 Tuesday, 10th May 2011 00:49 by Clive Whittingham Possibly the greatest day of all time After months of tension and angst the jury returned in QPR’s favour on Saturday morning, setting Shepherds Bush up for a night few who were there will ever forget. It is often customary in such circumstances for a writer to begin by quoting a famous poet or author or philosopher. But QPR, and LoftforWords, never really has done things by the book. No other team would attempt to derail their own procession to a league title by incurring seven charges relating to third party influence and false documentation in the transfer of a player two years previously, and no other website would ever continue to churn out 4,000 word match previews that nobody reads – but we are what we are, and we are QPR. So let me start by quoting Bart Simpson’s teacher Edna Krabappel… ”You dream about this day for so long, then when it comes, you don't know what to say.” Saturday began at 6am. It didn’t need to, bet then no days in my life ever need to begin at 6am. Except for the odd trek up to Middlesbrough there is never any need for me to be awake at 6am for football, for work, or for anything else. But for the last six weeks or so all of my days have begun at 6am – awake, exhausted, worried. Simple things make me happy in my life – beer, QPR goals, quality time with my girlfriend, three day weekends, warm weather, a large bar of Galaxy chocolate left to go soft in the sun and lay ins. I love lying in. I love being asleep until gone midday, snuggled up in a giant duvet, listening to rain howl around outside while I pull up another blanket and settle in for another hour of kip. But I have lost the ability to lie in recently. I find myself waking up at 6am every morning, and then laying there trying to go back to sleep before admitting defeat and getting up to wash up or something. I’ve never lived in such a tidy flat. I don’t always wake up thinking about Alejandro Faurlin and his bloody silly transfer agreement, signed with Instituto Cordoba and whoever the fuck else two years ago, but I do sometimes, and even when I don’t it’s always there, always niggling – like a default worry when everything else is ok. I didn’t take it as a positive that the rain was bucketing down when I opened my eyes at a little after 5.45am on Saturday morning. The driest spring on record, hose pipe bans already being prepared, my lawn starting to resemble a test match wicket on day five but suddenly, on this the day of all days, rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain – coming down in sheets and flowing down the Barnet High Road in a torrent. I wondered whether it was a sign while staring blankly out of my kitchen window and wondering just how and why I’d got to a point where a bloody silly football team meant quite so much to me. The rain had ceased by the time my other half Lindsey and I were ready to head to the tube at Totteridge and Whetstone and into town for breakfast at Scott’s in Covent Garden. I am a man of routine, I always have been. I use the same trains, I sit in the same seats on them, I order the same king prawn jalfrezi in Indian restaurants, I turn my back on QPR penalty kicks and on Saturday mornings I eat in Scott’s in Covent Garden – number three breakfast, scrambled eggs, extra mushrooms, white toast. LoftforWords official photographer – not a salaried position. I don’t want to, I want to eat four doors down in Farmer Brown’s where I’d eaten my Saturday morning breakfast since I was five years old. However several years ago (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the café was taken over by some rich foreign owners with some big ideas and having immediately forced out the long serving and much loved head chef and manager proceeded to make things much worse before then giving it an Italian theme, and then refitting it altogether as an Italian restaurant that nobody eats in. Because it’s not an Italian restaurant, it’s Farmer Brown’s, with Oz behind the counter telling stories of Austrian fishing expeditions and drinking German beer at 7.30am on a Saturday. Job one upon a lottery win will be buying that place back and returning it to its former glory. Lindsey will be delighted. In Scott’s on Saturday morning we found my brother Paul. Paul is very tall, with a full head of Akos Buzsaky/Jedward style spiked blond hair and a giant pair of film star sungalsses stuck permanently to his face which is further punctuated by a giant white smile. He is my brother in name only – we don’t know which one of us was the product of an affair, but we’re clearly not both from the same stock. On Friday night he had been to his university leavers’ ball in Sheffield, and then caught the mail train down to London straight from there in the early hours. Actually, that’s not true, he had at least had the decency to take one of the other leavers home for an evening of God only knows what, and then come straight from her to the mail train and Scott’s. We found him wearing a smart button up shirt, a dirty pair of Sheffield University football shorts, and