Gareth Ainsworth's promise of sunlit uplands and big things to come from his team look mightily stupid this morning after Blackburn Rovers ran a sword four goals thick through a QPR rabble at Loftus Road on Saturday - now one home win in a year for the R's.
One of the greatest sports books of all time is called The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro.
It’s written by American novelist Joe McGinniss who, belatedly in life, discovers a love of football/soccer, and Italian football/soccer in particular, through a combination of the World Cup being staged in the US in 1994, a friendship with Kolli-haired Alexi Lalas who played for Padova, and the glorious narrative tragedy of future QPR transfer target Roberto Baggio missing a penalty in the final.
Simultaneous to all of this, a village team from a particularly bleak corner of the impoverished Abruzzo region started inexplicably climbing out of the semi-professional, regionalised lower divisions of Italian football, led by a grizzled journeyman manager Osvaldo ‘The Bulldozer’ Jaconi and the ever-shady influence of CEO Gabrielle Gravina (who ended up heading the Italian FA). They won promotion into Serie B, presenting them with league games against the likes of Genoa and Torino, via a penalty shoot out in a play-off final for which Jaconi decided to substitute his distraught first choice goalkeeper for a small child who subsequently made the save that got them there. It’s the equivalent of Brigg Town making the Championship, and McGinniss thought it a fine subject for a ride-along as they attempt to compete in the second tier of Italian football. (Spoilers follow).
It’s essentially a pub team accidentally promoted above its level and there is high farce, controversy and dodgy dealing throughout as a club with a 5,000 capacity municipal stadium sets sail against the likes of Palermo and Brescia. McGinniss becomes embedded, engaged and enraptured by the village, the people and particularly the players. Midway through the season a car accident on the treacherous mountain roads claims the lives of two of the team’s brighter, younger stars. The book lurches back and forth from funerial grief and sorrow, to moments of great euphoria, high farce, deep rooted corruption, and loneliness. There is a tremendous moment where McGinniss, an American whose soccer fandom stretches all of a couple of years, visits Jaconi at his flat with an idea for a back three formation and wing backs scribbled on a few sheets of A4 and is incredulous and infuriated when a manager who has presided over 20 teams in 30 years (several of them more than once) slams the door in his face shouting "give me a blow job”.
Improbably, implausibly and (perhaps) illegally, Castle Di Sangro survive. They, really rather ridiculously, win a late season away game at Genoa in the storied Luigi Ferraris stadium in the midst of a biblical thunder storm, and then push it over the line in the penultimate game to secure fourth last place with a game to spare. The celebrations are raucous, the village is in raptures, McGinniss has the perfect final act for his book, several of the players agree to come and spend the summer with him back in America - so closely bonded is the group by the experience of a season like any other. "Don’t come to Bari, Joe”, they tell him, of their final away game to a team that needs a win for promotion. It’s done, we’re safe, there’s no need, we’ll see you in Chicago. McGinniss goes anyway and, one afternoon while enjoying the final throes of his Italian odyssey under a towel by the hotel swimming pool, inadvertently overhears the crux of the first team discussing how they will fix the final game at the agreed outcome of 3-1 securing Bari their promotion. McGinniss explodes, calls them all out on it, writes a new final chapter of his book about the fix, and never speaks to any of them again. The highlights of the game are on YouTube, here, and the Bari goal directly from the kick off to begin the game is quite a thing in that context…
I flag that up here, now, because I’ll milk any excuse to talk about that book; because I love a long drop intro with a drop so long neither regular reader knows what the hell is going on by the end of it; and because anything that puts me off having to describe QPR 0 Blackburn 4 to you for another few minutes is a good thing. Also because I’ve never seen goals – beginning with Blackburn’s first, escalated by their second and third, and concluding with a hysterical fourth – conceded quite like this by a team that weren’t deliberately trying to let them in.
LFW counsel (not a salaried position) has asked me to make clear I am in no possible way accusing anybody of fixing this game, but in many ways it’s actually worse. For the fourth goal Blackburn are allowed to play out from the goalkeeper to Luke Hyam unchallenged and with no press. He is allowed to play a straight 20-yard ball into substitute Moran in miles of clear blue water in midfield and turn without opposition. His pass to try and get Tyrhys Dolan in down the left side is rank, wholly misplaced, miles off target, and easy to defend. Ziyad Larkeche swoops in on a routine intercept, and then calmly helps it on into the space behind his own defence, square and across goal, so that Sammie Szmodics can have his clear run in on the School End after all and slide it in for four nil. These are the sort of goals and videos that get clipped for socials late in the Serie B and C seasons, that happen to teams who need a result in a game and have clearly and obviously paid for one. QPR’s ineptitude is now so eye-poppingly staggering it actually looks like they’re doing it on purpose. If we were doing this for money you could almost accept it. But no. We’re so shamelessly, biblically, pathetically, abysmal, we’re giving up shit like this for free.
