QPR are apparently on a complete hiding to nothing away to league leaders Leicester tomorrow, but to stay up from here Rangers are going to have to beat some teams they really shouldn’t – not for the first time.
Mercantile Credit Trophy >>> Saturday March 2, 2024 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather – Damp >>> King Power Stadium, Leicester
When did the earth last move for you, if you don’t mind me asking?
I can tell you exactly where I was, and who was doing it to me.
It was early days in what would become a beautiful and long-lasting relationship with Jamie - a dopey but loveable lad, with well-assembled hair, from Dorking.
Back then we were just getting to know each other, though it must be admitted he hadn’t hesitated to whip his disk-nipples and appalling dragon tattoo out at the first possible opportunity. A scorer of six goals in his first seven QPR matches, I wondered whether this was the real thing, or another one of those only-at-Rangers moments randomly escaping from the same tear in the fabric of reality through which Patrick Agyemang had once inexplicably plundered eight goals in six starts.
We had a really nice night out in Ipswich, of all places, where Jamie introduced me to his new (incredibly fast) friend Kyle. Intrigued to learn more, I set off for Leicester and, somehow, here he was again, running straight towards me, arms outstretched, shirt flapping in the breeze, like I’d always dreamed. One already in the bank for the afternoon, a second about to be seamlessly slipped between the thighs of Carl Ikeme, who was just watching. The concrete beneath my feet literally shifted, implausibly swaying and sliding across longitude and latitude at the same time like a Japanese earthquake doc on Nat Geo. Terrifying and exhilarating – the sensation, not the documentary. Is this love, that I’m feeling?
Ten years of Jamie I had, give or take. I still see him on the television, now and then, telling the viewing public Nathan Jones is "chatting shit”, or calling Mick Beale a "top cunt”. You don’t forget a love like ours.
Nor a relatively brand new, multi-million pound, apparently safety-checked, concrete structure wibbling about beneath your feet. Alarming though it was, I must admit this came as somewhat less of a surprise than Neil Warnock’s team suddenly breaking free of its shackles and laying waste to the Championship for nine of the best months of my life. For, you see, I’d had dalliances in Leicester before, and knew that away end inexplicably, and really rather worryingly, shifted beneath your feet when you hit the spot just right.
While hope sprang eternal in My Summer With Jamie (book rights available in all markets), when I’d previously braved the quicksand of Leicester’s away end in 2007 the only Hope in any of our lives played centre half for Scunthorpe, and later Gillingham – who both used to beat us. Spending a Saturday afternoon training up to Leicester to watch Damion Stewart charging about, facial expression of a man perennially concussed by a hefty blow to the face with a flat-bottomed wok, was akin to driving your television round to the bailiffs yourself. Just take it lads, I wasn’t watching it anyway. QPR hadn’t won in six games (sounds about right) and had started that run with a televised Friday night 5-0 loss at Southend United (you can see why I wanted rid of the set). Just the five? I was gonna suggest seven but five’s alright I s’pose. It was a team, by almost universal regard, getting relegated. Straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect £200. Peacefully, quietly… we’ll enjoy it.
Something stirred in the swamp, though. Danny Cullip was an angry man. Sampsa Timoska could actually play the game. Adam Bolder was a midfielder who got about the place like a lad whose father carried the moustache of a strict military upbringing (which is exactly what he was). Inigo Idiakez was the ultimate holiday romance. We were punching there, the poor bastard had no business being within 500 miles of the place. In those times of crisis the Rangers powers-that-be would dim the lights and gather around the little black book Mel Johnson had left them – is this ‘Lee Camp’ in the room with us now? He was. Loving being loved, as Lee Camp always did. Striding into that Southend shambles and immediately shithousing a nil nil out of Leeds United at Elland Road, back in the days when the best supported team in the world didn’t used to bother opening that upper tier.
