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Of all the terrible decisions TF has made giving Ramsey a long term contract takes the biscuit.
Mark my words he'll be fired after 15 games next season. I just hope he's goes in time for someone else to turn it around.
How you can give someone the job when they've got a record as caretaker like that is totally beyond me. People say 'he took over a bad situation' well he succeeded in making it even worse!
The worst bit is we're missing out on great people like Warburton, Clement and McLaren too.
How about we wait and see? If memory serves, the OP thought that Mark Hughes was going to be brilliant. Truth is, none of us know, there are as many arguments for him as there are against.
2
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 11:24 - May 29 with 4925 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 11:00 - May 29 by adhoc_qpr
The fans will have more patience than the board next season I bet...
Ramsey is a simply big risk as Tonto says.
Plenty of positives but also plenty of negatives, we'll see how it works out.
I'd just feel happier if we'd gone through a proper process and interviewed the best applicants, rather than appoint the man who happened to be in place, seemingly under qualified and with a shocking record in charge to date.
Ah, the famous 'interview process' .How many clubs put up a sign which says 'Shhh ,Interviews in progress''. Not many . I'm pretty sure that feelers were put out both by us and prospective managers agents. Thats including the high flyers like Clement ,Tiny Tim and the up and comers like Warburton and Jacket..'Interviews' these days are at best a phone conference or at worst a couple of newspaper headlines.Why should we be so diferent
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 11:24 - May 29 by Pommyhoop
Ah, the famous 'interview process' .How many clubs put up a sign which says 'Shhh ,Interviews in progress''. Not many . I'm pretty sure that feelers were put out both by us and prospective managers agents. Thats including the high flyers like Clement ,Tiny Tim and the up and comers like Warburton and Jacket..'Interviews' these days are at best a phone conference or at worst a couple of newspaper headlines.Why should we be so diferent
Hopefully you're right and they did all that before deciding Ramsey was the best option.
1
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 11:44 - May 29 with 4858 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 09:05 - May 29 by Pommyhoop
Who me ?? Yeah you've got me sussed mate. THE greatest signing we've ever made ! I love him so much that my favourite singer is Josh Groban purely because he reminds me of the little Pirate fella.
No not you! I meant the op...
0
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 14:26 - May 29 with 4669 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 14:02 - May 29 by timcocking
No not you! I meant the op...
OOPs Sorry Tim . If you would've said I was the first fella to say Diakite is the new Vierra you would have been bang on but I was never sure about the Pirate
Something I think we're starting to understand now is Les' actual level of involvement, which is total. DoF's have taken many shapes in football but it seems to me that the whole club is lock stock a Les Ferdinand joint now, he is taking the bull by the horns all by himself and at the moment is accepting no compromise, advice or input from outside. Ramsey got the job quite simply by being the known quantity, the hand of Les on the training pitch, the executor of Les' vision - a genuine head coach role. Clement may be a more impressive coach but Les doesn't know him, or feels the club doesn't have the time or the structure in place to get to know him; Warburton may be the better constructor in a traditional managerial sense but Les is taking on that job himself alone.
Only time will tell whether he's bitten off more than he can chew, but I'm willing to put aside my misgivings about Ramsey's work last season to find out.
4
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 18:04 - May 31 with 4238 views
Just turning the argument away from all the brilliant posts above for a moment, I think we suffer far too much from 'nice guy' syndrome, especially true where managers and chairmen are concerned. Ecclestone left with £35 million. Hughes and Redknapp were purportedly on £3 million (or more) a season. The players are on tens of thousands A WEEK.
Sure, if you meet them for a chat, and they're likeable, maybe even do you a favour, then they're nice guys. You don't have to be abusive or tell lies about them. But their niceness has nothing to do with the Club. The Club is a couple of hundred million in debt because these 'nice guys' deliver NOTHING, yet they are cold and ruthless when it comes to THEIR interests, THEIR terms, THEIR money. THe Club pays them with no guarantee that they will deliver anything worth having.
Try doing that to them. Try asking them to accept the money only when they win, so THEY have to worry where the next points are coming from, and they're arguing among themselves about who's the best manager or coach to have.
They don't mind kidding us along, losing QPR's money, then clearing off, having bled the Club dry, if they get a better offer.