That was really the theme of the day, and the season. We expected it to be bad, and yet it’s so bad it’s staggering.
QPR are on a club record run of one win from 21 home games, no win in 11 at Loftus Road, a year since they scored more than one on this ground, a year since they scored three anywhere, conceding at a rate of one per Heart FM ad break and scoring at a rate of one every watchable episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys. If you’re coming to Loftus Road now with any expectations for the football then you’re a deluded fool. Similarly, with Gareth Ainsworth, we know he’s a wholehearted manager who places great stock in buy-in and team spirit but whose stylistic and tactical approach is very much spit on it and call it foreplay. And we’re also well aware of the FFP corner we’ve painted ourselves into that means the wholescale rebuild our broken team and squad desperately requires is having to be conducted using only sticking plaster, elastic bands and prayer. We’re not expecting anything really. See if we can find three worse teams than us and get out of Dodge. But QPR were so criminally awful on Saturday, in every possible way, it was difficult to fathom how any full-time sports team could be as poor unless they were deliberately trying to do so. There are four really bad teams in the Championship this season, and we're three of them.
The fourth goal, in particular, shames the club, the coaching staff, the players, and everybody else involved in creating it. It is not a goal that is conceded by a professional football team, at any level. Watch how two forward passes bypass our entire outfield. Watch how those now the wrong side of the ball just give up and start to walk. Look at the space. You can’t just walk through a midfield like that, can you? You shouldn’t be able to. It is a personal, cultural, existential embarrassment. Everybody currently employed by QPR in a football or executive capacity should be force fed it on a loop through the international break. I’d use it to deprive them of sleep, smacking them round the back of the head with a bat every time they nodded off. Watch this. Like the snivelling little twat who uses the dry sponge for the execution on The Green Mile and then can’t bear to watch his victim cook before him. You created it, watch this. I am Tom Hanks, if Tom Hanks had spent the last 30 years watching this horseshit.
Let’s start at the start, the team selection was a suicide note.
I am at pains to state, over and over again, that my football experience extends to being a half decent six-a-side goalkeeper and occasionally coaching junior kids teams. I’ve had to manage an 11-a-side team twice, when the PE GCSE lads played the non-PE GCSE lads over two legs at the end of year 11 - the teacher took the firsts and I took the waifs and ground out a draw on aggregate by packing the midfield (very proud of myself). I’ve never coached a group of footballers, held a training session, managed a team. I don’t know what I’m talking about. LFW is a blog about emotions, the fan experience, and tales from traversing a broken country and with the worst team in a shit league. I’m here to tell you daft stories about Ainsley Harriott’s tit wanks. If you want somebody to talk to you from their mum’s back bedroom about "inverted full backs” and "8s in the half spaces” and "underlapping runs from FBs in ATK phases” and "1v1 isolations” then that’s never going to be me. The managers, and the decisions they make, I’m writing about, could drink me under the table in knowledge, experience and qualifications. So it’s not often I say this but... I could have told you that was a fucking ludicrous set up on Saturday.
The last time QPR played with a back four was at Watford on the opening day of the season, where we took the kick off and still managed to go 1-0 down in the first 30 seconds of the game and were then 4-0 down by half time. Gareth Ainsworth said afterwards Watford might end up as champions – they’ve won one of ten since and are fifth bottom. Since our return to the Championship in 2015 successive managers have come to realise that our centre backs and full backs are so God awful you have to either go safety in numbers with a back three, or pack a whole load of coagulant in ahead of them at the bottom of midfield to stem the bleeding, or usually both. To go back to the flat four on the weekend Sam Field, your best defensive central midfielder, is suspended, and Steve Cook, your best centre back, is injured, was legitimately, certifiably insane. Like going on JustEat to order a 24" Chicago Town deep dicking. Jon Dahl Tomasson was the delivery boy, picking it all apart with consummate ease. Even having Joe Hilton on the Blackburn bench couldn’t save us. The actual Joe Hylton could have started for them and we'd still have lost.
