Back down to earth with a bump with a big defeat at Cardiff - we've surely killed off the last of the outlandish play off hopes now?

You cannot tell what the hell is going on from QPR World commentary
I’m often perplexed to arrive home from matches to find so many people already on the message board giving forth with opinions on tactics and formations and players and managers. Somebody even beat me to the punch after the Sheff Utd game and I was indoors at ten past five because I can see Bramall Lane from my front lawn. More often than not these people have only ever listened to the game on the radio courtesy of BBC London and while it’s not impossible that they could glean such precise technical information on which to base their criticism from the commentators I always had my doubts.

Radio commentating is a fine art. There can be few pleasures in football to match listening to Mike Ingham and Jimmy Armfield on Five Live commentating on a football match. The language is so precise, varied and unrelenting that you almost feel like you’re at the match. I may be rattling round on the Sheffield inner ring road but I can see the grass at Highbury and I can tell where the ball is, and who’s got it, and who’s closing him down and who he’s passed to now and how they’ve controlled it and turned and how they’re accelerating away down the line. I can tell you that Arsenal set up in a conventional 4-4-2 but later dropped one man deep and pushed one man forward from the midfield to form a diamond and how Newcastle have changed their system to match up with that.

I can tell you all that because Ingham and Armfield are at the top of their profession. You don’t notice how good they are until Ingham hands the mic over to Alan Green for whom the goals, corners and free kicks are worthy of only a brief mention in between the rants about the referee and how awful the game is and how terrible Newcastle are and how he wishes he was somewhere else (piss off then Alan, I’ll pay for your cab).

This week, for the first time in a number of years I was unable to get to a QPR league match or watch it on the television so I had a chance to have a taste of Rangers via radio. This gave me an opportunity to see just how much you can glean from the BBC Radio London boys and whether I could form an opinion on the game at the end of it.

My evening started at half seven. I arrived back at LFW Towers from work, booted up the lap top, packed Dean Sturridge off to the hamster wheel to provide power and then with chilli on the hob ready for half time and a bottle of the Grolsch brewery’s finest work in my hand I clicked onto QPR World audio commentary and settled down into my chair in the front room.

I was a little early in fairness, by five or six minutes, so all I got was white noise to start with. I remember from my days with QPR World in the dim and distant past that this is pretty normal and the commentary tends to kick in as the teams come out. So I wasn’t unduly worried at this stage, or when the commentator came on briefly to announce the teams from the Bolton and Fulham match, I just presumed that once our boys emerged at Ninian Park the switch would be flicked.

As the clock ticked past 7.45 I started to get worried, and even checked to make sure I had the kick off time right. Once I’d ascertained that I did I decided, just as an experiment, to click on the Cardiff City commentary link and within seconds the speakers burst into life bringing Welsh accents and live football into my living room. The game had started some five minutes prior to me switching over, QPR World however was still wired up to the Reebok Stadium, and it remained so for the next half an hour bringing us another 15 minutes of white noise and then the first quarter of an hour of the latest date on Fulham’s Premiership farewell tour.

Not bad for £36 subscription a year. Shame I’m a QPR fan.

So I endured the opening half hour of our match, and the opening goal, at the hands of the Cardiff City commentators who only knew the name of one QPR player, and couldn’t really pronounce that correctly. “Leeesurewood” they kept slurring, hopefully Leigertwood will be back for Bristol City because his similarly named stand in sounded crap.

When I eventually got onto some ‘home’ commentary I found it being provided by Phil Parry (who does sound a lot like Alan partridge at times) and Clive Walker, the latter offering one or two interesting bits on just how badly we were playing, the former screaming “that was easy peasy lemon squeesy” when Cardiff made it two nil. I did resist the urge to put my boot through the screen, but only just.

They often failed to mention during open play where exactly we were on the field, and regularly neglected to tell us who had the ball at any given moment. Not only that but we were treated to regular 30 second bursts of silence while everybody else got an update from Deano Standing at Cheltenham v Millwall, or Charlton v Stoke, or the bloody Fulham game which they’d covered part of anyway.

The QPR performance coupled with the coverage made it like Chinese water torture for the listener. The fact that my increasingly knackered wireless router decided to shut down completely for 15 minutes during the second half hardly added to the experience.

To cap it all I only knew we’d scored when it flashed up on the Sky Sports ticker in front of me. It was fully two minutes before either commentator realised there’d been a goal.

I stepped away at full time knowing that QPR had played very poorly, that Cardiff had played very well, that Cardiff had scored three goals and QPR might have got one but nobody was very sure. That was it. I couldn’t tell you who played well or badly, or who played where on the pitch, or how we changed the system or anything. I’d basically taken as much information from the commentary as was available on ceefax.

And yet within minutes of the final whistle again threads appeared on the message board asking why so and so had been played out of position, or whether De Canio’s tactics were wrong. Looking around other message boards ours was quite philosophical in comparison, there was a baying for blood in other corners of the QPR online world and all of the posters seemed to be basing it on was the same piece of commentary I’d heard. It wasn’t until the hardy few started to arrive home that we got some flesh to put on the bones.

Unless there is some secret radio or television station that nobody has told me about where I can hear or see the whole of the QPR match, not broken up by updates from Millwall or commentary from Fulham or wireless router problems, then I’d love to know but if not then this week confirmed the two things I already knew. There’s no substitute for being there even when you get beaten, and you can’t tell a damn thing from the QPR World commentary.

