Chris Ramsey, predictably, was sacked as head coach of the QPR first team on Wednesday evening. But those rejoicing in his demise are placing too much faith in a board that has shown no ability to turn the club around.
The news that Chris Ramsey is being "relieved of the first team duties” at QPR is the least surprising development since Sandro cried off for another few weeks with the sort of ankle bruise infant school pupils pick up on the playground all the time and think nothing of. Since Neil Warnock arrived with "no interest in returning to management” in an advisory capacity a fortnight back it’s been a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
A good portion of the fan base will have reacted to this news, slipped out last night after most papers' early deadlines and at the same time as the Champions League results were rolling in, simply with "good” or stronger words to that effect. Another section will treat it as the worst news they’ve ever heard, another nail in the coffin of the entire club, another excuse for self-flagellation and exaggerated grief.
Football supporting has always been about opinions. Two people go to the same game and come away with entirely different impressions of it, and when one voices their opinion to the other the indignant rage builds up inside and an argument ensues. In a Derby curry house late on Tuesday night a discussion around our table about how Grant Hall had done a good job of keeping Chris Martin quiet was interrupted by a Phil and Grant Mitchell tribute act, who’d overheard/eavesdropped on the conversation from the other side of the dining room and decided they absolutely had to walk over and interrupt the meal of three perfect strangers to tell us how wrong we were, how brilliant Martin had been and "shit” Hall was.
These conversations used to be the mainstay of pubs and radio phone ins but they’ve grown into something more now. Everybody has a dozen ways of putting them forward — message boards, Twitter feeds, blogs, websites, message boards, podcasts. You venture your point of view, and somebody disagrees with it, so you argue back for days on end. You become entrenched in your view, it becomes extreme. Soon, in your own mind, you cannot possibly fathom why QPR haven’t sacked Chris Ramsey yet and it makes you angry, or you cannot stand that everybody seems so desperate for him to be sacked and that makes you angry. Before you know it you’re starting a petition to have everybody’s favourite mentally-sound Ostrich enthusiast Nigel Pearson installed or proclaiming in all seriousness that what’s happening at QPR at the moment is the "biggest sporting failure ever witnessed”. You become pro-Ramsey, or anti-Ramsey, with no middle ground - rather than just pro-QPR.
It’s nonsense, but it builds momentum. You end up with scenes such as the ones we saw at MK Dons last week, and Brentford on Friday, where fans are leaping out of their seats to abuse their own player and manager, faces contorted with rage. Supporters admit publicly they’d quite like QPR to lose the next game so as to bring the manager closer to the sack. It’s ugly. By the time the manager does get the sack it feels like a mercy killing of a man without a victory in months, when in fact QPR are only thirteenth in the Championship with the league’s third best attack.
It won’t get clicks or hits or retweets, but the simple truth is Chris Ramsey wasn’t that good, or that bad.
One of Ramsey’s big failings, with that in mind, was his failure to ‘play the game’. The incessant selection of Karl Henry was possibly through stubbornness, possibly to try and assert authority or probably because he thought he could do a good job for the team. Whatever the reason, there were times, and games, when he could easily have picked Michael Doughty instead and not damaged the team’s chances at all — even if you do believe Doughty’s inclusion weakens the team, which I don’t as we won away from home in his only start so far. Ramsey could have 'played the game' there, and bought himself some more rope.
At the end of last season Ramsey twice called upon Shaun Wright-Phillips. Most unforgivably, he sent him on with seconds remaining at Manchester City when 6-0 down. The City fans, who remember Wright-Phillips fondly, gave him a standing ovation. For the QPR fans, who despise him as a symbol of everything bad QPR have become, it was a very public kick in the bollocks having already been thrashed in a televised fixture. Whether Chris Ramsey wanted to reward Wright-Phillips for his diligence and professionalism in training or not, he should have realised or been told that this was a bad idea and played the game. Failing to do so undermined Ramsey’s position — many QPR fans still bring up that fleeting appearances against him now, six months later.
At Crystal Palace, ten minutes before the end, Ramsey asked Eduardo Vargas to prepare to come on and the Chilean refused. Reece Grego-Cox, a teenage boy, was sent on instead. When Jose Bosingwa had done the same thing to Ramsey’s predecessor, Harry Redknapp threw the player under the bus in front of the press the next week. That backfired on Redknapp when he subsequently tried to use Bosingwa again, and basically rendered a club asset that it had spent a good deal of money on absolutely worthless, but it deflected criticism away from Redknapp entirely - "What can he do? Look what he’s got to work with,” people said. Ramsey kept the Vargas incident in-house until after relegation was confirmed, and even then didn’t name any names. In the meantime he was branded an idiot for leaving a Chilean World Cup attacker out of a team struggling to score goals.