a pair of slippers. He was being loud in that way drunk people are when they don’t realise they are. At Bond Street, on the Central Line, he was sick in his mouth but managed to swallow it. Which he seemed very pleased about. That’s Paul. Brothers. Apparently. The plan after breakfast was to get down to Shepherd’s Bush as early as possible because both The Green, and The Green Room had told us in advance they were planning to open early for QPR fans wanting pre-match drinks. Sadly it was clear that while Leeds had only been given 1,800 tickets, and had only given them to their most loyal and trusted database supporters, the Metropolitan Police were keen to engage in a boot, and pocket, filling exercise in Shepherds Bush on Saturday presumably to tide them over while we’re all away during the summer. Although the officers at the tube station denied ordering any such thing The Green and The Green Room were closed when we arrived just before 10am. Tracey had arrived in the Bush far earlier, and been surveying the pub situation for some time. She was able to confirm that the police had ordered no pub to serve before 11am and so we were stuck with the soul sapping only option of the Wetherspoons in the shopping centre on the Green. Wetherspoons are useful if you want cheap beer, or you are a chav. The Wetherspoons in Shepherds Bush on Saturday was also under the no drinks before 11am rule and so the chavs gathered and ate their breakfast with the sausages made up mostly of ash and drank bad tea out of cardboard cups. A group of Leeds fans mixed freely with the Rangers, agreeing that the whole thing was ridiculous and lamenting their club’s reputation that sees them suffer this sort of overkill all over the country, all season. Thank God I follow a club nobody cares very much about. By this time the full LoftforWords travelling party had convened. Paul was still being an outrageous pain in the arse, Tracey was charged with looking after him, Colin and Nik had arrived and Owain had completed his latest commute from Paris to Loftus Road keen to keep up his record of presence at all our defeats so far this season. He wants to renew his season ticket next year, a panel will meet to discuss the case later in the summer. We were also joined at this point by Neil the official LoftforWords photographer (not a salaried position) and he started snapping away for want of something else to do while we waited for the 11am witching hour to tick around. When it did, we headed for The Green Room. Pubs around Shepherds Bush for people who want to eat, drink out of glass receptacles and watch live football without being bothered by away fans or having to venture into a Walkabout are few and far between. The Goldhawk was the best pub in Shepherds Bush for years but has long since been ruined. After the massacre of that place we tried The Brackenbury for a while, then the Bush Ranger until that went down the same God awful yuppy pub route, then The Green until that got rid of its Sky and then finally The Green Room which was, until about 4pm on Saturday, the Bush’s best kept secret. I fear we may face a bigger fight for tables there next season after what transpired here. And so we sat in The Green Room – drinking a variety of drinks ranging from vodka and diet coke through to great frothy pints of ale but all enduring the same taste that can only be achieved by pouring a drink (any drink) into a plastic glass. As I looked round the table I saw faces of people who so desperately wanted to enjoy this day that we’d travelled around all season longing to experience, but people who were worried about what may lay ahead. Fans of a normal football club would have been fretting over a result in the game required to seal it, but in a way that only QPR could ever muster we were all sitting there worrying about a legal case. Andy Hillman – winner of betting column profit, bringer of good news. Somewhere six miles up the road in a locked room four people whose identities we weren’t allowed to know were discussing a case the details of which were being kept from us trying to come up with a punishment we had no idea the extent of for offences we weren’t really sure about to a deadline we couldn’t be told while sleezy hacks kicked their heals outside and occasionally made things up when a deadline approached to prolong our pain and shift copies of their worthless rags. This is football in 2011. If football was a country, the FA a government, and this their legal process the UN would have sent tanks in a long time ago. The rumours came and went – everybody from the head of BBC sport through to the Wembley maintenance man was telling their mate exactly what was happening so they could post it on message boards. And everybody’s story was different. There’ll be an announcement at 10am said the rumour mill. Then, when that had been and gone, 11am, then 11.30am and so it went on. By the time LoftforWords betting columnist (not a salaried position) Andy Hillman left the room with indecent haste, mobile glued to his ear, it didn’t even occur to me that a verdict