Another glorious days in the sunshine on the south coast and QPR are still unbeaten at Southampton's new stadium but this was a day to forget on the pitch. Good fun off it though...

1 – The Match

Jesus, absolutely terrible. With the wide, pristine playing surface stretching before us, the sun beaming down and the grass nicely moistened before kick off conditions looked to be perfect for a superb match between two teams often referred to as the Championship’s ‘footballing sides’. How wrong could we have been? In the end the glorious weather (is it always gorgeous when we play here?) was the only positive of a thoroughly dire 90 minutes of football in which neither keeper had a serious save to make. Only when Adel Taarabt came on for his debut in the final ten minutes did QPR look anything like while Gorkss and Stewart were able to keep the Southampton strike force under wraps with something to spare. Sleep inducing.

3/10



2 – QPR Performance

Like so many home and away showings from the R’s this season – solid but toothless. All the positives came in defence where Peter Ramage followed up his excellent return to the first team at Doncaster with another solid showing and Kaspars Gorkss was his usual impressive self albeit in the face of limited opposition from Saganowski and Euell who were both pretty rank. Further forward there was almost nothing to enthuse about. Wayne Routledge continued his poor run of form with a bad performance and Liam Miller was a complete waste of time before being replaced by youth teamer Antonio German in the second half – he understandably looked keen but nervous. Dexter Blackstock offered absolutely nothing to the team in attack and spent the whole afternoon falling on his arse. I’m not sure we would have scored yet if we were still playing now. Half the team was very good, the other half was absolutely terrible and that has been the case far too often this season.

5/10



3 – QPR Support

Rangers always travel in good numbers to this part of the world and did so again here – more than two and a half thousand crammed in behind the goal. The nice weather we always seem to get down here means many are in colours as well so I always think it looks like one our most impressive followings away from home in any season. Despite the lacklustre performance and poor recent form there wasn’t the moaning, groaning and abusing of our own players that has become the norm at many matches this season – well, there wasn’t around me anyway. There was good noise throughout coming from the back of the stand, never more so than when Southampton substitute Bradley Wright Phillips was warming up. Ian Wright’s son you may or may not know was charged first with theft from a bar maid’s hand bag in a nightclub changing room and then with the assault of a Southampton fan on a night out. He was found guilty of neither and that seems good enough for the Southampton fans who started proceedings with a rousing chorus of “Bradley Wright Phillips, he hates QPR” which in turn sparked various versions from the away end including “he steals women’s clothes” “he nicked my mum’s purse” “you should be in jail” and “you should be ashamed” to name only the cleaner ones. Wright Phillips laughed, grinned and danced his way through all of them which seemed a strange reaction and not one Southampton should be encouraging really. When he came on in the second half he was absolute crap, just for a change, which only made the abuse worse. All in all it made a change this season to hear the QPR fans in full voice and good humour.

8/10



4 – Atmosphere

When clubs move to new stadiums attendances often shoot up dramatically for no reason other than the new surroundings. You only have to look at the pre-KC Stadium attendances of Hull City and Hull FC compared to the crowds they got almost as soon as they moved as the best example. I often wonder though just who these thousands of new people are and just how long they would stick around if the going ever got tough. Sunderland are a prime example of a club that suffers a 20,000 people swing in attendances whenever they drop down a division. You’ve got to wonder just where on earth 20,000 people go in Sunderland on a Saturday afternoon other than the football. QPR fans speak from a position of strength here because for some strange reason, possibly us all being sadists, we got twice as many fans in League One as they used to pull in for the lesser Premiership matches at Loftus Road. Southampton it seems suffer from the Sunderland syndrome – when their club needs the support and ticket money of its fans the most, thousands of them have disappeared. All four corners of the ground were completely empty and the stand at the opposite end to us was less than half full. Consequently the atmosphere was restricted to either side of the away end and even that was less vociferous than normal because the tiny crowds have enabled Southampton to widen the gaps between the two sets of fans. Some decent banter but not even close to previous seasons when the missing thousands of hangers on were still in attendance. Sadly the mouthy blond mother and daughter team so entertaining (because they gave it the big ‘un and then looked stupid when we won) in previous years were conspicuous by their absence in the main stand.

5/10



5 – The Ground

Broken record alert. A new ground, with no parking, in the middle of a gas works. A ground with four stands all the same level, all one tier, all the same colour. Thousands of empty seats, poor atmosphere, no character, no history. I really hate these identikit stadiums and wish clubs would think two or three times before moving into them. Design something different for God’s sake, they’re so boring. St Mary’s also suffers from the same problem as The Ricoh Arena in that the budget for the ground clearly did not stretch to the concourse area which is a horrible dark breeze blocked hell for supporters. Would some lights and a lick of paint really have broken the bank?

5/10



6 – The Journey

Southampton, along with Plymouth, is the longest trip the Northern R’s face this season and consequently the most expensive. Because of that we were checking train websites months in advance waiting for cheap tickets to become available. There is a direct train from Sheffield to Southampton Central but whenever I looked for the day of this game it was advising changes in Birmingham and Reading and advertising the cheapest fair as £92 return. Each. With railcards. I left it for a while until, six weeks before the match, the websites suddenly started recommending that we go to London and then out again for £40 return. That seemed reasonable enough so I booked it. It was only when the tickets arrived that I realised they said Southampton Airport rather than Southampton Central on them and the full horror became apparent. That’s right, we’d been duped into a rail replacement bus service. We left Sheffield at half six to arrive in London at half eight, I used Fighting Talk podcasts to pass the time, Young North slept straight through.