Idiakez scored at Leicester. He arched his spine, angled his neck, and guided a feather soft header over Paul Henderson (it says here) and into the net. I say into the net, it never actually reached, dropping exquisitely over the line and stopping stone dead. One nil lads, check the rules. He’s from San Sebastien, Idiakez. A Basque town built around a beach the smiles up at the sky like a Cheshire cat, protected by two rocky headlands which create a perfect natural cove called La Concha. The people just sit there, in the sun, with their curly hair, eating pintxos and waiting for the next intrusion. The French had a bit of a siege there in 1719, the British a hundred years after that, David Moyes even tried his luck at one point. Invasion, is it? Fetch the wheeled cannons and beautifully angled diving headers.
This inspired Paul Furlong, 58, to get all Rolls Royce about things and soon it was two nil, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Everybody shut up, my boy’s on TV.
Marc Nygaard was a strange beast. To look at him, my God, draw me a Championship footballer. Carve that out of marble you could take it on tour for stupid Americans to gawk at for 50 bucks a pop. Actually try to get it to do what it’s being paid to do and, well, as somebody who may, or may not, have been the manager for a bit of his stint once said to me, Nygaard would sit out training... games... weeks at time... not because he was injured, but because he "thought he might be about to possibly soon get injured". Which, as we’ve learnt from both sides of the Jake Clarke-Salter coin, can be very frustrating in a 46-game Championship season.
Expectations were, therefore, pretty low when Furs went all elbows-out and get-out-of-my-pub to flick on a long boot down field from Campy. Bouncing off into the full back channel, down the Leicester left and QPR right, it felt like the perfect opportunity to get some possession under calm control and start, frankly, being a bit of a dick about things down by the corner flag. There’s 20 minutes left, we’re two nil up, we’re as surprised about that as you, you’ve got Alan Maybury and Darren Kenton in defence for goodness sake you poor sods, nobody wants any trouble here, let’s just all shake hands on this and keep it civil. And then Nygaard, with absolutely no warning or backlift whatsoever, declared war. Silly twat whipped a right leg as big as your standard 11-year-old through the bouncing ball, first time, as it sat up off the turf. What, – I cannot stress this enough – the fuck, is he doing?
I mean, why not Marc, we’ve all had a drink, you do you. And off it set, through the sky, like a fucking comet. It’s a shame it was Paul Henderson (it says here) in goal. I’d have wanted a proper goalkeeper. One of the Schmeichels – either, or. More than one proper goalkeeper, in fact. Bring Van Der Sarr, and you can pair up if you like, and you can pick somebody else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, because when this thing comes down out of the sky you’re going to need it. Out of the sky it duly came, forced into an oval by the power behind it, glowing fiery orange at the back as it wrestled with the velocity inflicted upon it. A cruise missile, nine parts missile to one part cruise, it absolutely obliterated the far top corner of the goal, tearing the net off its moorings thread by thread. And there was that weird sensation of the away end dissolving beneath out feet. A very large dog, having a very large day. One of ours (Charlotte, for the record) had been downstairs, trying to wish away the time left in the game/her life by dragging out a long piss. Back up the stairs she bounded, as society dissolved all round her. "What happened, who scored?”. There was, and is still, as we told her at the time, no point. Nobody who wasn’t there to see it live would ever believe it occurred. I’m amazed the video hasn’t been classified by the government.
Only a fanbase who voted Paddy Kenny as player of the promotion season over Adel Taarabt, whose performance that year now sees him widely recognised as the greatest to ever do it in this division, could look at that goal, experience that moment, and vote Dexter Blackstock’s subsequent standard piledriver against Preston as the goal of the season. We did this with Rob Dickie’s meaningless 30-yard speculator at Middlesbrough, voting in our masses for that over Dom Ball’s lockdown-defining, faith-restoring, season-rescuing, manager-saving, last-second, left-footed, 30-yard barnburner against Cardiff. You’re all idiots. We must stop doing this to ourselves. Stop being so bloody contrary, just vote for what is obviously the right answer. Democracy does not work.