This was then compounded by the decision to force (extremely) left-footed, (extremely) left-back Ziyad Larkeche to start his first ever game of senior football at this level at right back – while, incidentally, two other right backs, including one who’s got 28 caps for the USA, sat on the bench. Larkeche was giving off Christer Warren vibes anyway – fans of the League One team he played for last season utterly perplexed he got a Championship deal – and here suffered the worst full QPR debut I’ve seen since Bob Malcolm versus Jermaine Johnson. He was thrown under the bus by his manager, but once down there he shit himself comprehensively.
Larkeche is the one hopelessly spaffing the ball off his shin directly into the path of Szmodics for the Blackburn fourth. He, and Jimmy Dunne, are the ones standing completely still and scratching their pubics while more mobile, alert, trained, coached and talented Blackburn players are on the move for the first. That was provided first by Dillan Markanday, squirming away from Paal far too easily just as Blackburn had done for their third goal in this fixture last season; then Joe Rankin-Costello, whose interest in the situation and drive into the box was barely matched by Jack Colback’s entitled, half-arsed, phoned in, I’m-doing-you-a-favour tracking job; and finished by Dolan who was just so much more mobile and alive to the situation than any of his leaden footed opponents, and was one of several in a queue for the tap in.
The second goal was almost as disgusting as the fourth. QPR had got Sinclair Armstrong into the box early, powerfully turning past his man on the edge of the box then drawing a save from Leo Wahlstedt at his near post. They’d then conceded a defensively shambolic opener. Not great, by any means, particularly for a team that’s recovered just two points from 14 losing positions in 23 games under this manager. But, with more than an hour left for play against a team that had lost four league games in a row prior to this fixture and themselves sat 20th, not the end of the world. Learn from it, wake up, liven yourselves, don’t do that again, still in the game, don’t worry about it. To concede essentially the same goal again - the same goal again, the same goal a-fucking-gain - within two bastard minutes was little short of treasonous.
First Jimmy Dunne is sluggish and yards off Sammie Szmodics in midfield allowing him to receive a ball with his back to goal unchallenged and turn it around the corner to Dolan. Paal then stands five yards off Dolan and lets him do as he pleases. Szmodics has run on into the penalty area to receive the return in space and, for the second time in the move, Dunne is too slow and too far off him to effect change. He cuts it back first time without looking, and with Jake Clarke-Salter nobody near anybody, Larkeche then stands still at the back post allowing Sigurdsson to run across the front of him on poke in a simple eight-yard finish. Fair warning, if I ever do coach a Sunday league team, and they ever dare contrive to concede a goal like that, then the Paal, Dunne, Clarke-Salter and Larkeche equivalents can expect such an excoriating and prolonged exhumation of every hope and dream they’ve ever held and any family member they’ve ever loved that you’d need a lottery grant the size of HS2’s overspend just to repaint the dressing room. It’s fortunate I sit in the upper tier, because if I’d have been able to get near any of them after that it would have been the bastard love child of John Sitton and Arthur Fowler handing them their dinner. Disgusting. Disgusting.
Sigurdsson’s decision to try and lay Markanday in for an empty netter, rather than shoot when through on Asmir Begovic, was the only thing that kept us from a three-goal half time deficit. Had he shot, he’d have scored, and he, they and we would have deserved it. Begovic’s reprieve from his midweek red card moved the needle about as much as making everybody in the Crown use paper drinking straws has improved the ocean plastic crisis. He finished the game with a big smile, laugh, and wave to the corporate hospitality. Maybe booking in his next appearance on The Bridge podcast?
Whoever he was waving at, it certainly wasn’t our owners, or our CEO. Bar Richard Reilly, none of them were there, and that’s often the case at home and always the case away. Amit Bhatia spent the week playing a Pro-Am golf tournament in Scotland, and amidst a hail of social media abuse and pleas from QPR fans has so far only contributed one Instagram story of him on the piss with Chelsea-supporting gobshite cricketer Kevin Pietersen captioned "best weekend with the best people”. We’re on a plane, descending steadily into a mountain side, while the pilots stage a networking drinks event in the cockpit.
Jack Colback, handed a two year deal with an option for a third at the age of 33, posing for his signing pictures in a watch worth more than my house, was found badly wanting for the first goal, and his only other contribution to this shambles was an airborne, out of control, two footed, studs up tackle after ten minutes which, had it connected, would surely have been a red card and four game ban following an identical moment of stupidity against Sunderland here a fortnight ago. This is him "buying into the project" here is it? Each goal was followed by him silently trudging away with his head down #leadership.