A quick and as usual excellent breakfast at Scott’s in Covent Garden split the journey to Waterloo in half and also gave us the chance to walk the last bit over the river next to the railway line out of Charing Cross. It’s a terrific walk on a nice day that, a view that reminds you that we do still just about have a city to be proud of. We met Tracy at Waterloo and jumped on the ten past ten down to the south coast. The train down to Southampton was nowhere near as nice as the one we’d been on out of here two seasons ago and looked like one of the dodgy commuter units they run on the bloody Ninky Nonk line to Hampton Wick in truth. The train was delayed for twenty minutes at Eastleigh which, it turns out, is about 300 feet away from the airport station. Had we known that we’d have saved ourselves some time and got off there. Anyway twenty minutes late we arrived at the airport and as we had now met up with Alb and his mates we attempted to nab the only seven seater cab in the car park – despite there being approximately thirty eight thousand saloon four seaters a very considerate and clearly bloody stupid couple jumped in the eight seater ahead of us and then stared blankly and drove away as we tried to get them to open the window so we could perhaps do a swap. That mean another twenty five minutes on the bus into town which went at a snail’s pace and then did the transport version of Todd Carty on ice in the car park at Southampton station.



As I said earlier when booking to ‘Southampton’ I wasn’t aware that I was actually being sold ‘Southampton Airport’ and so from thinking we were booked on the 1733 service from the middle of town some ten minutes walk from the ground we were actually faced with the almost impossible task of getting out to the airport inside half an hour after the match. QPR did their bit by boring us to tears and enabling an exit as the stoppage time board went up safe in the knowledge that we would no more miss a goal than fly to the moon. We then had to dance through the traffic in the middle of the Southampton inner ring road trying to hail one disinterested cab after another. By the time we got one, right in the city centre, it was quarter past five and our chances of making the train were slim to none. We explained the situation to the driver who, once he’d ascertained that we had the necessary twelve pounds, produced seven minutes of driving the likes of which the world has not seen since Evil Knievel was alive. What I’d assumed was a coffee stain on my seat when I got in I quickly surmised was either blood or the terrified living shit escaping from a previous prisoner in the cab of death. We arrived at the airport at just after twenty past five, and that actually gave us time to soak up some more sun on the platform and swig some nerve calming hard liquor. We all said a short prayer of thanks that we’d escaped with our lives.



After that the rest of the journey back was blissfully uneventful. I busied myself with podcasts and the like again, Young North fell asleep with a can of Carling in his hand, and only he glorious walk back across the bridge in London, even more stunning in darkness, broke up the long and monotonous trip home. Long, expensive, tiring - but great fun at times too.

7/10



7 – Pre Match

Southampton is always a great trip but one thing that remains a constant thorn in our side is the lack of pubs in the city centre with Sky Sports. I’ve never known a place so big, and with a university, have so few bars showing live football. Last season we ended up in Squares which was a horrible place really but had plenty of screens. We had planned to go there again but found it closed up and apparently turned exclusively into a night club now. Pity the poor people who think it’s a decent night out in there unless it has undergone a makeover even Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen might think extreme. That sent us on the worst pub crawl of all time, heading away from the ground and the city centre into one pub after another asking if they would be showing Man Utd v Liverpool. A couple looked promising – nice old style, clean pubs with plenty of food and beer on offer and Sky Sports News on plasma screens but both had sadly cancelled their live subscriptions. The second, The Red Lion, was bizarrely still advertising live football on a sticker on the door and we had an order in before they broke the news to us. Very disappointing.

That left us in The Bedford which seemed to be operating a home fans only policy but we walked straight in - the advantage of not travelling in colours shines through again. Once inside seating was very hard to find but we got lucky when a group of students wondering what all the fuss was about left after their lunch. We watched the Man Utd game on the smallest television ever made mounted precariously among the rafters of a conservatory extension built, it seemed, to house pool tables.

Young North and Tracy had some ghastly looking roast beef wrapped in a Yorkshire pudding and microwaved until soggy and flavourless which they seemed to enjoy very much an then the glorious ninety minutes of entertainment at Old Trafford began. I can honestly say I’ve had sex worse than that match. Maybe I’m not doing it right, but that was a wonderful game. The only drawback was the late fourth goal, scored after we’d left for the ground, equalled our proudly held Old Trafford scoring record. We spent the second half with a strange Scouse couple on a wedding anniversary – strange, but not so strange that we didn’t hug as the Liverpool goals went in. God I love it when Man Utd get beaten.

8/10



8 – Police

We expected a large presence after trouble at a previous fixture with Cardiff and the incident where drugs were seized from a supporter at the train station in a previous meeting but as the replacement bus services spread all the QPR fans out in both time and geography there didn’t see the need and I can’t actually remember seeing many police officers around town. In the ground the stewards were as relaxed and out of the way as I’ve ever known at this ground. Normally they are a real pain at St Mary’s but not this time.

7/10

Total – 48/80

Photo: Action Images

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