That Blackstock goal, however, did provide a crucial win in a game in hand. Suddenly it was all possible. Jimmy Smith won a game at Coventry in front of a ram-packed away end. Paul Furlong stooped to nod in a last-second Loft End winner, his final goal for the club, to cave the roof in on the place and beat Luton Town 3-2. A result that effectively saved Rangers and relegated the Hatters. Shame. John Gregory’s team beat Cardiff 1-0 in the penultimate home game, just to make sure. They stayed up. They stayed up with two games to spare. And in some style too. A team beaten 5-0 at Southend.
That is the positive side of the Typical QPR trope we lazily battered away at all of last week in an ultimately successful attempt to ward off a 1-0 home loss to Rotherham with a late winner from Jordan Hugill/John Jensen. It’s very QPR indeed to work themselves into a horrendous mire by losing lots and lots of games they shouldn’t to teams they really need to beat to the point you’re sure they’re definitely dead now, only to inexplicably stick six random wins on the board, land on both wheels, pull over at the side of the track and ask what everybody was worried about.
The club had been transformed and bent out of its prior form to such an extent by 2012 that you’d never even guess it was the same place that once thought the double permanent capture of Lee Camp and Simon Walton was here to save them from Armageddon. We can all have a philosophical debate about whether that was for the better or worse. It transpired you can try and suck the QPR from QPR as much as you like, you’ll do well to succeed. When new owners disgracefully panicked and sacked local hero Neil Warnock to be replaced by Mark Hughes, Sparkless subsequently burned off a January and February of Villa, Wolves and Blackburn; Fulham, Everton and (highly controversially) Bolton. That’s that, then. Surely.
The team then won five home games in a row, despite a litany of ridiculous red cards (mostly to Djibril Cisse), and a fixture list that offered Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Man Utd and Man City among our final ten games. Taarabt wrought revenge on Tottenham for releasing him; Samba Diakite (Samba Diakite!!) scored a worldie against Arsenal. Two nil down against Liverpool, with a quarter of an hour to play, Rangers won the game. There’s Jamie again, tattooed goose, flapping through on improbable combinations of botched defensive clearances and collapsed offside traps, slipping a ‘finish’ beneath Pepe Reina I’d have saved myself.
None of the teams at the bottom of the Championship this season have a run in as difficult as QPR’s. The average position of our remaining opponents is 10.6 – Stoke 10.9, Millwall 12.7, Huddersfield 12.8, Swansea 16.9… Having burned off so many opportunities against idiot scum like Sheff Wed, Millwall and Stoke, here we go again on our own… down the only road we’ve ever known… with that away end shape shifting beneath out feet. Lose the games you’re supposed to win, then beat the teams you shouldn’t. When QPR have succeeded in what they’re attempting to do now, this is the way they’ve done it. And it’s the only way open to us now. Ain’t wasting no more time.
If I’d told Charlotte, as she bounded back up the away end stairs, Marc Nygaard had just scored from 35 yards, she’d have told me to "fuck off”. She’d have been right to do it. If I told you all now that, as impoverished Sheffield Uni students, the four of us used to have QPR 3-1 every week, and that the obviously incorrect decision to award Leicester a consolation penalty in the last minute of stoppage time in that match sent us all back to the Steel City with a kitty that did irreparable damage to our livers, while providing a full percentage point boost to the local economy, you’d probably call bullshit. You’ll buy that story about my grandad and the Christmas pig, but this is a yarn too far. Unless you were there, near us at the back of the away end, watching us celebrate Iain Hume’s successful conversion like we’d scored the thing ourselves.
I was on the rain-soaked terrace at Stockport one night, riddled with teenage angst and acne, three nil down, hating everything about me, my life, and my life choices. My late best friend Stuart put his arm round me and reminded me of Newcastle, and Port Vale. To come back from 4-0 down at half time to snatch a result people will talk about forever more, and you’ll remember for the rest of your life, you do have to go 4-0 down in the first place… To complete an unlikely escape from relegation which you'll write about in a decade's time, you do have to get into the shit to start with. And we drew 3-3 that night as well. He was super smug on the last TransPennine "Express" of the evening home.