Ramsey, and Les Ferdinand, also made a rod for their own backs with the early involvement of Grego-Cox, Darnell Furlong and others. The lack of any opportunities whatsoever for the club’s youngsters was a stick Harry Redknapp was beaten with regularly and sensing an opportunity for early popularity points — which is all it could have been given what’s happened this season — the PR line after his departure was all about pathways from youth to first team.
Now the QPR youth set up, we well know, isn’t fit for purpose - no more capable of producing a Premier League player than a fucking astronaut. But Grego-Cox and Furlong both did ok last season and could easily have had minutes this year. Doughty, too, hasn’t looked that out of place at Championship level. Ramsey has clearly decided they’re not good enough for his first team and left them out but by not picking them at all, despite the senior players ahead of them playing consistently badly — Henry in the case of Doughty, James Perch in the cases of Furlong and Michael Harriman — he’s also burned off a lot of support.
Critics who may have stuck with him longer had they seen some sort of long term focus and plan in action have, quite justifiably, asked what long term goal we’re accomplishing by having a 34-year-old left back on loan from Leicester getting picked every week and playing poorly. Surely even Cole Kpekawa playing badly and making mistakes, but gaining the experience, is better than the Konchesky situation. No doubt if Ramsey had picked them, and the results had been bad, he’d have been widely abused as being on some sort of crusade to pick kids even though they’re not good enough and told in no uncertain terms to get the senior pros back in. But, again, he could have played the game — we’d still have beaten MK Dons with Kpekawa in the team for example and even if we hadn't, wasn't that what Ramsey was brought in for? I’ve been told that several young players feel they were made promises about game time this season that have not been kept.
Then there’s the substitutions, which have become a bone of contention. Firstly because Ramsey never made any, and then latterly because, in the eyes of the crowd, he made the wrong ones. There have been occasions — Wolves away, Huddersfield away — when not making changes and sticking to the original plan has worked for him. QPR have recovered seven points from losing positions this season, including two wins from two nil down. There is something to be said for sticking to the plan. Towards the end of his time it felt like whatever he did, he’d be abused for as that momentum I spoke about in the first section built. Seb Polter came on as a sub at Birmingham and was roundly abused, mostly for his nationality in the case of one group at the back of the away end. Three days later Ramsey was then criticised for not having Polter on the bench when he put Leroy Fer on upfront.
Even a staunch Ramsey supporter, however, would have to say his changes made during games, and his management of games as they progress, has been odd at best. Against Brentford and Derby in the last two fixture the initial plan worked well, only for the team to concede a goal in the inevitable ten minutes of intense pressure every team has in a game. There was nothing from Rangers thereafter to recover the situation. It felt like Ramsey knew what to do to play against teams from the start, having watched and studied them, but couldn’t deal with changes in the situation or match once it deviated away from that through circumstance.
But whether you’re pro or anti Chris Ramsey, whether you think he should have got the job in the first place or not, whether you lost faith with him because of what happened in the Premier League last season under his watch or not, it is undeniable that his remit was changed midway through his 15 games (and that’s all it is) this season.
Keeping hold of Matt Phillips, Charlie Austin, Sandro, Leroy Fer and Rob Green when they were all expected to leave during the summer raised expectations after the club had spent the entire close-season preaching the need to consolidate, trim the wage bill, get some solid foundations in place, avoid going into a Wolves-style free fall and so on. As I think I wrote at the time, if Middlesbrough or Derby signed those five players on deadline day you’d immediately have them down as runaway title contenders.
But that ignores a few things. Firstly, some of these players are nowhere near as good as QPR believe them to be. Rob Green has been a good Championship keeper who is regularly found out in the Premier League his whole career and at the start of this season he’s made several basic, fundamental errors that have led to important goals being conceded — the first at Fulham and the penalty against Forest in particular. Under Redknapp in the Championship he was brilliant - Ramsey wasn’t afforded the bonus of an in-form keeper despite persistently showing the utmost faith in Green, to the point where Alex McCarthy looked elsewhere for his football.
