Three wins in a row had flushed QPR through with so much optimism that even the arrival in Shepherd’s Bush of a team without an away win all season apparently wouldn’t pose much of a problem… as much as things change, they stay the same.
Queens Park Rangers entered the market for a new manager in October, and seemingly landed themselves a magician instead.
A team bereft of goals, wins and hope now apparently has all three in abundance. From two wins all season to three consecutively, from one home win in 23 games over a full year to two in a row in a week, four goals scored in a game for the first time in two years, three goals in home game for the first time since last October. QPR, dead on arrival, a priest already at work scattering their remains around the Championship’s garden of remembrance; Blackburn, Sunderland, Coventry and others gatecrashing the wake with loud, beery victories and memories of how Shepherd’s Bush used to be a difficult place to come. Now you’ve got supporters taking the 500/1 on offer for an unlikely, belated top six push.
Cifuentes has brought intelligence and tactics. Previously QPR thought these were little mints, now they’re on a run of clean sheets and have found reward in occasionally crossing the halfway line and moving towards the opposition goal with the ball. He’s brought a refreshing, balls-out-of-the-bath attitude – QPR are not just lucky to be here, the Championship is not Serie A circa 1994, West Brom away is not a mid-winter ascent of K2, and we’re not here to be happy with draws. And he’s brought belief to a desert of despair.
A home game with newly promoted Plymouth Argyle would be the stiffest test of his powers yet. In theory a great chance for a fourth win in a row. The opportunity we’ve been waiting for to move out of the bottom three for the first time since we last had daylight, a moment to suck one of the clutch of teams just above us back into the relegation whirlpool, a night to really make the most of the improved atmosphere and feel-good factor around W12 with a third home success in a row. It was all here for us, against a team playing Championship football for the first time in a decade, and still to register a single away win in 11 attempts – only Argyle and Rotherham are still without one. And that, really, was rather the problem.
Cifuentes may be able to get goals out of Lyndon Dykes. He may have rekindled Chris Willock’s interest in actually playing for his employer, got Jake Clarke-Salter upright and moving around without exploding into a thousand pieces, found talent from the club’s oft-criticised academy and reserve set up. He’s shown he can go to Preston, drop the club’s best player, leave out the two outstanding performers from the match before, and win regardless. On Sky, on a Friday night. This, it seems, is not a QPR manager at all. Already his record is the best since Don Howe in the late 1980s, and he won’t be the manager here for very long at all if he keeps up this wizardry. There is, however, nothing so QPR as going in warm favourites against at home to a team that’s yet to win away and bollocksing the whole thing up.
Regular readers (hello to both) will know that here we copy and paste the paragraph about John Jensen’s only goal in 139 Arsenal appearances, Lloyd Doyley’s only goal in half a million Watford appearances, Swindon Town’s first ever win in the Premier League at the sixteenth attempt on a night when they had ten men and a win would have taken us second (1993/94, Ollie, you silly old arse), Swindon Town’s only ever Premier League away win and double which duly followed in the return fixture. Rotherham United recently spent two years in the Championship winning away from home just once in 46 attempts. Even we thought that was a bit much and sacked Steve McClaren for his part in it, but it was so utterly typical of the club that the long suffering locals did little more than roll their eyes, give a resigned little laugh, and say "but of course”. Ancient Chinese proverb – team on bad run look for QPR in fixture list. The QPR was strong in this one, could the Cifuentes effect burn bright enough to cut through?
Answer: no. The sort of maverick team selection I think we’re going to have to get our heads round and become used to for the midweek games in three-match weeks didn’t work anywhere near as well as it had at Preston, and quickly collapsed into an opening quarter hour in which Plymouth could feasibly have scored three times. The visitors went the opposite way, resting players for their hiding to nothing at Leicester on Saturday and going big and early for this key game against a relegation rival. One of those recalled, Ryan Hardie, shot wide when played through on goal after three minutes when he should have at least hit the target, and then somehow lifted a one on one chance over Asmir Begovic but also the crossbar with an even better chance you’d have scored yourself. In between, the impressive Morgan Whittaker drilled a ball that was halfway between a cross and a shot right through the goalmouth when if he’d made his mind up decisively in either direction it would surely have been a goal for him or a team mate. When Hardie did get a shot on target, Begovic made his first save of the evening. Tiny wee Luke Cundle, on loan from Wolves and looking like the visitors had been short on numbers so let one of their sons play, was seriously tidy in a ten role.
