Reflecting on the appointment of a goalkeeping coach, the lacklustre performances of Buzsaky on the wing and the torture inflicted on the fans at Oakwell

We finally have a goalkeeping coach!
Well I’ve moaned about it for long enough in this column and on the message board so we’d better have a look at our new keeper coach now we finally have one. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to David Rouse, my God I’m pleased to see you.

Rouse has a career path so far that’s a spin doctor’s dream. You can make him look like a man on top of his profession or a quick and cheap fix to paper over some cracks. It is my understanding that he was recommended to the club Sir Alex Ferguson after eight years working in the Man Utd academy and I can’t imagine him suffering, or recommending, fools gladly. With Arsene Wenger spotted in the Renault F1 garages shortly before the appointment of Luigi De Canio and Kieran Lee joining us on loan from Old Trafford it’s encouraging to see us going to the very best for advice on key appointments and signings.

If you’re a glass half full kind of person then Rouse is a former Man Utd academy coach with the best manager in the country’s personal recommendation to his credit. If you’re a miserable old git then he’s the man responsible for Macclesfield’s keepers this year (played 34 conceded 56). Either way I believe he’s on a month to month deal through to the end of the season to see how he does. I’d have a little bet that the name of Jim Hollman, Lee Camp’s former coach at Norwich City, may crop up at QPR somewhere along the line. Time will tell.

At the end of the day somebody is better than nobody, you don’t coach at Man Utd for eight years if you’re an idiot, and it was good to see him working the keepers hard before the Barnsley game on Tuesday. Rangers have ridiculously been without a permanent keeper coach since Tony Roberts left his post last summer. Roberts may have been a bit of a liability between the sticks in his playing days but was clearly a top coach, rated by everybody that worked with him and snapped up by Arsenal following his release from QPR that had far more to do with off field issues and politics than any on the pitch problems.

The work of a goalkeeper coach goes largely unseen and almost completely unheralded but he is vitally important. Not only is he working with the keepers in training during the week, but he’s warming them up before the game as well which is an area that QPR have been embarrassingly lacking in this season.

A coach also provides a shoulder to cry on, somebody to talk to and somebody to administer a kick up the arse when necessary. Goalkeeper is a lonely position, especially if the team is losing or you’re playing badly, that Lee Camp had to go through that disastrous start to the season with only Jake Cole and Mark Bosnich for company is to our club’s discredit.

It is my understanding that Big Bos’ bizarre time at QPR is now coming to an end and he may already have left. Bosnich initially arrived to try and regain fitness and while he clearly lost a substantial amount of weight at Rangers it was clear he was never going to get back to a fighting weight capable of sustaining a career in the Championship at his age. It was disconcerting to see him playing for the reserves in their behind closed doors fixtures ahead of people like Jake Cole, and it was even more concerning to see him return to the club this season after the summer break and remain after the change of manager.

It seems that after the departure of Tony Roberts it was Bosnich who did some work with the keepers, although he didn’t travel to away games and never warmed the keepers up on a match day. A massive, massive part of a keeper coach’s job is the pre-match warm up. The pre-match routine for our keepers this season has been nothing short of a disgrace. The club don’t view Jake Cole as being good enough to even sit on the bench as Lee Camp’s understudy and yet they didn’t mind him effectively coaching Lee and warming him up before games for the past six months.

How refreshing it was to arrive at Oakwell at 7pm and find the keepers already well involved in a constructive, organised and sustained warm up an hour or so before kick off. Rouse was putting Pickens and Camp through their paces for a good 45 minutes before the match and that was wonderful to see. But for one mistake in the first half which Fitz Hall rescued for him this was Camp’s best game for some time - probably a coincidence, but there’s no doubt a coach will improve Lee no end.

Sadly our arrival at Oakwell was preceded by a trip to the bar in the Metrodome Leisure Centre where the Sky Sports News ticker was reporting what we’ve all known for some time - Liam O’Brien has signed for Portsmouth.

Now I’ve never seen Liam play so I’ll decline to offer an opinion on him myself other than to say I’m yet to hear anybody with a bad word to say about him. Regular watchers of the youth sides really think he’s going to be a big star. Sadly that won’t be with us. It seems, from the posts on a couple of message boards from his Father, that Liam’s departure from the club he supports has come as a direct result of the lack of a keeper coach, and a breakdown in relations between the family and some of the hierarchy at the club.

There seems to be two schools of thought on the young lad’s departure. Some say that it’s a terrible shame – and one that could be avoided if only a professional football club hadn’t tried to go through eight months without a keeper coach after sacking a perfectly good one. Others say you can’t tell how a goalkeeper, or any young player, is going to turn out at Liam’s age and our youth team’s recent record isn’t great with only Ray Jones and possibly Dean Parrett coming through of any real quality. We shouldn’t get too hung up on the departure of a young lad who made a choice, whatever the reason, to sign somewhere else because he may not turn out to be good enough. At his age, it’s all up in the air.