Nobody expected that John Gregory team to survive, nobody expected to go to Leicester that day and win the game, and Marc Nygaard will never score a goal like that again as long as he’s got a hole in his arse. But following clubs like ours is about enduring long periods of punishment for small moments of indescribable, ecstatic relief, which often come when you least expect them.
To be there to see a win - against all odds, logic and likelihood – away to an obviously superior Leicester side, with all the unexpected boost that tiny possibility would provide to QPR’s survival chances, and all the mental trauma this almost-certainly-fictional outcome would inflict on the teams around us…
…you do first of all have to go to Leicester away.
And I’ll see you all there.
Links >>> Wobbling or waltzing? Interview >>> Nygaard’s miracle – History >>> Davies in charge – Referee >>> Leicester City Official Site >>> Leicester Mercury – Local press >>> Foxes Talk – Message Board >>> When you’re smiling – Podcast >>> The Final Whistle – Vlog >>> Fosse Posse – Fan Site
90s Footballer Conspiracy Theories No.32 In The Series - Des Walker thinks Frozen (2013) was named so people could never find the answer to whether Walt Disney is still alive in a cryogenic freezer.
Team News: Jack Colback had made it through five matches on a nine-booking tightrope but his take-one-for-the-team yellow card against Rotherham means he now sits out for two matches against Leicester and West Brom. It’s bad news for Rangers with Colback’s form and fitness improving noticeably, but not the disaster it would have been pre-January when such an absence from the centre of midfield would have had one of the Crown & Sceptre regulars lacing up for Saturday action. Sam Field was unlucky to be benched against the Millers after an impressive showing at Bristol City and will almost certainly replace Colback from the start here. Rayan Kolli is the only other official injured absentee, although noticeable that, since starting at Blackburn, Elijah Dixon-Bonner has played only a minute of football and hasn’t even made the bench for the last two.
After two league defeats, Leicester had to slog all the way down to Bournemouth for 120 minutes of FA Cup action during the week which, conventionally, makes this as good a time to play the Foxes as any. However, Enzo Maresca made nine changes for that 1-0 extra-time win over the Premier League side and will surely revert back here.
Hermansen, Faes, Winks, Dewsbury-Hall and Mavididi, who all sat things out in midweek, along with Ricardo, Justin and Fatawu, who all came on as subs, will be recalled – Winks and Mavididi scored in the first meeting. Jamie Vardy is fit again after a knock interrupted an intimidating run of seven goals in eight appearances.. Wilfred Ndidi is the only longer-term absentee while Kasey McAteer is a new injury. Tom Cannon, one of the best players we saw last year when he was with Preston, doesn’t get in this team and has made only three starts all season. Depressing stuff. Maresca won’t be able to call on influential defender and club player of the season candidate Jannik Vestergaard though – having nursed himself through 15 Championship games on nine yellow cards the Dane finally succumbed to a booking at Leeds and now gets two games on the naughty step. The next yellow card ‘amnesty’ in the EFL, after which you’ll only be suspended if you’ve accumulated 15 bookings Sam, is at game 37.
Elsewhere: Given the manner of both teams’ performances on the night, it is very difficult not to gaze at the Mercantile Credit Trophy table and imagine just how much healthier it would look from a QPR point of view had they turned up and got a result at Stoke. That 1-0 victory is the Potters’ only positive result in a run of six defeats and they dropped into the bottom three for the first time last week on goal difference following a 2-1 defeat at Cardiff.
Having already ditched sporting director Ricky Martin (livid he’s leaving Stoke-a) there’s now speculation that temporary replacement Jon Walters may already be considering jettisoning Stephen Schumacher who was only poached at considerable expense from Plymouth on December 19 – one of those classic managerial moves that shafts both clubs and the person involved all at once. Starting at home, where they’ve lost 20 and won only 11 of their last 40 games, against Middlesbrough tomorrow, the next few fixtures are not kind – Leeds A, Preston A, Norwich H, Hull A.
