While all around are losing theirs — Column Wednesday, 31st Aug 2016 23:01 by Clive Whittingham Mercifully the Transfer Window/Intelligence Vacuum has “slammed shut” for another year. LFW assesses QPR’s summer through weary/optimistic eyes. Gargling cold cat pissBack in the glory days of purple dildos being thrust into unsuspecting Sky reporters’ ears, Martin Allen giving live updates on Gillingham’s business while riding a pushbike, and Stephane Mbia’s less-than-delighted mug staring out the window of a private aircraft he believed was taking him to Glasgow Rangers, we used to live blog Transfer Deadline Day on LFW. This would consist of half a dozen of us gathering together for 12 increasingly drunken hours taking the piss out of Sky Sports' attempt to turn what is, essentially, a last-second panic by clubs that haven’t got their summer right, into some sort of global television event akin to the American sports drafts. And about halfway through we’d have a barbecue. This was a lot of fun initially. QPR did things like sign Julio Cesar, and Manchester City did things like sign Robinho, and the standards of journalism would often stretch as far as reporters peering through fences to try and recognise somebody walking into a building 250 yards away and then, when they couldn’t, just making it up.
To be honest, there have been times this afternoon that we all wished we still did that — the blog, not the signing Julio Cesar — and maybe it’ll be back next year. There’s certainly been plenty of material: clubs fighting over Derby pudding Chris Martin, laying out trails of pastries to try and tempt him in for a Homer Simpson jiggle test; the mere notion of Jack Wheelchair passing anything other than a nightclub doorman, let alone a medical, would surely have occupied us for an hour at least; £5m for 33-year-old Daryl Murphy… It’s a crazy, crazy world out there. But, very quickly, we realised we were merely subjecting ourselves to 12 hours of extreme, almost unrivalled, irritation. That child kicking the back of your seat on a long haul flight; that super important businesswoman talking loudly about her mega important event on a hands free kit in order for everybody else in the waiting room to know she’s arranging something that involves Elton John; that youth on the bus with no headphones listening to some vile rap about cutting bros and beating bitches; that pale, spotty, ginger lad who gets on the Northern Line at leafy Woodside Park and proceeds to ring all his mates and talk to them in Jamaican patois while slapping his fingers in the air… deadline day in the era of 24 hour sports news and social media is like all of them all at once. Smug, self-satisfied claptrap, vast swathes of which turns out not to be true, belched forth and gleefully lapped up. Lonely souls with no sex lives so desperate for the warmth of human affection they set up "ITK" Twitter accounts, often pretending to be a football agent, throwing shit at the walls and lauding the occasional nugget that coincidentally sticks to the paint.
The whole Jim White thing - a man who used to present Scotland's equivalent of Good Morning Britain who has since built an entire fucking football persona around Harry Redknapp sending him a text to say Robbie Keane was going to Celtic on loan a decade ago. The use of Football Manager statistics on screen - as if they’re real — to compare players and see if clubs have done a good deal or not. I mean Jack Wilshere being assessed for 'bravery' based on a sodding computer game was a lower point in British TV history than Naked Attraction. The fascination with what Conor Wickham and other such luminaries are saying on Twitter. The 38 Chelsea players going out on loan - why not just own all the footballers and the rest of us can borrow the XI we need each week? Everybody finding it funny, rather than scandalous, as Redknapp bankrupts another club through the window of his car. The sheer, total disregard for any journalistic practice or integrity whatsoever. The clickbait tedium. The always-completely-bloody-hilarious classic film scene with Brendan Rodgers’ head superimposed on the top. That fucking totalizer, hoisted forth in triumph, another £1bn spent and none of the teams really that much better or worse for it. I could give it the self righteous big 'un about use of food banks in this country, but of more relevance are the dads who can’t afford to take their lads to the football any more while all the insufferable cunts involved in this process get ever more filthy stinking rich. How about spend a bit less than £1bn, then maybe it wouldn't be £54 to get in. It used to be a bit of a laugh, tapping out verbatim quotes from Iain Dowie’s oversized tongue and Dave Bassett’s under-size brain as they poured forth. But it soon occurred to us that we’d rather suck the lukewarm fluid from one of Thora Hird’s old Tena Lady pads than subject ourselves to even ten more minutes of this puerile bullshit. (God rest her. Other incontinence pads are available.) So we stopped. It was pretty easy actually. Since then, a couple of things have happened. Firstly, the lamentable nonsense that used to be the exclusive domain of the “Barclay’s Premier League” has bled down into the second tier. Astonishing