That's okay. The Club gets rid of them one way or the other when it has had enough. It is not a reason to be hostile or vicious, but it is a reason to be REALISTIC. They are not our mates.
Fernandes's chief asset seems to be his smile. How does that work? Does he practise all week smiling so, by Saturday, he can outsmile their 'owner'? Are we actually learning from our mistakes? Usually seems not. We know we got it wrong, and we know getting it wrong is not right, but all we really understand is changing the manager and squad on the basis that the last lot were rubbish, and we just get another lot of rubbish.
One thing that often seems lacking in discussions about the Rs - this one is hard-headed (on both sides, as it should be, no discussion without opposing opinions) - is a sense of reality. And one of the ways this manifests itself is in an apparent wish to know IN ADVANCE what the outcome of a particular judgement will be. Mourinho, with his track record, couldn't know he would succeed at Chelsea. But we feel sure that this or that signing or manager will be better than the present one.
Surely that is a factor which almost more important than anything else. Signing players, appointing managers, or welcoming chairmen, in a way that suggests we KNOW what will happen - and especially that we should get behind them and be positive - misses the point. THEY should get behind the Club and be positive. We're not getting paid to correct what is wrong, THEY are.
So it isn't just hindsight that is alarming - in fact, hindsight is the signpost to good sense. We ONLY know what HAS happened, how well we DID do. Never what will happen. And we've been wrong so many times, we have no real reason to trust our own judgement. We - or more to the point, the people making the decisions - seem to be unable to separate the reality of what they are doing from their own hype, the optimistic gush they feed us. They seem unable to develop a recruitment system which, among other things, is designed JUST TO FIND OUT what works and what doesn't. Without imagining they will know - after getting it wrong so often - what it will take to get it right.
They're just beginners. None of them has the pedigree to tell us we'll be okay, to trust with the Club's future, or to believe in.
How do we bridge the gap between hindsight and foresight. So we know the difference between real class which is proven, and which can reasonably be expected to deliver (allowing that there are no certainties), and the difference between that kind of expectation and one based on the sort of players who are actually available to us in the state the Club is in
When Clubs like Derby and Forest under Clough, and Liverpool and Everton under Paisley and Kendall, played their kind of game, they seemed to me to be OBSESSED with the prospect of failure. They talked about belief and confidence and all that kind of thing, but what they DID - George Graham was another one - was to tackle all the areas where things had a relentless tendency to GO WRONG. So they were defence minded, and almost maniacal about any kind of risk (Clough fining players at half time for passing the ball across the face of their own defence).
At QPR we are masters of things going wrong, we conjure disaster out of almost any situation. But the Board are insouciant, season by season, as if they've got it all sussed, just a little adjustment, a few rousing tweets, and it'll just sort itself out. They seem to have not the slightest idea how DIFFICULT it all is, and how UNLIKELY it is that any Club will really get it right, let alone one with a track record like ours.
Those 70s and 80s Clubs were ready for anything because they FEARED everything, indeed, they knew anything might happen, stars played badly, tactics failed, last season's solution didn't work this year. And their systems embodied that anxiety, trying to minimise risk at all times. Whereas the regime at QPR seems to fear nothing. We kid ourselves our signings are good, we think the Chairman can smile, so that's that problem solved, and if we go on tweeting about keeping the faith (and this from people who are all mercenaries to the only people connected with the Club, the Supporters, who are not) and 'getting behind the lads', it'll all be okay.
We must be able to see how little we know, how little we have learned, and how little effect on the opposition our beliefs about this manager or that squad BEFORE THE EVENT actually have. We have only control over our own signings, ours results suggest our opponents' efforts are far more effective - We don't sign their players, we don't have their managers - but we are narrowly focused on whether we have a team that is better than previous QPR sides. What might work for QPR is far likely to work for our rivals (if only because there are so MANY of them). And it isn't because things just go WRONG easily, they often go right without any apparent justification at all. We're unusually bad, so we're not a good example, but most nondescript sides get strangely good results, excellent ones, or amazing runs (Leicester), and I often feel what THEY can't see is how much of this is uncanny. No-one knows why it happens.