I waiver towards the first theory. Liam seems to have been courted by half the Premier League so he must have something about him, these are the kind of players we need to be keeping and bringing through at our club and it’s a shame to lose one in such silly circumstances. All at LFW wish him good luck at Portsmouth, and David Rouse good luck at Loftus Road. Luckily the cloud that is the departure of Liam has a silver lining in that Lee Camp has plenty of time on his side and could be between our sticks for many years to come, and now he’s got a coach to coach him he can surely only go from strength to strength.

Buzsaky is still wasted on the wing
In the last nine games Akos Buzsaky has scored once. In the eleven games before that he scored six. The difference? Buzsaky is increasingly, and now seemingly permanently, playing wide on the left or right flanks whereas before he was playing off a striker in the centre. Not only have the goals dried up but so have the game changing, match winning, man of the match performances. Tuesday night at Barnsley was just about as poorly as he’s played for QPR since arriving here but it’s hard to point the finger at him – in poor conditions for football Rangers barely gave him the ball in any areas where he could hurt Barnsley. One shot he took on and smacked over the bar in the second half apart it’s hard to remember an occasion when he got the ball played to his feet in the areas that he smashed goals in against Scunthorpe, Colchester, Coventry and Bristol City.

Look at those goals, the free kick at Scunthorpe apart, and look where he’s coming from and striking the ball. Bristol City, striding onto a lay off 20 yards from goal dead centre, Coventry likewise, Colchester likewise twice, Scunthorpe likewise. He was our most threatening player during the winter, a shoe in for player of the year, and now I’m listing him in the match report from the Barnsley game as “a passenger” – which he was. Two months ago we were mocking Holloway’s remorseless picking of players, particularly Buzsaky, out of position at Plymouth and Leicester. What a fool he looked as Buzsaky matched his goal tally from 100 games on the wing at Plymouth inside eight weeks playing down the middle at QPR. Now knock me down with a feather we’re doing the same bloody thing.

I’ve included the word ‘still’ in the headline here because I’ve already written this once this season, after the Sheff Utd away match. That day Buzsaky was bumped wide soon after the restart in the second half after previously playing through the middle. The result was an end to QPR as an attacking force, and a swing from 1-0 lead to 2-1 deficit. Everything we did well in the first half we did badly in the second. Only when Buz returned to the forward positions in the middle in the dying embers of the game as we chased an equaliser did we threaten again as Stewart saw a header from the Hungarian’s corner saved and then Matt Kilgallon headed/punched his shot off the goal line in stoppage time.

It clearly didn’t work for a half there and yet now we’re doing it every week. The permanent change seems to stem from the Cardiff away game after which there was a ‘clear the air’ meeting between players, manager and others involved at the club. After that it was heralded on other message boards that it would be “good old 442 from now on” which has meant that since then Buzsaky has been stuck wide in that four. He hasn’t been as poor as he was at Barnsley every week by any stretch of the imagination, and his goal against Bristol City came when he was playing there – all be it from the central position feeding off Agyemang as he loves to do.

Sure enough after this meeting we’ve stuck remorselessly with 442 when to be honest I quite liked the look of us with Vine wide and Buz playing off Agyemang. That’s not a system for home games, but works nicely away from home and gets our star player involved far more often. Correct me if I’m wrong, I was fortunate enough to miss Cardiff, but from what I can gather from those that did travel the problem at Ninian Park was that Martin Rowlands was taken out of the middle of midfield and played wide and we didn’t seem to know that despite being left footed Peter Whittingham plays wide right. Nothing really to do with Bzsaky playing down the middle. Like I say I might be wrong – I’d love to hear differently from anybody – usual address loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.

Since the move to 442 Rowan Vine has benefited because he’s back up front now whereas previously he was playing wide. His performances, until Saturday, have remained consistently good wherever he’s played. Vine has five goals this season spread evenly across his time with us and scored both from the wide position and when he’s played up front. Look at his assist at Southampton (when he was playing up front) and the penalty he won at Charlton (when he was playing up front) – where does he come from for those? Deep and wide on the left. I really don’t see how his game suffers in the same way Buzsaky’s does when he plays wide.

What have we gained by this switch in formation? Well we have Rowan Vine playing well in attack, just as he did out wide, which is good but we had that anyway. What we have lost is a man who was our most influential player, scoring goals, cutting teams apart and looking the part – in his place a man of the same name having about a tenth of the influence from the flanks. He’s still worth a place in the team, but he’s gone from looking awesome to being just another name on the team sheet.

