QPR have today succeeded in one of their key missions for the 2013 summer transfer window – offloading Portuguese full back Jose Bosingwa. LFW reflects on an unhappy 11 month union between club and player.
Fossils date the tradition of mounting the severed head of your victim on a stake back to the Stone Age. Part of the victory celebrations, a warning to others who may act up in the same way, or simply an offering to whichever greater power groups of people believed in through the ages, this gruesome ritual has been performed across the world for centuries.
Despite Jose Bosingwa’s behaviour, performance level and attitude over the last 12 months it would probably be frowned upon by the health and safety authorities, and the police in all likelihood, if QPR were to perform a similar ghoulish parade with him as the centre piece as part of the pre-match entertainment at the Sheffield Wednesday game on Saturday. Nevertheless, the idea of some sort of permanent warning against the possibility of ever landing the club in such a situation again is a salient one. Perhaps a painting of the work-shy, mono-browed low life should be hung in the manager’s office so whoever Rangers have picking the players in future is never tempted to walk that road again. Maybe Tony Fernandes should carry a copy of Bosingwa’s final pay cheque around in his wallet for the rest of his time as chairman so he never forgets.
However they do it – paintings, severed heads, naming a toilet block after him – QPR must not brush their 12 months with Jose Bosingwa under the carpet. It must not be the transfer which dare not speak its name, it should not be a touchy subject to bring up around the senior powers at the club, and it must be at the absolute forefront of everybody’s mind whenever a new signing is made. CEO Philip Beard’s should ask before every deal is completed “Are we making the same mistakes we did with Jose Bosingwa here?” If the answer is yes, or even perhaps, then he should abandon the transfer immediately. It should be like the “have you remembered to put enough petrol in?” part of the pre-flight checklists carried out by airline captains.
Jose Bosingwa, rightly or wrongly, came to represent everything that was wrong with Queens Park Rangers in 2012/13. Over-paid, under-worked and with an attitude to the greatest profession in the world that surely, when he’s older and wiser and looking back on his life, he’ll be thoroughly ashamed of.
Many of his failings were not unique to him. For a start he was brought in from a far bigger, more successful club where he’d won a clutch of medals including the Champions League just weeks before moving to Loftus Road. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing – Ray Wilkins gave QPR many years of excellent service at the end of his playing career having won trophies with some of the biggest clubs in the world – it does rather run the risk of saddling yourself with a player who will struggle to motivate themselves for a day of work. From Chelsea trophy challenges, masterminded on a purpose built training facility by the best coaches in the world using some of the greatest players of the modern era, to a relegation scrap at Queens Park Rangers in their ramshackle old stadium and rancid training ground borrowed from a college. You need to be sure you’re bringing in a good egg in that situation.
Secondly, despite the success at Stamford Bridge the previous season, Bosingwa had struggled at times. The general consensus from the Chelsea faithful was that he couldn’t defend, and few tears were shed when he left. QPR themselves should have known this having caught him out badly with a player as limited as Shaun Wright-Phillips– Bosingwa was sent off in Rangers’ 1-0 win at Loftus Road in 2011/12 for hauling down the little winger after allowing him to sneak in goal side of him. Most of the rest of the league found that Wright-Phillips could probably be marked out of games by a sack of woodchips if needs be.
While it’s tempting to say that just because a player doesn’t look quite up to the standard of the likes of David Luiz and Juan Mata that doesn’t mean they’ll be no good for a team of much more meagre ability and ambition, what QPR have found with Bosingwa, Ji-Sung Park and several others is that if they’re starting to get found out while surrounded by world class players, they’ll be horrifically exposed when they’ve only got Anton Ferdinand to cover for their lapses.
And thirdly, he was bought on his name, his reputation, and the identity of his agent, rather than because the QPR scouts and management had sat at dozens of Chelsea games and picked him out as a decent, available player who could do a sound job for the team. Rangers spent all last summer haphazardly collecting players whose names they’d heard of, only thinking about how they might all fit together in a cohesive team unit when it was far too late.
Bosingwa had won the Champions League twice with two different clubs, the Portuguese league on four occasions and the Premier League once, the Portuguese cup once and the FA Cup three times, the Portuguese Super Cup three times and the Community Shield once. He had 24 caps for Portugal and was named in the team of the tournament at the European Championships in 2008. Chelsea spent nearly £20m to bring him to this country in the first place. Who needs scouting and references when the player has a CV like that? For an agent dealing with a club as full of itself and naïve as QPR it was an easy sell.