If it isn't luck entirely, so little of it is actually under the team in question's control, that it is luck in everything but name. But there is still that belief that we can know this or that up front, and simply turn our decisions, our ideas, into reality, and the evidence suggests that it DOESN'T work. We have people who make one decision after another, as if a team can decide to be good or successful, just take a vote, just make up your mind, just believe it will happen.
None of it has anything to do with the real world.
Sure, SOME people know, and do it often enough to show they've cracked it. But they are few and far between, the Mourinhos and Fergusons (the Cloughs and Ramseys are long gone, the Premiership has banished that kind of challenge, to date anyway, from the smaller Clubs).
I think we need to get away from the confidence we have before the event. We need to see how wide of the mark most of our calculations and decisions have been. Chairmen come to the Club and start making decisions from the first day. Based on what? They know about as much about football as the corner flags. Football is not business. In football, you know before a ball is kicked that one Club will win, the rest won't. Every newsagents shop can be a success, every Club can't. This is not a basis for spending to succeed. Every Club spends, and every Club is ranked mechanically year in year out from 1-20, even though they're all spending more and more and more. Improvement is not there for the taking. Football has supporters, not customers. Customers use a business because it is better, cheaper or more convenient. QPR is none of them, but we don't all rush off to Stamford Bridge or Brentford or Southampton or Palace, even if we live nearer to those Clubs.
So we have time. The supporters, that is. We're not going anywhere else, because we're not customers, so we don't need all the advertising and PR, we know how good they are from their performances. But they don't see our importance, so they just fob us off with optimism. And in no time, they're out the door, because we're not satisfied.
Perhaps we should be spending more time on what we don't know. What the players can't do. Because that is something we are good at. Not knowing, not getting things right, not doing things we should do. Surely that is where the lessons are to be learned. We can only improve starting from where we are now. Our talent is for screwing things up. If our managers have hardly ever been successful, why will they be successful here? If the only players we can sign are players for whom QPR represents a step up - so they benefit far more from being here than we benefit from having them - why do we expect anything at all from them?
Why not learn from their mistakes?
It is not negative to study our mistakes, and understand why we are so good at making them. But everyone is in too much of a hurry to reassure us. To say 'we've learned'. Words don't tell us that, RESULTS do. We believe in skill, goals, points and success. Results reassure us, performances do. Players who TURN OUT to be good.
It might make us more cold-blooded. More able to see that the virtues we think we have in our better performances aren't significant enough to set much store by. And to ask ourselves where the difference lies between a side that can produce the odd decent performance, and lots of rubbish ones, and sides which have been able to shift the balance the other way. It isn't just QPR. Most of them are mediocre at best. The game is designed that way. That's what makes success in it such an achievement, and makes doing anything at all so bloody difficult. That's the challenge, but we never give the impression we've ever bothered to face up to it.
What we do is just change the manager, change the squad, year in, year out. We still believe, after all these changes which haven't worked, that our judgement is good. At least when it comes to poor players.
We had a decent goalscorer, but finished bottom. Vital to have a good goalscorer, we think. Or maybe not. Not if we finish bottom.
Even if we let the fog of uncertainty just be the fog that it undoubtedly is, surely our own ability to come up with the wrong answer almost every time is a vast statistical mine of useful information of extraordinary importance. Isn't it the calibre and qualities of the losers that makes the winners so effective? Surely it is the successful Club's insight into how rubbish their rivals are that makes them just that little bit better all the time? The fact that QPR and other Clubs will defeat themselves must be useful, just as it was useful to the likes of Clough or Kendall.
We have qualities which are worth understanding, and are there to exploit. Every other Club, even the feeble ones, seems able to exploit ours. Can't WE begin to learn something from the seemingly perpetual failure of the Board, the Bench and the Dressing Room to sort any of it out? They are pointing the way, surely. If the Club can begin to do all the things these people seem to think we SHOULDN'T do, maybe we'll be onto something. At least we might look somewhere else for the answer.
Isn't there a lesson somewhere in all that misconceived insight and misplaced effort? Fernandes' meaningless reassurances, our belief that some of our managers had what it takes, when hardly any of them did. Or why players who might have done a job for us, mysteriously didn't.