We’re still in a relegation battle
Northern the Elder often discourages the younger members of our travelling party from settling down with one girl too soon by asking: “Why buy a book when there’s a lending library?”

The Elder is full of wise words. He’s seen enough football in his time to see off just about everybody at Loftus Road on a Saturday and although he can no longer remember much of it he still knows what he’s talking about. Another of his wise pieces of advice relates to how teams start the season. He reckons once you’re up there, or down there, after 10 or 15 games you’ll pretty much remain there for the rest of the season except for the one team that always crashes through the league (Barnsley) and the one that strings it all together and goes the other way (Palace).

The famous example of Millwall topping the table in autumn only to end up relegated come May is often trotted out but basically a season is set by those first three months of football and it’s very hard to get away from whatever you started once the momentum is with/against you. Look at Watford for example. Just one win from their last six league matches and without a league win at home in seven attempts. That’s relegation form going back nearly three months, and yet they’ve still only dropped two places to third. That’s because they won ten of their first 13 league matches and drew another two of those. They started the season with 32 points from 39 matches.

The Hornets have only moved that total up to 49 points in the following 16 matches but they’re still only two points from the summit and only need another 36 points from the remainder of the campaign to achieve the total the automatically promoted sides got last year. They’ve been falling apart for three months and yet they’re still there or there abouts – it’s all about the start you make. Once you’ve started well or badly, it’s very hard to turn that around on the league table.

QPR of course started without a win at all in their first ten matches. By the time they did secure a maximum points haul for the first time, against Norwich at Loftus Road, they were very much bottom of the table and facing a long haul to safety. Since then QPR have lost just eight of 22 matches played, picking up 30 points in the process. That’s upper mid-table form, possibly pushing for the play offs, if it can be produced over a full campaign and yet here we are 19th in the league and three points outside the relegation zone.

We are of course now boasting an entirely new team from the one that started the season and with quality players like Rowan Vine, Akos Buzsaky and Fitz Hall joining the ranks some have even spoken of play offs this season. But with every defeat, I’m drawn back to Northern the Elder. Our dire first three months are going to cost us anything better than lower midtable this season, and could yet relegate us. This week, after wins for Norwich, Leicester and Preston on Tuesday, we find ourselves staring back into the abyss. I’d fancy Colchester and Scunthorpe to die quietly to be honest but I can’t see Coventry and Sheff Wed sticking around down there much longer and Preston are suddenly showing signs of improvement.

I personally don’t think we will go down, we’ve got too much quality for it in my opinion – hopefully not famous last words. However we’ll be knocking around the bottom of the league pretty much for the rest of the season now. “What about Palace” the optimists cry – but Palace have climbed to their present position with a run of 15 matches unbeaten, we only have 17 matches left this season and I can’t see us only losing two of them. They also set off on their run while the league was still settling down and was very tight, it’s really starting to spread out now. We were eight points off the play offs at half time in the Sheff United game and now we’re 11.

This week’s mauling at Cardiff has shown us how fragile our position is because of the lousy start we made. If I’m right and we do knock around the bottom of the table for the rest of the campaign then it only needs results to go as they have done this week in the final week, when we finish with West Brom at home (gulp), and we could be requiring a new pair of trousers. Two injuries to new signings in our defence on Tuesday only adds to the perspiration levels.

As I say, I still think we’ll be finishing somewhere between 12th and 15th, but this week has shown once again that all talk of anything more than that is fantasy and folly at this time.

A new phrase has been coined
If I’d said to you a few months ago what does “doing a QPR” mean, what would you have said? Losing in the first round of the cup to a team of car mechanics? Having an international footballer on trial for a fortnight during which time he scores seven goals in two reserve games but then buying Mike Sheron instead while the foreign lad tears the Premier League apart? Changing the away kit every season only to come back to the red and black hoops you should have kept in the first place only to then change it again after one season? Winning 4-1 at Man Utd only to lose to Southampton with barely a whimper two days later? Spending £1.2m on a centre half only to see him pick up a career ending injury within ten minutes of his first pre-season friendly? Losing a midweek game at home?

It could in truth have been any of these things, but now apparently ‘doing a QPR’ is a term associated with success. A poor team at the bottom of the table that suddenly comes into money, buys nine new players and climbs up the league with a run of impressive results can now, apparently, be said to be ‘doing a QPR’. Got a nice ring to it actually after years of being a laughing stock.

The first example of the term in everyday use comes courtesy of Burnley’s Operational Director Brendan Flood who has moved to reassure the Turf Moor faithful that any further progress for Burnley will be slow and steady rather than the quick fix solution QPR have gone for. Of course Burnley under Owen Coyle are starting from a position of relative financial security with a competent Championship side while Briatore and Ecclestone arrived at QPR as we were on the brink of administration with the worst team in the league by some distance.

Flood said: "The key thing to remember is the transfer window involves a desire to forget everything that's been done over the past 12 months and focus on an amount of money that gets spent in this month. Barry and I are committed guys and we're continuing to make further commitments to the club, and I think everyone can see that we are getting a better squad and we're not going to do a QPR.”

So there you go, our name in lights in Burnley at least. This column will keep a close eye out for any further use of this new term in the coming weeks. We must hope that the definition isn’t altered slightly come May to “spending a lot of money in January and going down anyway.”

Photo: Action Images

Queens Park Rangers Polls