But so far so standard. Bosingwa wasn’t alone in any of this, and nor was he the only player who was playing poorly and apparently not putting a great deal of effort in during the early part of the season. Park, Julio Cesar and Esteban Granero all arrived with a similar set of circumstances with similar mediocre (and at times horrendous) results on the field. But one fortnight in mid-December elevated Bosingwa high above the steaming shit tip at Loftus Road and made him the poster boy for the club’s dreadful season. By May QPR fans at a home game against Newcastle were singing “Jose Bosingwa, you’re not wanted here.”
Mark Hughes had fallen on his sword after a summer of too much big talk and expensive flirtations with the likes of Bosingwa and the other toads on Kia Joorabchian’s client log had collapsed into a 12 game winless run at the start of the season. He’d been replaced by Harry Redknapp and in one of the new manager’s first matches, a 2-2 draw up at fellow relegation-haunted side Wigan, Bosingwa had been particularly insipid even by his barrel bottom standards and was replaced towards the end of the game by Fabio Da Silva.
Redknapp wasn’t impressed and resolved during the week to leave Bosingwa out of the next match at home to Fulham and pick Nedum Onuoha at right back instead. A week later, upon hearing the news of his demotion, Bosingwa packed up his kit bag and walked out of Loftus Road before the Fulham game had even kicked off. He felt he was too good to be a substitute for little old Queens Park Rangers.
Rumours of his behaviour did the rounds during that week, as they always do at football clubs – particularly ones as notoriously leaky as QPR. But that is all they were – rumours. There’d been rumours about training ground fights, players not pulling their weight, players acting up, players behaving badly, cliques in the dressing room and so on all season. This was, at this stage, just another one to throw on the pile. Had Bosingwa returned to the team and continued to play badly he’d just have been another one of those lousy signings QPR had made whose attitude stank and wasn’t trying very hard.
What Harry Redknapp did next changed that situation completely. A week later at Newcastle Rangers were beaten 1-0 with Anton Ferdinand pressed into service as a terrifyingly inept full back. Redknapp need only have explained that Bosingwa was injured and couldn’t play, but he wasn’t in a conciliatory mood. The former Spurs boss, who’d been close to being named England manager just a few short months beforehand, had stood in the pouring rain and freezing cold watching his new team meekly surrender to defeat at the other end of the country three days before Christmas. To make matters worse he’d been without Julio Cesar and several other first teamers who he strongly suggested afterwards had exaggerated stresses and strains because they didn’t fancy a long trip up north so close to the holiday period. His mood was black and so when asked about Bosingwa he chose to go public not only with the players’ pre-Fulham walkout, but also the size of the subsequent fine which was for the maximum two weeks wages allowed by the PFA and amounted to £120,000. Bosingwa was now not only a poor player not trying hard enough, but a poor player not trying hard enough while disrespecting the club, behaving badly and pulling in £60,000 a week. Redknapp, stretching the truth somewhat, said Bosingwa was being paid more than anybody he’d had at Tottenham the previous season.
The QPR manager may like to make out that he’s not the brightest – one of his many far-fetched defences to a criminal prosecution for tax avoidance had been that he “can’t fucking read or write” – but he’s a master at working the British media to his advantage and rarely says anything to them without it benefiting him in some way. Perhaps he had just let rip in the heat of the moment, so disgusted with what he’d found at QPR, or maybe he wanted to make an example of a player to try and deliver a kick up the backside to one or two others. Whatever the reason, he’d finished Jose Bosingwa at QPR in one fell swoop and given that he didn’t pick him at all for the rest of December, January and the beginning of February it seemed that Redknapp knew that as well as anybody.
But Bosingwa wasn’t finished at QPR. Redknapp quickly lost patience with plenty of other players – Anton Ferdinand paid the price for a shambolic showing against MK Dons in the FA Cup by being shipped off to Turkey and Ale Faurlin, a fans favourite who nevertheless also struggled in that match, was bummed off on loan as well. In Faurlin’s case it seemed the manager hadn’t taken too kindly to being told by board members and supporters what a super player he was when, coming back from a long term injury, he wasn’t able to show it. But Bosingwa remained, and by the end of February he was back in the team.
The QPR fans were remarkably tolerant initially – and who knows, had his 25 yard howitzer at Aston Villa flown into the top corner and made it 2-0 rather than striking the top of the post and staying out immediately prior to the home team equalising he may have been able to turn the tide of public opinion. But by going public with Bosingwa’s misdemeanours Redknapp had created a powder keg so volatile that even the tiniest spark would set the whole thing off. Bosingwa was hammered by supporters for misplaced passes that barely registered when other players made them, and fans pored over video replays of goals conceded looking for an element he could be blamed for. Of course they did, this was somebody who thought himself too big to sit on the bench for their club.