Much as it pains us, you might hear the faint strains of ‘Marching on Together’ echoing around the White City Estate before we even get to a box office-intimidating final home game of the season against Daniel Farke’s promotion chasers. On a run of nine successive league wins, they go to our near rivals Huddersfield tomorrow lunchtime and then play Stoke H, Sheff Wed A and Millwall H.
Elsewhere at the business end of the league tomorrow there’s a both-can’t-win/both-can’t-lose conundrum between the bottom two, Sheff Wed and Rotherham, at the New York Stadium. Rotherham fail to win that, you start to wonder whether they’ll actually win again this season.
Millwall, meanwhile, having looked absolutely bang in trouble, got a shock win at Southampton in the first match of Neil Harris’ latest Wawll comeback, and now have what looks like a fantastic opportunity for another three points at home to Watford. Not going up, not going down, and already eyeing flights to Mykonos, it’s threatening to be a very Watford end to a season indeed with only one win (and that at Rotherham, only just) in nine matches for the Hornets who, having stunned the footballing world by extending Valerian Ismael’s contract pre-Christmas, are now said to be thinking of sacking the manager again. The only other team they’ve beaten in the last 11 Championship games was us – another missed opportunity there.
Birmingham, Swansea and Blackburn have felt like they were desperately trying to embroil themselves in the battle at the bottom for months now – seeing Stoke’s decline as something to aspire to rather than avoid.
Everybody assumed Brum would move off into the distance under Moany Towbray once the hilarious Wayne Rooney era was cut short by somebody with no taste for modern British comedy, but with Mowbray now recovering from surgery it’s intriguing to see whether they’re going to try and cruise through Southampton H (tomorrow), Hull A, Millwall A and Boro H in the next couple of weeks under caretaker charge, and how that’ll go if they do. The boss they never should have sacked, John Eustace, seems to be steadying the ship at Blackburn just enough to keep them out of trouble, and they go to Luke Williams’ vulnerable looking Swansea tomorrow. All three are proving what we showed last season to our benefit, and are finding this year to our cost: once those points are on the board, you only need very occasional wins to steer clear of trouble, and the teams who botched their first half of the season basically need to fly on take-off power for months to catch you. Plymouth, just above that lot and also now almost mission accomplished after a surprise win at flaky Boro last week, have Ipswich at home.
Among the games we haven’t mentioned… Friday night is always West Brom night in the Championship, and they welcome play-off rivals Coventry who for accountancy fans made the play-offs last year with a wage bill of £18m to our £25m, and then sold nigh-on £35m-worth of footballer during the summer. It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it. Bristol City v Cardiff is an early kick off for the police, Norwich v Sunderland isn’t half as interesting now Honest Mick has been binned, and there’s a north-off between Preston Knob End and ‘Ull.
Referee: Only Reading have had Andy Davies referee their games more than QPR (19 appointments). By contrast this is only his second Leicester game, and first since 2013. Details.
Leicester: To this point it has been an absolute procession for Leicester on what seems certain to be their brief return to the Championship. They’re top, averaging well over two points a game (78 from 34 played) and with a goal difference of +41 (Leeds have +37 and then after that the next best is Ipswich and Southampton on +23). They’ve won 25 of their 34 played, losing only six. At home they’re 13-1-3, with Hull, Leeds and Boro the three sides to win here so far. The Foxes have scored 70 times, two more than the next best total (Ipswich) and an average of more than two a game. At home they’ve scored 34 in 17 games and conceded only 11. Maresca’s side have scored three goals in a game on eight occasions, four goals on four occasions, and have a 5-0 win to their name at Stoke. Perhaps oddly, there are 11 players ahead of anybody from Leicester in the race for the Championship golden boot, including two each from rivals Ipswich and Leeds – the joint top league scorers here are Stephane Mavididi, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Jamie Vardy who have ten goals each – Vardy has another two to his name in the cup. Only Leeds (27) have conceded fewer than Leicester’s 29 goals, and only Leeds and West Brom (15) have kept more clean sheets than their 12.