They brought the 2003/04 promotion winning team out here at half time and judging by the fit of their suits Richard Langley and Paul Furlong could happily have stuck around for the second half if I had my say. Nobody involved in what happened next should have the nerve or hubris to look men like Danny Shittu, Steve Palmer or Martin Rowlands in the eye.
Gareth Ainsworth says we started the second half strongly. Gareth Ainsworth says he’d told "the boys” that if they scored the next goal they’d win the game – presumably referring to a different set of "the boys” than the rabble I’ve watched now win one home game in a year and fail to score more than one goal in 21 attempts. His assertion is out of keeping with my notes, which include only Ilias Chair taking a presentable free kick wide on the left and skying it so horribly and hopelessly over the penalty box that they’re still looking for the bloody thing in the same back bit of the solar system we lost Kerry Dixon’s penalty to.
I don’t think I was in the toilet for this bit, but given his assertion that our start to the second period was an improvement - more like it, impressive, troubling to Blackburn, worthy of a goal, potentially sparking a comeback - I do concede now it’s possible I’d spent longer downstairs at half time than I thought, or had perhaps gone to a different game altogether. Either way, that certainly wasn’t the second half I went to on Saturday. The one I was at had the team fifth bottom of the table, with four straight defeats in the league, cruising along on auto-pilot at 36,000 ft. There isn’t a QPR player within spitting distance of any of the third goal build up as a ball is fed in from Sigurdsson in 20 square yards of space on the opposition half, to Szmodics who neither Dunne nor Clarke-Salter had taken responsibility for, out to Dolan unchallenged, back to Sigurdsson unmarked, and Stephen Duke-McKenna allowed him to step inside and calmly find the far corner. Amateur hour. Amateur hour. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, emerge from the pool shed with the flamethrower, burn all this to the ground, there’s nothing here for public consumption. This is a stain on the crest.
There was still the criminally inept fourth to come and, as at Watford at day one, it only stayed at 4-0 because the a vastly superior opponent called the dogs off with 20 minutes to go and pissed about a bit. Had Blackburn, or Watford, continued at the same tempo, we’d be nursing a couple of 7-0s at least. Both embarrassingly better than us in every single department.
Duke-Mckenna is not a youngster. He’s 23. We keep these players hanging round our club, supposedly skint but still happy to pay for their handsome livings, repeated contract renewals for years and year and years. We’ve only just got around to releasing Charlie Owens, who’s 26 in two months, and made one start and two sub appearances for us in six years, but could be found driving in and out of the treatment room every day in a car you and I could only dream of. They had to bin off Mide Shodipo, 26 in July, this summer for fear of owing the little waste a testimonial. Nico Hamalainen, don’t get me started. I keep reading and hearing hype from social accounts about Rafferty Pedder, now on loan at Oxford City, or Elijah Dixon-Bonner, who did a quarter of an hour at the end of this and contributed as much as I did. Our academy set up is a joke. Armstrong, the best of a dire bunch, was used as a battering ram for 70 minutes and then removed, then Rayan Kolli came on and missed a chance you’d have scored yourself.
We constantly hype players, either for social media clout through contrariness, or the management requiring a "PSG youth graduate” to distract us from the giant oil rig fire that is our club, or the population of Iraq needing Alex Auraha to be the second coming to cheer up their miserable existence. "EDB” is not coming to save you. Ziyad Larkeche played for PSG in only the same way me walking across the pitch at Glanford Park to get to my car quicker after their 1999 Division Three play-off semi-final defeat at Scunthorpe means I played for Swansea City. The development squad wins every week, and is top of its league. Zero of that translates to the first team. We need to stop kidding ourselves.
As does the manager. Gareth’s now talking about finishing at the top of a "mini league” at the bottom of the Championship. I mean, quite apart from the fact we wouldn’t finish top of the Cleethorpes and District Knitting Circle playing like this, it’s only a couple of weeks ago he was talking about climbing the table, pushing on into the top half, achieving big things, proving everybody wrong, getting back at the "haters” (also known as people who spent two days this week emptying their bank account into a trip to Leeds). Suddenly after the defeat in the week it’s "well we always knew this was going to be tough” and another shambolic home loss later we’re trying to win a "mini-league” at the bottom of the Championship.