Maybe it should be axiomatic to believe they will be bad. To believe they don't care. To believe they are an overpaid, useless waste of space. So we've cleared the decks of all that confusing 'belief' and 'foresight' that tells us 'this might work'. With a clean sheet as far as expectations go, we might be able to see the wood for the trees, much earlier than we do. To see how they - and our opponents - actually perform. Rather than what we - or the Board - want to see.
Clearly we can't create enough chances, our passing is inadequate, our tactics don't work, we can't defend, our appointments are almost invariably failures, our chairmen come and go without ever getting to grips with anything except property deals, share dealings and loans, loans, loans.
I doubt that any of the English game's most celebrated managers were recognised as such before they'd proved themselves. How is anyone to know. They all look different, they all have different styles.
To know they were working on their own shortcomings, trying to understand why we are so bad, and making that the starting point for learning whatever CAN be learned, that would be something, I feel. It would be honest, at any rate. And we could still make the signings and appointments we make.
We'd just be looking at them from the point of view of what is best for the CLUB, and REALISTICALLY. As supporters should do. They're rather too good at persuading us that what is best for THEM amounts to the same thing.
And it doesn't.
1
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 19:57 - May 31 with 4106 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 14:26 - May 29 by Pommyhoop
OOPs Sorry Tim . If you would've said I was the first fella to say Diakite is the new Vierra you would have been bang on but I was never sure about the Pirate
I remember telling fans of other clubs that Diakite was the new Viera. Hey ho
0
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 00:33 - Jun 1 with 3920 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 10:26 - May 29 by Discodroids
thought ramfukker set the limbo bar lower than victoria beckham on the f plan , up to 4.50pm on the final day of the season.
since then, i couldnt have asked for more, other than karl henry being flung out with the detritus.
hes got some way to go before he can convince me he has been cast from enzo bearzots rib , but ill stop calling him ramfukker.
i know hes got soul.
NO MORE RAMFUKKER! Hoorah!
From the book of Matthew Rose Chapter 4 Verse 1-2
"And truly I say unto you that it is easier for a Chels fan to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle or for Disco to admit he was calling it wrong."
'I'm 18 with a bullet.Got my finger on the trigger,I'm gonna pull it.."
Love,Peace and Fook Chelski!
More like 20StoneOfHoop now.
Let's face it I'm not getting any thinner.
Pass the cake and pies please.
2
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 10:39 - Jun 1 with 3770 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 00:33 - Jun 1 by 18StoneOfHoop
NO MORE RAMFUKKER! Hoorah!
From the book of Matthew Rose Chapter 4 Verse 1-2
"And truly I say unto you that it is easier for a Chels fan to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle or for Disco to admit he was calling it wrong."
now now 18 stoner, im happy to admit when i get things wrong, my mrs is awlays telling me im wrong, but im happy with his signings and the carrion he has let go.
but ramsey's record so far is worse than william shattners 'when i was 17'
and if you include the performances at palace, everton, man city and leicester considerably more vomit inducing than even bills efforts in this video.
as for his tramps sartorial elegance he makes shughie mcfee from crossroads seem like simon templar
when i was forty seven , it was a very poor year, it was a very poor year for niko krancjar, who lived up the stair with perfumed hair, that reached to heaven, when i was forty seven..
[Post edited 1 Jun 2015 10:41]
"...The monkey is never dead, Dealer. The monkey never dies. When you kick him off, he just hides in a corner, waiting his turn."
0
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 12:18 - Jun 1 with 3697 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 18:04 - May 31 by Ingham
Just turning the argument away from all the brilliant posts above for a moment, I think we suffer far too much from 'nice guy' syndrome, especially true where managers and chairmen are concerned. Ecclestone left with £35 million. Hughes and Redknapp were purportedly on £3 million (or more) a season. The players are on tens of thousands A WEEK.
Sure, if you meet them for a chat, and they're likeable, maybe even do you a favour, then they're nice guys. You don't have to be abusive or tell lies about them. But their niceness has nothing to do with the Club. The Club is a couple of hundred million in debt because these 'nice guys' deliver NOTHING, yet they are cold and ruthless when it comes to THEIR interests, THEIR terms, THEIR money. THe Club pays them with no guarantee that they will deliver anything worth having.