QPR’s relegation was sealed with a dire 0-0 draw at Reading where Bosingwa turned in his worst performance of the season so far and was again substituted early. Afterwards the Sky cameras caught him laughing as he went down the tunnel before panning away to the Rangers fans behind the goal, devastated and dumbstruck by the demotion. It’s highly unlikely Bosingwa was laughing at the relegation – but he shouldn’t have been laughing at all.
Redknapp’s behaviour then became very odd. QPR had three games left to play and nothing to play for. The obvious thing to do would surely have been to start planning for the following season – using players who would definitely still be with the club and ignoring those who either definitely wouldn’t be, or wouldn’t be if Redknapp had anything to do with it. Bosingwa could have been placed in either of the latter two categories. Redknapp, bizarrely, went out of his way to state in press conferences that he definitely wasn’t taking next season into consideration when selecting his team.
What happened next was therefore inevitable. Now officially relegated the QPR fans no longer had to keep up the “not over until the fat lady sings” pretence. They could start taking their frustrations out on the players without fear of affecting performances on the pitch, because the performances on the pitch no longer counted for anything and could scarcely get any worse in any case. After the Fulham incident, the salary revelations, the Reading laughter, and the consistently half-arsed performances, Bosingwa was always going to be a prime target. Perhaps that’s exactly why Redknapp continued to pick him: to make him realise there was no future for him at QPR, even one where he stayed and went through the motions collecting his money. Maybe Redknapp just wanted to humiliate a couple of his team: Stephane Mbia, himself incurring fans’ wrath for ill-advised Twitter activity, and Jose Bosingwa had gone from Champions League football to pariahs in a relegated team at a tiny club in less than a year.
There can be no other reason for picking both players in the final home match of the season against Newcastle. Their performances were so shambolic that this couldn’t possibly be deemed a shop window exercise, they were contributing absolutely nothing towards helping the team get a morale boosting win, and they were destroying the atmosphere at the game with their very presence. The abuse they received against Newcastle, where Bosingwa first conceded a penalty and then engaged in a supremely incompetent exchange of woefully short passes with goalkeeper Robert Green which ended up costing the R’s a second goal, was so brutal both players had to be removed at half time. A week later at Liverpool Redknapp finally relented and picked youngster Michael Harriman at right back where he turned in a man of the match display.
Why hadn’t that change been made sooner? Why did Redknapp not only pick Bosingwa in meaningless games, but also go out of his way to defend him against criticism in the wake of the Reading incident? Faurlin, Ferdinand, Jamie Mackie and Adel Taarabt have all been swiftly bombed out completely by Redknapp, with apparently no chance of a reprieve or second chance, and yet Bosingwa was recalled, picked, and defended. A situation made all the more odd because it was Redknapp’s post-Newcastle comments that made his position untenable in the first place.
When pre-season training rolled around this summer Redknapp made powerful statements by leaving senior players like Joey Barton at home while the first team squad travelled to Devon for a training camp. Adel Taarabt was sent home for bad behaviour. And yet, again, Bosingwa was included. Harriman didn’t even travel and Bosingwa did. It made no sense to start with, and when Bosingwa then came on as a second half substitute at Exeter and spent half an hour giving the ball away and trying to talk the referee into sending him off with several extremely childish moments of poor behaviour and dissent he suffered the ignominy of being subbed back off himself. Afterwards Redknapp told reporters that Bosingwa knew he had to leave because the fans hated him and his situation was untenable – as if it was somehow the supporters’ fault. The supporters who would never have known about Bosingwa’s wage or behaviour at that Fulham game had Redknapp not told them, and wouldn’t have cared anyway had Bosingwa played well and tried his best all season. At a time when Redknapp needs all the friends he can get among the support base, it seemed like a strange bridge-burning exercise on his part.
But, luckily, he was right. Bosingwa couldn’t stay, and hasn’t. The club today announced he had been ditched from the remaining two years of his contract by mutual consent and he’s almost certainly now set for the Turkish league which sits on the other side of Europe like some sort of giant skip for the bad, mad and sad cast offs of English football. If Redknapp was right about Bosingwa’s wage than QPR have put the thick end of £3m in his pocket over the last ten months in exchange for 24, mostly awful, appearances and one goal in the League Cup against Walsall. ‘Mutual consent’ hints that Rangers have paid him off, but well-connected local journalist Dave McIntyre suggested last week that QPR’s opening offer in the haggle had been somewhere in the region of “zero” and hopefully it didn’t rise much higher than that because Jose Bosingwa isn’t worth the steam off my piss.
Even if it has cost the club money it will be worth it not only to be rid of the worst possible example of a modern footballer, but also because it will act as a further chastening reminder of just what a colossal mistake this signing was right from the outset.
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Pictures – Action Images