I’ve said for a few weeks now these players will only "buy in” for so long if you keep losing. Several of them already look fed up. The amount of times a player is on the ball, arms outstretched, desperate for options, and angry at what he’s seeing, is now pretty stark. I’ve also said you cannot keep promising the supporters jam tomorrow and "big things are coming” and then keep producing this slop. You can’t tell people they’re coming to the Royal Albert Hall to see a screening of Brassed Off with a live orchestra, and then wheel a small portable TV out onto the stage and show last Wednesday’s Loose Women. You can’t tell people you’re going to do a remastered version of Jurassic Park at the Imax in Waterloo, with a question and answer with Steven Spielberg afterwards, and then send out some little twat to hold his phone up and show an old episode of The One Show with Jermaine Jenas as host. If people have been told to expect a national treasure like David Attenborough, and you waddle out some walking talking human Ebola virus like Piers Morgan, you’ll perhaps get away with that once at most. You definitely can’t do that and then start pretending it was always going to be Loose Women, The One Show, Piers Morgan, or a "mini league” at the bottom of the Championship all along. Ah no. No no. You cannot have it both ways.
Even in Saturday’s programme Ilias Chair is quoted as saying: "You can see a change in the way we play, the way we approach games…believe me, there’s going to be a change, and it’s going to blow a lot of people’s minds”. At the moment if three QPR players successfully completed accurate, crisp, well-controlled ten-yard passes to each other it would blow my mind to such an extent I’d have to get in the nine hour queue for an ambulance with the other stroke victims. The only thing I’m finding mind blowing currently is our apparent best use for Ilias Chair is him picking the ball up 15 yards inside his own half and knocking channel balls for Sinclair Armstrong. That’s fucking African-lion-in-a-Romanian-circus level of cruelty.
There’s a line somewhere between PR and positivity, and outright gaslighting and lying to people. We’ve accelerated past that line this week and left it behind. The line is a dot to us. Blackburn, Coventry and Sunderland have all won more times at Loftus Road in 2023 than we have. It’s now one win at home in a full calendar year, and one can only imagine what Leicester are going to do to us here on the other side of the international break.
It’s a very risky business lying to QPR fans after what we’ve been through. Gareth Ainsworth came here with enough credit in the tank to fly him to the moon and bank without a refill. He is beloved by the Shepherd’s Bush public. You won’t find any support base in the EFL more well versed, educated and understanding in the intricacies, whys and wherefores of the league’s FFP/P&S regulations. QPR fans have rioted, invaded pitches, stages sit ins on South Africa Road, threatened directors at gun point, for way less than what’s going on at the moment. We all fully understand what he’s inherited, what he’s got to work with, whose fault it is, how long the road out of this is. But you start a back four for the first time since your last 4-0 defeat, you do it in the week your best central midfielder is injured, you chuck an obviously poor left back into his first ever Championship start at right back, you hang another deficient B Team player out to dry in midfield, you go 4-0 down and don’t make a single substitution until the 71st minute, you concede that fourth goal in that manner…
This may sound an odd thing to say 3,300 words deep into this but I am speechless. Speechless.
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QPR: Begovic 4; Larkeche 2 (Kakay 74, 3), Dunne 3, Clarke-Salter 4, Paal 3; Colback 3 (Smyth 71, 4), Duke-McKenna 3 (Dixon-Bonner 79, -), Dozzell 4, Chair 4; Dykes 3, Armstrong 4 (Kolli 79, 4)
Subs not used: Kakay, Archer, Willock, Cannon, Kelman, Adomah
Bookings: Clarke-Salter 22 (foul), Smyth 90+3 (dissent)
Blackburn: Wahlstedt 6; Hill 7, Carter 6, Hyam 7, Pickering 7; Tronstad 7 (Travis 60, 7); Rankin-Costello 8, Markanday 7 (Brittain 45, 7), Sigurdsson 8 (Moran 61, 7), Dolan 7 (Ennis 76, 6); Szmodics 7 (Gilsenan 89, -)
Subs not used: Wharton, Garrett, Telalovic, Hilton
Goals: Dolan 19 (assisted Rankin-Costello), Sigurdsson 23 (assisted Szmodics), 59 (assisted Dolan), Szmodics 66 (assisted Larkeche)
Bookings: Szmodics 43 (foul), Gilsenan 90 (foul)
QPR Star Man – N/A Yeh, good one.
Referee – Josh Smith (Bourne) 7 Must have enjoyed this, strolling around in the sun, refereeing a game about as competitive as one of those friendlies you play against a village team in the first week of July.
Attendance 15,376 (1,200 Blackburn approx.) Lovely day for it.
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Pictures — Ian Randall Photography
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