Try doing that to them. Try asking them to accept the money only when they win, so THEY have to worry where the next points are coming from, and they're arguing among themselves about who's the best manager or coach to have.
They don't mind kidding us along, losing QPR's money, then clearing off, having bled the Club dry, if they get a better offer.
That's okay. The Club gets rid of them one way or the other when it has had enough. It is not a reason to be hostile or vicious, but it is a reason to be REALISTIC. They are not our mates.
Fernandes's chief asset seems to be his smile. How does that work? Does he practise all week smiling so, by Saturday, he can outsmile their 'owner'? Are we actually learning from our mistakes? Usually seems not. We know we got it wrong, and we know getting it wrong is not right, but all we really understand is changing the manager and squad on the basis that the last lot were rubbish, and we just get another lot of rubbish.
One thing that often seems lacking in discussions about the Rs - this one is hard-headed (on both sides, as it should be, no discussion without opposing opinions) - is a sense of reality. And one of the ways this manifests itself is in an apparent wish to know IN ADVANCE what the outcome of a particular judgement will be. Mourinho, with his track record, couldn't know he would succeed at Chelsea. But we feel sure that this or that signing or manager will be better than the present one.
Surely that is a factor which almost more important than anything else. Signing players, appointing managers, or welcoming chairmen, in a way that suggests we KNOW what will happen - and especially that we should get behind them and be positive - misses the point. THEY should get behind the Club and be positive. We're not getting paid to correct what is wrong, THEY are.
So it isn't just hindsight that is alarming - in fact, hindsight is the signpost to good sense. We ONLY know what HAS happened, how well we DID do. Never what will happen. And we've been wrong so many times, we have no real reason to trust our own judgement. We - or more to the point, the people making the decisions - seem to be unable to separate the reality of what they are doing from their own hype, the optimistic gush they feed us. They seem unable to develop a recruitment system which, among other things, is designed JUST TO FIND OUT what works and what doesn't. Without imagining they will know - after getting it wrong so often - what it will take to get it right.
They're just beginners. None of them has the pedigree to tell us we'll be okay, to trust with the Club's future, or to believe in.
How do we bridge the gap between hindsight and foresight. So we know the difference between real class which is proven, and which can reasonably be expected to deliver (allowing that there are no certainties), and the difference between that kind of expectation and one based on the sort of players who are actually available to us in the state the Club is in
When Clubs like Derby and Forest under Clough, and Liverpool and Everton under Paisley and Kendall, played their kind of game, they seemed to me to be OBSESSED with the prospect of failure. They talked about belief and confidence and all that kind of thing, but what they DID - George Graham was another one - was to tackle all the areas where things had a relentless tendency to GO WRONG. So they were defence minded, and almost maniacal about any kind of risk (Clough fining players at half time for passing the ball across the face of their own defence).
At QPR we are masters of things going wrong, we conjure disaster out of almost any situation. But the Board are insouciant, season by season, as if they've got it all sussed, just a little adjustment, a few rousing tweets, and it'll just sort itself out. They seem to have not the slightest idea how DIFFICULT it all is, and how UNLIKELY it is that any Club will really get it right, let alone one with a track record like ours.
Those 70s and 80s Clubs were ready for anything because they FEARED everything, indeed, they knew anything might happen, stars played badly, tactics failed, last season's solution didn't work this year. And their systems embodied that anxiety, trying to minimise risk at all times. Whereas the regime at QPR seems to fear nothing. We kid ourselves our signings are good, we think the Chairman can smile, so that's that problem solved, and if we go on tweeting about keeping the faith (and this from people who are all mercenaries to the only people connected with the Club, the Supporters, who are not) and 'getting behind the lads', it'll all be okay.
We must be able to see how little we know, how little we have learned, and how little effect on the opposition our beliefs about this manager or that squad BEFORE THE EVENT actually have. We have only control over our own signings, ours results suggest our opponents' efforts are far more effective - We don't sign their players, we don't have their managers - but we are narrowly focused on whether we have a team that is better than previous QPR sides. What might work for QPR is far likely to work for our rivals (if only because there are so MANY of them). And it isn't because things just go WRONG easily, they often go right without any apparent justification at all. We're unusually bad, so we're not a good example, but most nondescript sides get strangely good results, excellent ones, or amazing runs (Leicester), and I often feel what THEY can't see is how much of this is uncanny. No-one knows why it happens.