Sandro hasn’t been fit to play, which is entirely predictable as he hasn’t been fit to play since he got here - more tart than "Beast”. Leroy Fer, also mostly absent, hit and miss on his occasional outings just as he was last season. Matt Phillips has been inconsistent, just as he has for his entire spell here but for a three month purple patch last season. Austin has been excellent, but having prepared to play 4-2-3-1 without him, Rangers have been forced to try and turn him into what Heidar Helguson was for us in 2010/11 — which Austin isn’t. Austin’s the main man, he’s not there to pull the ball down and feed it to somebody else.
All of these players were here when QPR finished last in the Premier League last season. Of them, only Charlie Austin can be said to have shown he was worthy of the top division. Why do we suddenly expect them to tear this division apart? Because we’re paying Premier League money for them? That’s our fault for overpaying.
Secondly, the challenge of re-integrating big-name players back into a Championship squad they thought they were going to be leaving is tough. Again, it’s the QPR attitude of individuals over team coming to the fore — we’ve got the best individuals, we’re spending the most money, therefore we should have the best team. Teams take time to build and cultivate. The Championship is being won consistently at the moment by teams built over time who come from the pack and overtake the big spenders — Brighton, Bournemouth, Warnock’s QPR.
Mentally, these players had probably already gone — Fer failed a medical at Sunderland for instance. Austin and Phillips have given it their best can you say the same of Fer and Sandro? When Kenny Jackett took over at Wolves in League One he stuck the club’s biggest earners and supposed best players — Kevin Doyle, Karl Henry, Roger Johnson — who either wanted to leave, or thought they would, in the reserves and left them there whether they left or not because of the difficulties the uncertainty around their future may cause.
That re-integration, an issue in itself, has caused the third problem: a number of players who were brought in to replace these players haven’t played at all. Alex Smithies, in the case of Green, didn’t come that cheap and has moved his very young family away from his home town and his boyhood club to sit on the bench at QPR — how is he feeling now? Ben Gladwin loaned straight back to Swindon without being given a fair shot. Seb Polter made his feelings clear on social media after being left out against Sheffield Wednesday. Tjaronn Chery is being forced to play out of position wide left. So as well as the youth players who thought they’d get game time but aren’t, there’s now another bunch of new signings not getting what they saw in the brochure when they signed here.
The big names, and more important the big earners, staying at the club caused as many problems as it solved and it added a whole new one — people looked at the team on paper, looked at how much it was costing and decided it should win promotion. From looking to consolidate and build, Ramsey was told he had to win promotion. Neither he, nor his players, are good enough for that, whatever they’re paid.
There’s a scene in The Four Year Plan where Flavio Briatore is sitting with Alejandro Agag lamenting, in Italian, about how every manager they’d employed was an idiot. "One got drunk, one attacked the players, every idiot we found, not an idiot left in turn,” they say.
It shows a preposterous lack of self-awareness, that they could possibly believe that managers as diverse in experience and ability as Luigi De Canio, Paolo Sousa, Iain Dowie, Jim Magilton, Paul Hart and Mick Harford could all fail at QPR because of their own faults, and not because of the one megalomaniac constant that oversaw them all. Neil Warnock deserves huge credit for the job he subsequently did, but don’t forget it only happened when Briatore withdrew and left control of the team to the manager with Amit Bhatia and the underrated, much-missed Ishan Saksena overseeing the club.
You can make a decent case that the failings at QPR over the past few years have all been down to the managers of the team at the time. Mark Hughes, arrogantly walking away from Fulham because they couldn’t "match his ambition”, gleefully playing fast and loose with the QPR cheque book, signing big-name toads from Kia Joorabchian’s client log so he could prove just what a brilliant manager of big egos and big clubs he was only to fall flat on his face. His subsequent success with Stoke a result of the lessons he learnt at Loftus Road.
Harry Redknapp, the chancer’s chancer, taking a job his heart wasn’t really in after missing out on the England post he dreamed of, doing a half-arsed number on an almost part-time basis while tired old Bondy and Joe Jordan milled around deferring to whichever out of work manager Harry had asked to come in to help out — the team peaking and troughing based on whether Steve McClaren was leading the sessions or Steve Cotterill.
Chris Ramsey, the inexperienced youth-coach promoted above his ability level because he’s Les Ferdinand’s mate, out of his depth and found out.
It is still possible that Tony Fernandes and the Tune Group are the best football club owners fans could ever wish for, and have simply been let down by two experienced managers who did an awful job and one who was too naïve.