And yet, such is the relentless pace at the top of the Championship this season, what should be an inevitable league title has been cast into some doubt by a pair of defeats in the last two league games. The Foxes have only lost six games all season but this is the second time they’ve lost to Boro and Leeds back-to-back and it means they’re still only six points clear of Ipswich in third. Over the last ten seasons at this level the average number of points required to seal automatic promotion is 85.5 with a high of 89 in 2015/16 and a low of 81 which would have got you up last season (Burnley and Sheff Utd actually got 101 and 91). Leicester have got 78 already with 12 games left to play and yet Leeds and Ipswich are keeping pace right there on 72 apiece and Southampton on 67.
Leicester won the first meeting this season 2-1 at Loftus Road after Andre Dozzell scored and then got himself sent off. Rangers last trip here was there last game in the Premier League when Charlie Austin scored in a 5-1 defeat to a Leicester side that had put on a late spurt of results to carry it to safety after being promoted with Rangers the summer before – within a year they’d have won the Premier League outright. The R’s have lost their last two visits here, beaten 1-0 in the 2013/14 promotion season with Benoit Assou-Ekotto red carded, but it’s another one of those new stadiums that hasn’t been too bad a place to visit for the Hoops since its construction. We’ve won three and drawn one of eight visits since this fixture was rekindled in 2003/04.
QPR: It’s certainly not a week to be drawing many comparisons between the two sides. Leicester’s 25 wins is as many wins as QPR have managed in 97 games going back two seasons to February 26, 2022 – just nine of those have come in 23/24. Leicester’s 70 goals scored is not far off the total (76) QPR have scored since the start of last season. Maresca’s side have scored three goals in a game on eight occasions, four goals on four occasions, and have a 5-0 win to their name at Stoke. QPR scored four at home to Stoke but that’s the only time they’ve scored more than two in a game all campaign and they’ve scored one goal or fewer in 26 of their 36 matches with 14 blanks. Mavididi, Dewsbury-Hall and Vardy top scoring with ten goals each in the league compares with QPR whose Championship top scorers are four players (Chair, Willock, Dykes, Paal) on four goals. Leicester have six individuals with more league goals to their name than that.
On the brighter side, Marti Cifuentes’ team certainly come into this latest meeting in better touch then they did the first meeting. At that stage, in what turned out to be Gareth Ainsworth’s last match in charge, Rangers had lost six in a row and were winless in nine. This time they’ve won four and drawn two of the last seven games and last weekend exited the bottom three for the first time since the last weekend in September. The R’;s are separated from fourth bottom Stoke by goal difference alone. How much different it would have looked had the one defeat in that sequence, at the Potteries on Valentines Day, had gone the other way – Rangers would now be six points clear and sitting eighteenth above also Birmingham, Huddersfield and Middlesbrough.
The hard-fought victory against Rotherham last time out furthered a couple of impressive individual player stats. QPR have still never lost on any of the 20 occasions Chris Willock has scored for them in his four seasons at Loftus Road – W17 D3. He’s now two short of Wayne Fereday’s record of 22 games (W18 D4) says Jack Supple. Steve Cook’s impressive debut season at the club continues to stack the numbers – across 23 starts and one sub appearance he has played in eight of the team’s nine wins, and eight of its nine clean sheets (Preston away the anomaly in both cases, when he was on the bench). He’s lost only one of his last 11 starts and lost only seven of the 23 games he’s started.
Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. Reigning champion Aston says.
"For Leicester, I think its going to be a really tough one. They come in on the back of two league defeats in a row but a big win in the cup which will give them a real boost. This will be a hugely tough game regardless of our current form. We'll give it a good go but it will be a step too far. 2-1, Chris Willock to score for us.”
Aston’s Prediction: Leicester 2-1 QPR. Scorer – Chris Willock
LFW’s Prediction: Leicester 2-0 QPR. No scorer
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