If it isn't luck entirely, so little of it is actually under the team in question's control, that it is luck in everything but name. But there is still that belief that we can know this or that up front, and simply turn our decisions, our ideas, into reality, and the evidence suggests that it DOESN'T work. We have people who make one decision after another, as if a team can decide to be good or successful, just take a vote, just make up your mind, just believe it will happen.
None of it has anything to do with the real world.
Sure, SOME people know, and do it often enough to show they've cracked it. But they are few and far between, the Mourinhos and Fergusons (the Cloughs and Ramseys are long gone, the Premiership has banished that kind of challenge, to date anyway, from the smaller Clubs).
I think we need to get away from the confidence we have before the event. We need to see how wide of the mark most of our calculations and decisions have been. Chairmen come to the Club and start making decisions from the first day. Based on what? They know about as much about football as the corner flags. Football is not business. In football, you know before a ball is kicked that one Club will win, the rest won't. Every newsagents shop can be a success, every Club can't. This is not a basis for spending to succeed. Every Club spends, and every Club is ranked mechanically year in year out from 1-20, even though they're all spending more and more and more. Improvement is not there for the taking. Football has supporters, not customers. Customers use a business because it is better, cheaper or more convenient. QPR is none of them, but we don't all rush off to Stamford Bridge or Brentford or Southampton or Palace, even if we live nearer to those Clubs.
So we have time. The supporters, that is. We're not going anywhere else, because we're not customers, so we don't need all the advertising and PR, we know how good they are from their performances. But they don't see our importance, so they just fob us off with optimism. And in no time, they're out the door, because we're not satisfied.
Perhaps we should be spending more time on what we don't know. What the players can't do. Because that is something we are good at. Not knowing, not getting things right, not doing things we should do. Surely that is where the lessons are to be learned. We can only improve starting from where we are now. Our talent is for screwing things up. If our managers have hardly ever been successful, why will they be successful here? If the only players we can sign are players for whom QPR represents a step up - so they benefit far more from being here than we benefit from having them - why do we expect anything at all from them?
Why not learn from their mistakes?
It is not negative to study our mistakes, and understand why we are so good at making them. But everyone is in too much of a hurry to reassure us. To say 'we've learned'. Words don't tell us that, RESULTS do. We believe in skill, goals, points and success. Results reassure us, performances do. Players who TURN OUT to be good.
It might make us more cold-blooded. More able to see that the virtues we think we have in our better performances aren't significant enough to set much store by. And to ask ourselves where the difference lies between a side that can produce the odd decent performance, and lots of rubbish ones, and sides which have been able to shift the balance the other way. It isn't just QPR. Most of them are mediocre at best. The game is designed that way. That's what makes success in it such an achievement, and makes doing anything at all so bloody difficult. That's the challenge, but we never give the impression we've ever bothered to face up to it.
What we do is just change the manager, change the squad, year in, year out. We still believe, after all these changes which haven't worked, that our judgement is good. At least when it comes to poor players.
We had a decent goalscorer, but finished bottom. Vital to have a good goalscorer, we think. Or maybe not. Not if we finish bottom.
Even if we let the fog of uncertainty just be the fog that it undoubtedly is, surely our own ability to come up with the wrong answer almost every time is a vast statistical mine of useful information of extraordinary importance. Isn't it the calibre and qualities of the losers that makes the winners so effective? Surely it is the successful Club's insight into how rubbish their rivals are that makes them just that little bit better all the time? The fact that QPR and other Clubs will defeat themselves must be useful, just as it was useful to the likes of Clough or Kendall.
We have qualities which are worth understanding, and are there to exploit. Every other Club, even the feeble ones, seems able to exploit ours. Can't WE begin to learn something from the seemingly perpetual failure of the Board, the Bench and the Dressing Room to sort any of it out? They are pointing the way, surely. If the Club can begin to do all the things these people seem to think we SHOULDN'T do, maybe we'll be onto something. At least we might look somewhere else for the answer.