It’s increasingly unlikely though isn’t it? Mark Hughes is the big clue. Blackburn, Fulham, Stoke — as far as Premier League clubs go they’re as close as you can get to QPR and he’s had them all in the top half of the league and often going deep into cup competitions either side of his time at Loftus Road. He couldn’t win a single bloody game here in 15 attempts at the start of his second season.
That’s why it’s hard to get excited about any of the alternatives being mentioned, because does it really matter who the manager is when the manager isn’t the problem?
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has been backed into the favourite position, as he looks set to lead Burton Albion to a second successive promotion from League One. But Hasselbaink took over a solid team from Gary Rowett, with one of the best training grounds in the country at his disposal, zero expectations among the fan base, no debt and an experienced and canny chairman. He’d find none of that here, and he’d bring Chelsea connections which would erode the amount of time he was given by the supporters.
Kenny Jackett is exactly the sort of steadying influence the club needs right now. He also builds teams that the QPR fans like to see, with a big, mobile front two serviced by two out and out wingers — James Henry in his current Wolves team, a QPR player in waiting, like a right-footed Lee Cook. But he’s never shown any ability to go beyond the middle of the Championship once it’s stabilised and solidified, and we don’t want stability and solidity, we want promotion right now.
Neil Warnock is obviously in prime position. As I said a fortnight ago, bringing him in as an experienced hand to help isn’t like Tony Pulis does with Gerry Francis or Dougie Freedman does with Lennie Lawrence because he was a Premier League manager less than a year ago and clearly still fancies himself. As a long-serving ex-player at QPR told me a few weeks before Warnock re-appeared, do you think Neil Warnock flew up from Exeter one summer’s evening to appear on a live QPR Podcast from The Ship in Kilburn for want of something better to do with his time? Or because the QPR Podcast pays big appearance fees and he’s short of cash?
The inference being he’s been angling after this, and in doing so fits in with how Hughes got the job after Joorabchian got into Fernandes’ ear and undermined Warnock, and how Ramsey got the job after Ferdinand did likewise with Redknapp. This is not only snide and unpleasant — Ramsey’s dead man walking situation for the last fortnight reflects poorly on the club - it’s also no kind of recruitment process and it’s not working.
It’s always a quick appointment from a shortlist of one. I suspect it’ll be Warnock in the Ferdinand role with Shaun Derry in the Ramsey role this time — it would at least improve the atmosphere, but those who criticised Ramsey for lacking experience would struggle to make a case for Derry however legendary he is round these parts. Just as those who say Ramsey’s football is boring are presumably sweating that Paul Lambert’s odds are so short.
The problem here isn’t the manager, and any temporary improvements made by a new appointment will likely be just that. Tony Fernandes seems to have taken a back seat while the, mercifully, less public facing Ruben Gnanalingam runs the show, but collectively this board remain the issue at QPR.
Their remarkably steadfast support among the fans seems to be based around the money they’ve been putting in. But, according to Reuters, that near £200m debt is borrowed against the Air Asia share price which is now dropping below that value. Common practice in the Far East, the report says, but big trouble when it goes like this. With that, and the ongoing FFP negotiations, it feels like we’re heading for a major situation here. No wonder Fernandes’ brief re-appearance at Harlington a fortnight ago brought a "promotion is everything to me” message.
Let’s not forget three things. Firstly, the team we have now finished last in the Premier League last season and even if it does go back there this season it’s likely to go without its best player who is out of contract in the summer. Secondly, this huge debt we’re saddled with has been accrued while earning the Premier League television money we’re so keen to get back to in order to keep the wolf from the door. If we were planning to go back and use the £100m to pay down some debt I could see the point, but it’s our previous spells up there that have been so ruinous.
And thirdly, that television money the club was paid in three of the last four seasons was the club’s. It was reward for what Neil Warnock, Amit Bhatia and Ishan Saksena achieved before Tony Fernandes got here. It could have secured the club’s future, left us totally debt free, built a training ground, improved infrastructure. Instead it went in the pockets of wanker footballers and their agents, in the name of turning QPR into a promotional vehicle for the Tune Group and an Asian airline.
In the end Chris Ramsey’s failings set out above made it difficult to support him too much, but it became a case of better the devil you know for me. There’s absolutely no indication this board will get it right at the fourth attempt and the only reason they’re trying seems to be an attempt to chase losses they’re entirely responsible for by rushing back to the place where they occurred. That’s not even a good strategy for the bloke on the fixed odds terminal in the local Bill Hill’s, never mind international businessmen in charge of a football club.
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