Whatever Cifuentes and his staff thought, it wasn’t a thing here. What made it worse is a good number of these Plymouth issues came from us passing the ball to them. Sam Field gave the ball away after a minute and got himself stupidly booked for pulling his conqueror back by the shirt, Hardie’s first chance came after Ilias Chair had effectively passed him through on our own goal, Whittaker’s after a lousy bit of play by Willock, the Begovic save after a seat-of-your-pants bit of nonsense on halfway ended with Osman Kakay giving a pass away square across his own goal, and the chip over the bar was originally in our possession as well. I criticised Sam Field for passing backwards and sideways too much at the weekend because it was safe, and to play Cifuentes’ Cruyffian football you need to be brave and go forwards, but there was nothing safe about it here – every time we passed the ball back towards our own goal it put one of the Plymouth strikers clean through on it. You wouldn’t ordinarily get that many warnings in this league without going behind. I started to wonder whether we might see substitutions before the half hour. "We were pretty dreadful” the Spaniard said in his post-match. Too right. Far too right.
What has also turned in QPR’s favour of late, however, is the moments in games that are out of our control are starting to go our way more than the opposition. We had a week, a week, earlier this year where we lost one game to a goal punched into the net by a player’s fist, another where short of shooting Sinclair Armstrong in the back of the head it’s difficult to fathom how much more blatant the unawarded penalty could have been, and a third where our goalkeeper was sent off on the circumstantial evidence of being in the vague vicinity at the time of the incident. Against Stoke, a penalty went our way and a red card against them. At home to Hull, the referee was positioned well enough to judge a toe on the ball as Aaron Connolly hit the ground in the penalty box. And here, official Tony Harrington shrugged off his own 18 months of injury hell to be right up with play when Dan Scarr ended a QPR counter with a knee high, studs up lunch that brought a red card half a second later. I wondered at the time whether this was a Championship yellow with a Premier League referee, but it didn’t need much of a second look to see he’d nearly amputated the Moroccan’s leg and Argyle’s impressive manager Stephen Schumacher was graciously clear afterwards that he had no complaints and it was the right decision.
Game changer, momentum shifter, QPR from lucky not to be a couple of goals down at half time should have led when Charlie Kelman, one of the surprise starters, bumbled in at the back post to try and gobble up an inviting chipped cross from Willock and somehow didn’t connect. An unhappy night for a player rated as one of the best finishers at the club in training but who often looks out of his depth at this level when given a chance – you’ve got to feel for him personally, it’s a big chance missed in every sense of the term, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating for us.
Second half was as second half was always going to be. You couldn’t fault the manager’s intention or enthusiasm. He made three substitutions straight away, adding speed and physicality in the full back positions with Ziyad Larkeche and Reggie Cannon, and purposeful forward passing instead of ponderous midfield play with Elijah Dixon-Bonner. What yellow cards we'd stupidly accumulated were removed before further damage could be done.
Off Rangers set with renewed purpose, knowing what a fantastic opportunity this was for them, but they quickly became frustrated by a highly effective block from Plymouth so low it was basically in the car park at Westfield. There’s been saltiness about their approach, and flagrant clock running throughout. Referee Tony Harrington, having gone all Premier League with the red card, was distinctly Championship with his policing of the time wasting i.e. let the goalkeeper take the piss as much as he likes for the entire half and then book him in the 93rd minute when the job’s done, the game’s gone and the yellow card is completely irrelevant. Why referees allow themselves to be made to look so stupid, and complicit in the cheating, like this I will never know. Overall, though, I thought the referee was fine, and Plymouth were impressive. With the ball, 11 v 11, they were much the better team and would surely have gone onto win the game without the red card or a significant pivot from us shape and approach wise. Without it, 10 v 11, they switched to a completely different game plan instantly, and executed it really well. Ex Arsenal junior Julio Pleguezuelo, who I was really disappointed we weren’t sniffing around in the summer when he wanted to return to London from Holland, came on for Finn Azaz and was excellent. Later they brought on Angel Rangel’s non-union English equivalent Adam Randell, and Eastenders matriarch Pat Butcher, to see the game through. There’s criticism of QPR to come, but sometimes you have to acknowledge the opposition. This is a well-coached, well managed team, and Schumacher spoke yards of truth after the game.
It was a half time of repeated announcements in German for the Freiberg fans to stop doing weed and steins in the Ellerslie Road stand, an appeal from Mo Syzlack for a Mr A S Hole to phone home, and a potentially lethal t-shirt cannon channeling the spirit of Tony Yeboah finally unloading the last of those Ledesma hat trick v Carlisle numbers in odd sizes. Oh what mirth I could have made in this report with a win to go on.
The fun, sadly, ended there. It was a horrible frustrating half. Kelman wasting an early chance with a poor touch, Cannon blasting another high and mighty over the bar. You know you’re in trouble when you’re screaming for penalties as half-hearted as Steve Cook’s dramatic fall in the six-yard box trying to convert one half chance, and when Jimmy Dunne is launching 30 yard left footed volleys bringing death and terror to the Upper Loft. Come on guys, we've all had a drink.