Isn't there a lesson somewhere in all that misconceived insight and misplaced effort? Fernandes' meaningless reassurances, our belief that some of our managers had what it takes, when hardly any of them did. Or why players who might have done a job for us, mysteriously didn't.
Maybe it should be axiomatic to believe they will be bad. To believe they don't care. To believe they are an overpaid, useless waste of space. So we've cleared the decks of all that confusing 'belief' and 'foresight' that tells us 'this might work'. With a clean sheet as far as expectations go, we might be able to see the wood for the trees, much earlier than we do. To see how they - and our opponents - actually perform. Rather than what we - or the Board - want to see.
Clearly we can't create enough chances, our passing is inadequate, our tactics don't work, we can't defend, our appointments are almost invariably failures, our chairmen come and go without ever getting to grips with anything except property deals, share dealings and loans, loans, loans.
I doubt that any of the English game's most celebrated managers were recognised as such before they'd proved themselves. How is anyone to know. They all look different, they all have different styles.
To know they were working on their own shortcomings, trying to understand why we are so bad, and making that the starting point for learning whatever CAN be learned, that would be something, I feel. It would be honest, at any rate. And we could still make the signings and appointments we make.
We'd just be looking at them from the point of view of what is best for the CLUB, and REALISTICALLY. As supporters should do. They're rather too good at persuading us that what is best for THEM amounts to the same thing.
And it doesn't.
Crikey, is this a record for the longest post ever?
0
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 15:55 - Jun 1 with 3608 views
@Ingham 'At QPR we are masters of things going wrong, we conjure disaster out of almost any situation. But the Board are insouciant, season by season, as if they've got it all sussed, just a little adjustment, a few rousing tweets, and it'll just sort itself out. They seem to have not the slightest idea how DIFFICULT it all is, and how UNLIKELY it is that any Club will really get it right, let alone one with a track record like ours.'
I agree that this a huge problem - the board didn't have the slightest inkling of the difficulty of the task they were facing. This led our very own King Canute Phil Beard to announce that relegation was impossible. There are a lot of these types who have gotten into football: Venky's, Shahid Khan, others too numerous to mention.
@Ingham 'I think we need to get away from the confidence we have before the event.'
@Ingham 'Perhaps we should be spending more time on what we don't know.'
'As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.' United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
Air hostess clique
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Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 18:10 - Jun 1 with 3540 views
Like the Rumsfeld quote mate! Anywhere else, it would come across as a bit tortuous (I realise that is why it circulates). Unless, of course, the reader is one of us, and has spent years trying to work out what QPR are at. In that case, Rumsfeld is crystal clarity itself by comparison.
I do wonder whether the winners are the ones who don't know it all in advance, and are, in fact, the guys who have no idea what is going to happen next, good or bad, and are, in consequence, Clubs in a constant state of emergency (not necessarily panic, of course) simply because anything MIGHT happen. That their mantra is not 'we are confident' but 'things go wrong'. With the corollary that one should always be asking oneself ("one?") what ALL the options are, not just the hoped-for ones.
Thought of that when I saw a few minutes of Arsenal v Chelsea (or vice versa), and was as impressed by that other shower's defending as I was by Arsenal's sublime passing. The gooners strike me as a team that knows what they are doing, and it limits them. Still a very, very good side, but not quite there yet. Mourinho's team struck me as a side which had no idea from moment to moment what the opposition was going to do, no expectations at all, one might say - so they were ready for anything, as their 'emergency' style of defending suggested.
We never seem to be ready for anything. Except that everything will go well. Once the season is underway - things might change now, but we've been saying that for decades - we modify that expectation to going pretty well, quite well, not too bad, not too awful, not actually disastrous, not totally catastrophic, and then with any luck, the rather forlorn hope that we might escape by a miracle.
Why are our expectations so far removed from reality?
Doesn't follow that we won't do well for years from now on, of course it doesn't. But I doubt that we WILL do well if we aren't more cold-blooded about just HOW good not only our signings but those of our opponents are. Optimism is no use for realistic evaluations of our potential if we can't be honest.
And that means recognising how many and diverse are the ways that things can go wrong. Much of it mysterious. Sudden bad runs, sudden unexplained good runs.