transfer fees - £10m for just the one Dwight Gayle, £8m for somebody that looks a bit like Matej Vydrya but is hopefully for Derby’s sake somebody else, £15m for that lad who looked reasonably promising against us for Bristol City last season — and extortionate wages. Fawning over a couple of big clubs. Matches moved to weird and wonderful kick off times for television. Everything we all used to hate about the Premier League, well it’s all here now as well. But, on a happier note, Queens Park Rangers got all sensible for themselves. InsQPR have been functional in their early matches this season, scoring exclusively from set pieces and grinding out wins at Cardiff and Wigan only to be outplayed by a talented young Barnsley team and picked apart by a tactically astute Preston outfit. Leeds were thrashed, but we won’t be the last team to do that to them this season. The midfield looks rather like a Rubik’s cube that could do with another turn to the left. Jordan Cousins is a fantastic buy at little over a £1m, aged just 22, and he showed exactly what he could do when Charlton played at Loftus Road last season and he scored their goal and dominated the midfield. But he doesn’t look overly suited to the right wing role at the moment. Still, pound for pound, one of the best deals done in the division this summer in my opinion. Yeni Ngbokoto, another one at a great price and age, was well liked at Metz but has started wide left for QPR and keeps cutting in, narrowing the attack further. Whether he switches now Polish international Pawel Wszolek has arrived on a season long loan from Hellas Verona remains to be seen but I can’t imagine we’ve deliberately signed two wingers so as to continue using Cousins out of position on the right. Have we Jimmy? Jimmy?
Then there’s Anderlecht striker Idryssa Sylla, who can also play wide to the left, to factor into this as well. Good age, good price (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) but not an overly impressive number of appearances for a 25-year-old so far. Presumably he’s been brought in to compete with Seb Polter for the lone striker role, or maybe even play alongside him in the tougher, more direct, more physical away matches when Tjaronn Chery can often drift out of the action. The Dutchman is obviously our best player technically, but only one of the 13 goals he's scored so far has come in open play, away from Loftus Road. With two wingers and two big powerful strikers, could QPR look to break away from the 4-2-3-1 and maybe sacrifice Chery in specific circumstances now? We haven’t seen a lot of Ariel Borysiuk yet thanks to his injury, but presumably he’s competing with Cousins, Karl Henry and Massimo Luongo for those deeper lying midfield berths. There’s a lot of options there at least, and from what we’ve seen so far I don’t think Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has quite found a combination that’s working for him yet. All signings carry an element of risk, and QPR are cranking that up by trying to buy at below market rates, and from the far corners of Europe. Les Ferdinand told LoftforWords he expected signings from abroad to take anything up to 18 months to settle into the English game. ”I don't care who you are, 95% of foreign players coming into leagues in this country take a year to 18 months to settle into it. Roberto Soldado at Tottenham, cost £28m, never settled. If Erik Lamela had been an under 21 player he'd never have played for Tottenham. If he'd come through the ranks at Tottenham playing like that he'd never have played. Players need an opportunity and he got one, because they'd paid £30m for him and didn't want him to fail. He got an opportunity that a 21-year-old wouldn't have done. Andros Townsend had to go out on nine loans to get the same opportunity.” - Les Ferdinand QPR have added four from Europe this summer. That midfield needs work, and time. On the home front Rangers found prices on the mind-bending side of stupid. Adam Reach was mentioned, but little more than 100 senior appearances and loan spells with Darlington, Shrewsbury, Bradford and Preston makes a player worth £5m these days and he went to Sheffield Wednesday this evening. Albert Adomah will similarly be sleeping on a pile of money surrounded by many beautiful ladies after his switch to Aston Villa. A Brentford fan begrudgingly admitted to me he couldn’t recall Jake Bidwell ever having a bad game for them and that steady, 7/10 consistency has been in evidence from him so far despite a topsy-turvy start to the season from the team overall. At £1.5m in the current market, and just 23-years-old, he seems a bit of a steal to me at the moment. Of course, Brentford have gone out and replaced him with Rico Henry from Walsall for a similar amount. Henry was one of the outstanding players in a wonderful, vibrant, young Saddlers side in League One last year and caps a very fine summer of business down the road at Griffin Park. Keeper Dan Bentley, who Rangers failed to prise out of Southend last summer, has started strongly and John Egan from Gillingham looks a good addition to the defence. The Bees are one of the few Championship clubs who look to have signed both well and sensibly, but potentially so have QPR.