It was, of course, a blow to lose the purposeful Larkeche to a nasty looking concussion which had him wobbling around like late years Bruno - "that’s cricket Harry”. A blow, because he’d been playing well and offering penetration down his side so sadly lacking elsewhere. A blow, because it gave Plymouth an extra sub, which they used to remove Cundle who had tired and been booked. And, because, despite a fresh invitation, Cifuentes didn’t introduce the pace of Paul Smyth or Sinclair Armstrong. Instead, the lesser spotted Taylor Richards lumbered on for Introduction To The Offside Law Module 1.1. In a half where QPR were increasingly guilty of hanging onto the ball too long, trying to do too much, pisballing about in neutral areas too often, the addition of Richards, who lists all of that as skills on his LinkedIn, only exacerbated the ball ache.
I guess Cifuentes would tell you, when the block is so low it’s basically on the goal line, pace can’t help you as there’s no space behind to run into, and what you need is somebody who can unlock the quagmire with an incisive through ball. I felt QPR needed to commit men into tackles, drawing either fouls and further cards or taking them out of play and reducing the green numbers further. What they did instead of either these things, far too often, was play around in front of the massed ranks. Ilias Chair and Chris Willock, as poor here as they were brilliant at the weekend, started picking the ball up as far back as the halfway line, and trying to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune themselves. What you need against a short-handed opponent is to stretch the game widthways, and move the ball relentlessly quickly. Having Willock on the ball in the centre circle, Chair running into traffic to try and beat three men and score from long range, or Richards doing whatever the fuck it is Richards does, was absolute nectar to Plymouth for whom Brendan Galloway seriously impressive. When Smyth did, belatedly, come on, he committed and beat a man immediately, got to the byline, cut it back to the near post, and nearly induced a decisive goal.
There was, to be fair, a terrific defensive block on a shot from 12 yards out by Willock that looked a goal all ends up, and a cross in the fourth minute of injury time would have been a Preston-like goal for Smyth but for another brave intervention at the back post, but eight minutes of stoppage time were mostly spent watching Lyndon Dykes run a night school on how not to head the ball towards goal. What saves reserve Plymouth keeper Conor Hazard did have to make he looked nervous as hell about, the absence of the excellent Michael Cooper should have been another boost to our chances, but he wasn’t tested enough. Plymouth were tremendous value for their point, QPR didn’t deserve any more than they got.
At Preston a week back Cifuentes picked a starting 11 that 100 QPR fans could have spent 100 minutes having 100 goes at guessing in the pub beforehand and never got close. Ilias Chair’s influence from the bench in the second half that night, the 2-0 win, and the performance and result, vindicated him totally and made a few of the angry little boys on Twitter look very daft indeed. Cifuentes was quick to say afterwards it was "not because he was a genius”. Here a similarly wild selection backfired, with the selection of Kelman a particularly sad failure. That, naturally, opens up the manager to criticism from the online Monday morning quarterback types like myself.
Personally I’d have rather us blitz this game and Sheff Wed at the weekend, and then sack off Southampton and Ipswich if necessary, but I accept Cifuentes knows more about it than me, and I can’t on the one hand say I hated Ainsworth’s defeatist attitude to splashing around in a division that is mostly a footballing tub of shite, and then on the other say that Russell Martin’s dance of a thousand passes and Ipswich away are hurdles so insurmountable we shouldn’t even bother. Cifuentes is trying to build a front foot, confident culture, that we’re Queens Park Rangers and we don’t give a fuck about Southampton, Ipswich or anybody else. He’s also trying to involve everybody within his squad, as opposed to the previous manager who bore grudges against some of its best players. And he’s working full in the knowledge that this is a threadbare group, with quality concentrated in half a dozen players and next to nothing beyond that, with several of his key players horribly injury prone. While we’re slagging Ainsworth it is worth saying the sport science changes and appointments made in the summer do seem to be paying dividends, with only Morgan Fox currently missing of any significance. Cifuentes knows he’s a couple of injuries (Cook, Willock, Chair, Clarke-Salter) away from a serious problem, and at least two of the players in those brackets have a record like the 35th Christmas anniversary special of Casualty, where a space ship crashes into a car, on top of a tram, outside a nightclub. If he thinks this is the team selection for this game then, at the moment, he’s earned that right. I think he’ll have learned a lot about who you can leave out, who you can trust, who you can bring in, from this game though.
I’m choosing to take it a positive point. If you can’t win, don’t lose, and we didn’t do that courtesy of a third consecutive clean sheet for the first time in five years. Go back and watch the highlights of the Blackburn game again – that team has now kept four clean sheets in seven games. This is loaves and fish stuff. Steve Cook was integral to this latest shut out, the only player who maintained his level from the previous games.