Even before we've signed players, we seem to have a clear idea how good they'll be. We don't start from a position, whoever is coming to the Club, that they have a lot to learn. And as a result, our opponents discover it, and exploit it mercilessly because we can't face up to reality ourselves. To an extent, it is an over-eagerness to be loyal. But our own confidence is, inevitably, mirrored in a belief that is its counterpart - that the opposition's signings WON'T work as well as they hope. Won't overperform. And won't cope well with our new 'stars'.
We've had four managers in the Premiership, and their regimes all fell apart. Each one was different in background, style, and experience, but the outcome was uncannily similar.
Personally, I don't like all the blame resting on the manager, it should be on the players entirely. ANd that should certainly be the case as long as they get paid when they don't win.
Because that's another thing. Why kid ourselves that the player's job is to get GOOD results, when we pay them just the same for bad performances week in and week out? If we're paying them when they perform badly in their job, how can we kid ourselves we're paying for quality? Any more than any other business that paid out enormous sums for sub-standard performances could pretend that excellence was what they were buying.
I bet the players don't represent themselves as crap when they negotiate those contracts. That's the Club's job. Either to drive wages down to the level the players perform at, or drive performances up to the level the players earn at.
But there is little or no indication that there is any mechanism for doing so.
And the incentive for the owners to do it - that they're losing tens of hundreds of millions of their own money - doesn't exist, because it isn't their money. They all seem to be more than happy to go on siphoning it out of the Club, with their own position protected by airtight contracts, while the benefits the Club accrues from their services aren't enforceable in any way at all.
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Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 00:00 - Jun 2 with 3433 views
Will be very interesting indeed to see what Ramsey ends up doing with Luongo and Gladwin - could well make or break his time in charge in fact. The more I read about them the more they seem like talented but unpolished and undisciplined creative players that will require careful thought about how to get the best out of them (Gladwin in particular sounds like a cross between Leroy Fer and Lee Cook!). They have shone for a Swindon side designed to play 3 at the back all season - specialist wing backs, sitting creator in Kasim - which has given them the freedom to go forward without the burden of the defensive work neither seem much into. In English football parlance that leads to a lot of vague talk about versatility and #10s but I think we as a fanbase know better than most how that usually goes... Ramsey will have to be a damn sight more tactically flexible that he's shown so far basically because I don't know if these lads are going to just slot into a 4-4-2 so easily.
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Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 00:39 - Jun 2 with 3408 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 00:00 - Jun 2 by rsonist
Will be very interesting indeed to see what Ramsey ends up doing with Luongo and Gladwin - could well make or break his time in charge in fact. The more I read about them the more they seem like talented but unpolished and undisciplined creative players that will require careful thought about how to get the best out of them (Gladwin in particular sounds like a cross between Leroy Fer and Lee Cook!). They have shone for a Swindon side designed to play 3 at the back all season - specialist wing backs, sitting creator in Kasim - which has given them the freedom to go forward without the burden of the defensive work neither seem much into. In English football parlance that leads to a lot of vague talk about versatility and #10s but I think we as a fanbase know better than most how that usually goes... Ramsey will have to be a damn sight more tactically flexible that he's shown so far basically because I don't know if these lads are going to just slot into a 4-4-2 so easily.
Will be interesting to see if Ramsey actually sticks with 442 if he has the summer to go shopping...
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Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 05:05 - Jun 2 with 3352 views
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 23:24 - Nov 4 by CamberleyR
Spookily accurate prediction Westbourne!
Agreed, he even called the number of games.
It does all look so predictable now though. Of everything surrounding the decision to give Ramsey the job then the most unfathomable was the length of contract. He'll be ok though and will no doubt be back coaching very soon.
Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 23:30 - Nov 4 by FredManRave
Agreed, he even called the number of games.
It does all look so predictable now though. Of everything surrounding the decision to give Ramsey the job then the most unfathomable was the length of contract. He'll be ok though and will no doubt be back coaching very soon.
[Post edited 4 Nov 2015 23:32]
Yes he will - our yoof from the way I read the statement!!
I kind of agree with that but it's a bit weird Saves Bungle paying up contract but he could go for contrived dismissal??
Cherish and enjoy life.... this ain't no dress rehearsal
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Ramsey is and will be a disaster on 23:39 - Nov 4 with 2618 views
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