We await a first proper look at Joel Lynch, but with Nedum Onuoha, Grant Hall and Steven Caulker all still with the club that’s a very decent centre half line up for this level. QPR seem to have a better balanced side than last year, with options in most positions, and despite signing seven new players a smaller wage bill, and a profit in the bank. So much depends on how the foreign lads settle and perform, but as the top two divisions completely take leave of their senses and start paying £10m-£15m for players who, even a year ago, would only have cost £3m-£5m it feels like a very solid attempt from Rangers. OutsI’ve little doubt that QPR’s prime aim for the summer was to finally shift Sandro from the squad/wage bill/treatment table/morgue. Unless we can find one of those far off nations where the window stays open a bit longer than ours, we’ve failed in that once again. That we can’t even find him a club in China tells you everything you need to know. The problem with Sandro is getting rid of him will require one of two things. Either we find a club that is so desperate for a midfielder, who has proved repeatedly since he arrived in this country that he cannot play more than half the first team games in a season, they agree to pay him all of his extortionate wages and sign him without a proper medical, or scrutiny of the date of birth bit of his passport. Or Harry Redknapp gets another job somewhere. A potential move to Sporting Lisbon earlier in the summer collapsed when his medical was carried out somewhere other than Dr Nick’s $29.99 late night clinic. Now Sandro has had an independent medical done and published the results recently which state he is absolutely fine, and would pass a fair medical if given one. Which should be wonderful news for QPR, except he’s still here. And a simple look at his appearance numbers since arriving in this country in 2010 probably give you a clue as to why. He signed for Spurs at the start of 2010/11 and since then these are the number of appearances (some of which will have been as a sub) he's managed each season. 2010/11 - 27 out of 53 Spurs games played So since he arrived in this country he has been unavailable to play in 160 of the 309 games his teams have been involved in. Almost exactly half. If his knees are like brand shiny new knees and everybody else is wrong and how dare they doubt him and his fitness... then what exactly is wrong with him? Any idea that QPR should now try and re-integrate him, because he’s here and we may as well, because we’re paying him regardless, and/or because he looked alright against mighty Rochdale should probably be resisted. Not only because those numbers suggest that he’ll no more sail the seven seas in a sieve than complete a 46 game Championship season, necessitating frequent chopping and changing of the team to accommodate him, but because it didn’t work last season and rarely works in any circumstance. In Michael Calvin’s excellent Living on the Volcano he speaks to Kenny Jackett about his experience of finding a squad full of players in similar situations when he arrived at Wolves. Jackett said: “There were quite a number of players here who were just waiting for something better to come along. That is not the right way to be. They were being paid very well, and they were happy to tick over. You could see it in their eyes, sense it in their body language. I had to accelerate the process by isolating those who didn’t have the hunger to make the most of themselves. I told them straight away they weren’t in my plans. There were a couple of situations were people knocked on my door and said they should be in the team. I was polite, and told them we were going down a different route and eventually most of them drifted away. “There had been a complete breakdown in the relationship with the supporters. The crowd needed new faces, a couple of home grown players, a few fresh ones and a few they’d never heard of. A change in atmosphere has to be player led. It’s a deeper process than simply getting results. Fans have to have a sense of togetherness, of pride in playing for their club. It is a great club, a big club, and the players have to show what a privilege it is to work here.”
Thankfully, an expiring contract meant we were finally rid of Armand Traore who, astonishingly after playing no football at all in 18 months and not being very good before that, immediately got handed a three-year contract by the crazy loons at Nottingham Forest. I need that guy’s agent. Traore turned up so late for his first match - a pre-season friendly at a notoriously strong, powerful, dominant, all-conquering Alfreton Town outfit - that he was forced to start from the bench. Having been introduced at half time, he scored an own goal in a 3-3 draw. He’s since clocked up 152 minutes in Forest’s first eight games of the season. Waste of space. People have been similarly dismissive of Daniel Tozser, who was released by the club today and immediately signed for Hungarian side Debrecen. Now Tozser was undoubtedly a failure for QPR, as you would guess having been released a year into a two-year contract. But he wasn’t a bad attempt at bringing in the ball-playing central midfielder Les Ferdinand and Chris Ramsey knew we needed if Ale Faurlin wasn’t going to be able to play last season, fresh from a promotion campaign with Watford. And it’s worth remembering, as the social media channels again fill with the walking dead haranguing the club for not making yet more signings, that he only joined a year ago the last time they were clamouring for more blood. Signings aren’t always needed, don’t always work, aren't always a good thing and shouldn’t be craved with quite the hunger some of QPR’s support base seem to have for them. QPR fawn over grainy YouTube montages, hype the hell out of the player, then disregard him and start slagging him off with depressing haste. Those equally desperate for a January addition got Conor Washington, and just six months and 20 appearances later a suggestion he might leave tonight was met by quite a few with “good”. QPR the club seem to be calming down a bit in the transfer market. An element of the fan base would do well to catch up.