We’d have lost this game, comfortably, had it been played six weeks ago. We’d have lost this game, comfortably, had it continued on the flightpath it was on before the red card. Ainsworth would have absolutely rejoiced at the resilience of the team and how the boys dug in for each other because playing against ten men is never easy and Plymouth might be champions by May and yadda yadda yadda. Cifuentes was somewhere between annoyed and furious, which I liked a lot. I do wonder, when the memory of Ainsworth fades and the novelty of the new man wears off, whether our poor little loves will take kindly to the manager coming out after games and saying things like "we were dreadful”. For now, standards need raising at this place and it’s gratifying to hear and see a manager driving that rather than picking little bits of coal out of the dust and shouting DIAMOND!.
A small setback like this might not hurt at this point, particularly as we didn’t lose. The only time QPR are a bigger danger to themselves than when they’re playing a team that hasn’t won and/or a striker that hasn’t scored since the Cretaceous Period is when they get all confident, cocksure and think they’ve got it all made. Some of the lazy, slapdash, half-arsed passes they played in the first 15 minutes should have been punished with goals and were very QPR indeed. Managers are important, and we’re seeing that this season more starkly than perhaps ever before, but you don’t win two of your first 16 games if you’re secretly a good team that’s just got a meathead in charge, and nor do you breeze your way out of relegation trouble if you’ve only put eight points on the board by November. This is still the same group of players that has been losing consistently for two years, and it is still a sizeable task ahead of them to climb out of the mess they’ve played themselves into.
A little reality check, delivered by one of the teams we’ve been breezily waving our hand towards saying "oh we’ll go past that lot” on our now apparently relentless and inevitable climb up the division, might not be a bad thing. Best of all, it's the manager screaming that message the loudest.
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QPR: Begovic 6; Kakay 5 (Cannon 46, 6), Cook 7, Dunne 6, Paal 5 (Larkeche 46, 6 (Richards 72, 4)); Dozzell 6, Field 5 (Dixon-Bonner 46, 6); Kelman 4 (Smyth 78, 6), Chair 5, Willock 5 (Armstrong 90, -); Dykes 5
Subs not used: Clarke-Salter, Archer, Drewe
Bookings: Field 1 (foul), Paal 31 (foul),
Plymouth: Hazard 6; Kesler-Haden 7 (Edwards 78, 6), Scarr 4, Gibson 7, Galloway 8; Houghton 6, Azaz 6 (Pleguezuelo 28, 7); Whittaker 6 (Randell 57, 6), Cundle 7, Mumba 6 (Miller 57, 6); Hardie 5 (Nundu 78, 5)
Subs not used: Wright, Waine, Burton
Red Cards: Scarr 25 (dangerous foul)
Bookings: Cundle 86 (foul), Pat Butcher 90+4 (I love you Frank), Hazard 90+6 (time wasting, joke)
QPR Star Man – Steve Cook 7 A grownup in the room. Multiple rescue jobs, interceptions, tackles, headers and clearances, bailing his team mates out of situations largely of their own making. He knows what it takes to achieve in this division, and three wins in early December isn’t it. Steve McClaren is a good QPR manager by those standards. You have to be good, consistently, over a long period of time. He was the only one who maintained his level from the previous games, and addressed this one as a serious challenge rather than a forgone conclusion. Good players want to be good players all the time. Do you not realise how profound that is, have you not examined the words? Sits, you’re too intense.
Referee – Tony Harrington (Cleveland) 7 I sense I’m probably going to get a bit of grief for this judging by the discourse online, and I absolutely agree his policing of the flagrant time wasting was a farcical joke culminating in the punchline of the goalkeeper being booked in stoppage time. Nevertheless, the big decision in the game is the sending off and he’s got that exactly right from a distance of ten yards away in a fast counter attack – didn’t even have to think, right there, saw it clearly, card straight out. It’s QPR’s fault they’ve not been able to knock over ten men for an hour, not the referee’s. He added eight minutes, blew on eight and a half, and got surrounded by QPR players saying they should have been allowed one more attack – well, you’ve had all night lads, what were you going to do with this one that you couldn’t have done with the others? I thought he was pretty good, and he’s not usually a referee I like very much.
Attendance 16,339 (2,000 Plymouth approx.) Wednesday night, fortnight before Christmas, scandalous £37 a ticket, trains an extortionate catastrophe, no away wins all season and beaten 4-0 at Leicester at the weekend, and you bring that many people here and make a racket like that? Fair fucks. I don’t want to hear about "Leeds would have taken more” or whatever, it’s people like this, following clubs like Plymouth, that make the sport what it is in this country, and what the broadcasters and people that run it are increasingly decaying. I wish them all the best, I’d be very surprised if this team ends up as one of the worst three in this division.
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