may be in. I’d resigned myself to not knowing. To be honest, I’m surprised I know now sitting here and writing this on Monday night. I’d started to resign myself to weeks of this. Seeing our QC Ian Mills going into Wembley with boxes of paperwork piled high upon one another on Friday morning (when we were supposed to be getting a verdict) I couldn’t help but feel we were engaging in the time honoured legal trick of trying to bury our fault under a mountain of paper and words - a sign of guilt, and a sign that it may take a while yet. Then Andy, and several others besides, burst through the door. “No points, no points,” they were shouting, making that hand across the throat gesture that Millwall fans make towards Asian people. There was a pause of almost complete silence. “What did he say?” No points. No points. The place erupted. Grown men hugging, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria. Our table remained still. I turned round to see that Colin had already started to cry, but we all said the same thing; “let’s just wait.” There had been a lot of false dawns. Was that light at the end of the tunnel the sun? Or another train coming our way? The curse of Devon Loch is lifted. No points deducted. QPR’s official text service is, to be fair, absolute shit. “Sign up for the transfer news first and fastest” it boasts, then charges you 25p several times a week for such vital tit bits as “Bradley Orr has been named in the Championship Team of the Week” and “Rob Hulse scored for the reserves today in a behind closed doors game with Charlton.” But all of those 25p charges that the club has basically stolen from me since I signed up for that thing were all so worth it when my clapped out old Nokia whirred into life. No points. No points indeed. The barman scrabbled frantically for the remote and suddenly there it was, the Championship trophy glinting in the sun with Spark the bloody Tiger standing next to it. The chuffin silly mascot that replaced our beloved Jude, I’ve never been so glad to see him or it. By the time the sound had been turned up Mark Lawrenson was babbling on about West Ham, because they’re Premiership and therefore important, but you know what? We’re Premiership and important now too. The trophy acted like a magnet. Drinks were downed in a split second and off we went to the ground. It was early, why were we leaving? Who could tell? It just felt like we needed to be at the ground. For the first time in weeks, months maybe, that tense feeling at the pit of my stomach had gone. The times I’ve sat on the toilet in the past few months and been unable to do anything other than just sitting there, mistaking nervous tension for last night’s dinner. All gone, all drained away. It felt marvellous, like somebody had injected morphine straight into my brain. The ghost of QPR players past who had briefly brought Rufus Brevett into my life a week before sensed this was a special occasion and delivered Stan Bowles to Batman Close. What a club this is. On the rare occasions QPR do something amazing it is always tinged with a little sadness for me, because I always want to be standing there watching it with my granddad Tom, my dad Rob and our best mate Stuart - all three of whom have been taken from me in the last 15 years by a heart attack caused by too many breakfasts in Farmer Brown’s, mouth cancer and prostate cancer. That feeling was still there as Loftus Road quickly filled up into a sea of blue and white with free flags flapping in the breeze while that beautiful silver trophy glinted in the light on the touchline but for the first time since I lost them all I sort of got the feeling they were there. They’d been looking out for us. Putting in a good word and perhaps as sometimes happened when things got tough, like the time we were attacked by a priest in Newcastle, producing their warrant cards and telling the aggressor to stop being so daft. “Just fine em and let em get on with it they’ve been through enough,” I could almost hear my dad saying. Bizarrely I remembered the time we’d been on a family holiday to Florida during the Atlanta Olympics and Linford Christie had been disqualified for a false start in the 100 metres – the American channel had gone for a commercial as it happened and my dad had gone absolutely mental, demanding the bar staff flick through the channels for better coverage. Which they did. If you wanted something sorting, my dad would sort it for you, and maybe he sorted this for us. Bit of a big game down the Bush on Saturday apparently. There was a time about 18 months ago that I was considering giving up LoftforWords and reclaiming the vast amounts of time it eats out of my life for my other favourite pass times – booking train tickets and writing letters of complaint. This stemmed from a match at Cardiff under Jim Magilton and came to a head at Christmas when we were beaten at Ipswich with Paul Hart in charge. You can probably understand, given my passionate hatred for Paul Hart and the demoralising experience of giving up time at Christmas to go and watch his fucking awful