The reaction was similarly over the top to the club’s official announcement that Cole Kpekawa was moving to Barnsley today for a fee in the region of £450,000. Or, put another way, the news that the club’s fourth choice left back was leaving in return for half a million quid. Now that’s slightly harsh. At left back, I liked what little I saw of Kpekawa, particularly at Burnley last season where he faced the best player (George Boyd) in the best team in the division and coped with aplomb, easily QPR’s Man of the Match that day. His one outing at centre back, a ropey half hour against lowly Charlton at Loftus Road last season, was fairly terrifying. I’m nervous about this one, not only because I think he’s got potential, but also because Barnsley have form for picking up players like this and turning them into established players which can be sold for several million quid years down the line — former Wycombe man Alfie Mawson joined Swansea for a hefty £5m last week from Oakwell. But this is a player who’s made four senior appearances for QPR, isn’t a teenager, hasn’t impressed when out on loan, isn’t even third choice in his position at Loftus Road, and isn’t behind a load of crusty old retirees in waiting in that left back spot either. Jake Bidwell is a great signing, Jack Robinson is potentially excellent if he can ever get fit, James Perch is perfectly adequate cover. If somebody offers you £450,000 for your fourth choice left back you take it, it’s best for the player and the club. If he goes on to be a star, QPR look silly, and start rifling through paperwork to make sure they got the sell-on clause inserted in there. But this is not, as one mouth breather on Twitter said earlier today, “the worst decision the club has ever made”. Lord give me strength. It's actually some sort of progress - a few years ago QPR couldn't even get League Two sides to take their juniors on loan, now they're selling one to a Championship side for some actual money. We’ve obviously already covered the departure of Ale Faurlin who has subsequently signed for Getafe in Spain, and Clint Hill previously this summer. Likewise Leroy Fer, who dropped into an interview this week that Swansea City could find themselves in a relegation battle this season — well if anybody would know… And Matt Phillips, whose performance for West Brom in a sanity sapping 0-0 draw with Middlesbrough at the weekend brought to mind Simmo’s old “if I pulled out as often as Phillips I wouldn’t have to sit in the family stand” comment. All the ability, all the physical attributes, none of the heart. Maybe £5m for football’s Cowardly Lion wasn’t such bad business after all. There has been the usual array of loan deals heading out in a variety of circumstances. Michael Doughty’s season long departure back to Swindon surely, finally calls time on a QPR career which has threatened in fits and starts but never really got going. League One feels like his level at the moment and approaching 24 he’s no youngster any more. I felt he was underused at QPR last season, particularly early in the season, but a succession of managers have come and gone without selecting him, he’s always semed to lack several yards of pace and the necessary engine for that position at this level and he needs to go somewhere permanently and play regularly now. This has gone on too long now really. Darnell Furlong’s got four years on Doughty, and his move to Swindon looks to be much more optimistic from a QPR point of view. Two stints in League Two last season at Northampton, where he played enough for a title medal, and then in a play-off push at Cambridge United, where he impressed, bodes well and a spell in League One is now a natural progression ahead of, hopefully, a breakthrough in the Championship next season in a position QPR aren’t currently blessed with great options.
It impresses me that Brandon Comley not only did reasonably well at Carlisle last season, but has now accepted a move to Grimsby this. Tough clubs to play for, far away from home, in un-appetising, remote, cold, wet and windy parts of the country. A boy who wants to play some regular, challenging football and isn’t afraid to travel to do it. Deserves success. Reece Grego Cox was desperate to do likewise last season so it’s pleasing that Newport have given him that chance this. A striker of his size, at a club operating on Newport’s miniscule budget at League Two level, will find things tough, the games physical and the scoring chances hard to come by. Grego Cox is no shy, retiring violet on the pitch — he has youth background in rugby union — but this is a tough assignment. And then there’s Jay Emmanuel-Thomas who has already whopped in five, mostly spectacular, goals in eight appearances for Gillingham but apparently still never once stopped to wonder why QPR, Bristol City, Cardiff City, Ipswich Town and Arsenal all bombed out such a “swazzy” talent. Particularly QPR, who aren’t in a monetary position to be loaning out big, physical, talented, goalscoring forwards without good reason. What a waste of a potentially brilliant footballer he is. But rich, as my old mate Stuart used to say. Rich and well sexed. The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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