Far be it from me, just some numpty with a website, to tell De Canio his job – I just think it’s a shame that we’ve lost so much of the exciting football we played over the winter with Buzsaky at the heart of it in place of much more orthodox run of the mill performances with Buz hardly seeing the ball for long periods. It’s even more of a concern now that the goals and the results have suddenly dried up. Still I’m probably wrong – when De Canio took over we were bottom and now we’re 15th so that’s good enough for me, I’ll trust his judgement for now.

Electro, techno 1980s keyboard solos are not a great addition to the pre match atmosphere
Simon Davey and Luigi De Canio both made reference to the gale force winds blowing through Oakwell on Tuesday night as something of an excuse for the dire 0-0 bore draw. Rightly so. That, and the dreadful state of the pitch, certainly played a big part in the game. When the teams hoofed the ball in the air the wind carried it around in ways that were impossible for the players to predict. When the ball was passed around on the pitch the bobbles and uneven bounce made it difficult to control and resulted in numerous ‘couldn’t trap a bag of cement’ incidents where simple passes hopped over outstretched feet and into touch.

But blaming the pitch and the weather and the referee for poor performances is so mundane. I mean how many times have you heard that? Probably thousands. Why not look ‘outside the box’ as some management jargon speaking wanker might say? What other reasons could there be for the lacklustre fair on offer to the hardy souls who turfed over £20 to sit in the cold on Tuesday night. Could it possibly be that the weird keyboard music with drum machine beat, that sounds like a cross between the second track on a double A-side with the Final Countdown and an old steel dustbin blowing down a steep hill, that Barnsley remorselessly play for five minutes before during and after the unveiling of the teams at Oakwell be responsible?

This may not be as crazy as you think, stick with me on this. Why do teams play very loud music in the dressing rooms before the match? To get themselves up for the match; a good tub thumping noise to get the juices flowing and motivate the boys to go out and give it their all. The exact opposite of that is what they’re treated to at Barnsley. Imagine emerging from the Oakwell tunnel into the sub zero temperatures and howling gale just as the world’s worst piece of music goes through a tortured key change. You look around and see 8000 cold Yorkshiremen standing in silence and more than 14,000 empty seats, the drum machine kicks in with the keyboard music – Christ even Gareth Ainsworth would struggle to remain upbeat and motivated during all of this. The players must wonder what might have been – they could have had a nice warm office job and listened to Radio One all day but no here they are being forced to stand in shirt and shorts in arctic weather and listen to some hideous 1980s nonsense played at great volume.

Just when they’d got that out of their system it was time for a break and back to the dressing rooms they went. While they were down there the supporters were treated to the Cheeky Girls at even greater volume than the garbage that was played before the match. So we had the wind blowing in our faces, the football was about as bad as we could have hoped for, and the Cheeky Girls were being blasted at us with such gusto you can’t make yourself heard to the person next to you – personally I think the United Nations needs to have a very series look at this little part of the world.

Warm beer in a plastic glass and then a half mile slide down a muddy bank into a large steel cage that you have to pay £20 to get into followed by two hours sitting in sub zero temperatures while first 1980s keyboard music is blasted at you, then 45 minutes of awful football, then the Cheeky Girls, then another 45 minutes of awful football and then another run up the muddy hill in the pitch black – suddenly water boarding at the hands of an American soldier doesn’t sound quite so bad does it? If this isn’t a form of torture I don’t know what is. Is it any wonder that Oakwell is consistently the quietest place we visit with QPR, with all the atmosphere of an abandoned morgue? The people in there are being put through agony for goodness sake.

Don’t believe me that this could have an effect on the players? Well then let me present item two for the prosecution. Tina Turner’s 1989 crime against humanity ‘The Best’. Now some of our younger readers may not know that QPR used to run out to that song back in the early 1990s. When you’ve got a minute get a graph of our league positions out over the past 20 years, stick a pin in the graph at the time we stopped running out to ‘The Best’ (approximately 1994) and then run your finger along the line. I think you’ll find that we go from 5th in the Premiership with the song, to 11th in League One without it over the course of a decade and although we’ve had a little revival lately, we’re still floundering some 30 odd positions and one division lower in the league ladder than we were when Tina greeted the boys.

What more proof do you need? Prosecution rests. So what have we learnt? The man operating the public address system at Barnsley is a torturer worthy of prosecution in the highest possible court and possibly a stoning of some sort, and if we swallow our pride and give Tina Turner another airing at five to three we’ll be back up there as London’s top club in the Premier League before you can say “turn that bloody racket off.” If we start on Sunday against Stoke it’s probably not too late for us to make the play offs. Now you may rightly point out that Glasgow Rangers have sort of ruined the song (if it could indeed be ruined and not simply made worse) with sectarian nonsense but I think we can be trusted with it and the results will speak for themselves. The ‘bring back Tina’ campaign starts here.

Photo: Action Images

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