team, why the latter may have sparked such a desire in me. But you may recall that the game at Cardiff was actually a victory, with two Jay Simpson goals and a fabulous Martin Rowlands performance guiding us to three points. I have to tell you now that I came home from what should have been a great day thoroughly depressed. It wasn’t long after Stuart had died and I’d been unable to persuade anybody to go to the game with me. I spent three hours there on the train from Sheffield by myself, I sat and watched Liverpool play somebody in the lunchtime match in a pub near the station by myself, and I journeyed the four hours (and two changes) all the way back by myself. And by the time I got home, despite the victory, I was dangerously depressed. Going to QPR has never been about simply rolling up at 3pm and watching those 11 idiots running around and losing to Port Vale. It’s always been about the people - the pre-match, the post match, the train journeys. And on that day there were no people, just me, some nutter travelling across the country by himself to watch a poxy football match. Like no other feeling on earth. That’s football. The reason I’m still here writing all this nonsense that I still can’t really believe anybody would want to read for anything other than work avoidance (forget Northern Rock and greedy bankers, LFW caused this recession) is because QPR brings randomers together and it brought some together for me just in time. Colin, who just so happened to always arrive in the Bush Ranger at the same time as me and Stuart, Tracey who drank in The Brackenbury when we all did and went to Sheffield Uni at the same time as me, Owain who I got from a landlord during a protracted negotiation over a flat I’d signed for and he’d double booked (he agreed to let me have a nicer one at the same rent as long as I took a stranger in as a room mate – and it was him), and Neil who has become a friend mainly through this website. Neil was once a sensible, articulate, intelligent young man who programmed computer games for a living and wrote intelligent things about QPR in his spare time. He is now the person who crashed into his flat after the Watford game and lay on the floor of his living room, shirt round his neck, in a deflated paddling pool we’d saved from the gutter singing QPR songs, very badly. Used to be a quiet pub this… Everybody has these groups of people at QPR. People you only see once a week, and may well not see at all for the next three months. People from all walks of life and careers who come together for the common cause once a week. And Saturday night was for all those people. All those people who have suffered together through the years. Everybody is telling stories this week about parties on the Uxbridge Road, a big night in The British Queen or the White Horse. My favourite is the one about the guy who was walking along South Africa Road after the game and just so happened to be passing at the same time as one of those who’d been in hospitality was rushing off to another function: “here you go mate, enjoy yourself” he said, handing over his pass to the perfect stranger who then got to party with the players. After the match, and the three pitch invasions (two of them stupid), and the presentation, and the lap of honour, and Neil Warnock’s speech in the director’s box which Tracey tried to invade only to end up straddling the wooden side panel of the C-Club and sliding down towards the pitch at a frightening speed before being rescued before she fell to her death we all went out into Shepherds Bush. We headed first towards The Goldhawk but then, with service in there not good at the best of times and tales of a queue out the door being relayed on text, back to The Green Room. Shepherds Bush’s best kept secret no longer. Within an hour of the final whistle the place was jumping - and by 10pm that night it was still jumping. I’ve honestly never seen so many QPR fans so happy. Colin Speller, Managing Director. Even Nick De Marco turned up – a controversial figure in the past at QPR and on LFW, but somebody worthy of praise for his work on our legal case over the past few months whatever you think of him. Only at QPR could such a thing come down to such a case. Thankfully these days QPR can afford good lawyers. QPR, not the only ones punching above their weight. We sang along to the anthems that played on the jukebox, with Daphne Biggs’ favourite Hi Ho Silver Lining booming out on more than one occasion. We laughed at the Blackpool penalty farce on the big screen and sang “we’re all off to Blackpool” more in hope than expectation. We drank, and danced, and had the best night of our lives. It seemed like everybody I’d ever known from Rangers had suddenly gravitated towards my pub for one reason or another. It was everything I dreamed it would be and more. And on Sunday I slept until 1pm. LoftforWords wants to hear your stories from Saturday, and the season as a whole. E-mail memories, short or long, to loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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