This week - Argentinian flags in the air, but feet firmly on the ground
Thursday, 28th Aug 2008 13:08

What a difference a week makes - QPR fans have gone from the depths of despair to a state of complete euphoria inside seven days. Let's not get too carried away though eh...

What have we here?
Admit it, you’re excited aren’t you? I am. I mean I know it was only Carlisle, and it was only Doncaster before them, but there’s been a lot to get excited about at Loftus Road this week. In Emmanuel Ledesma we appear to have stumbled across the division’s outstanding talent and most entertaining player, signed him up on loan and agreed a fee for his transfer next summer without even realising we were doing it.

It’s most un QPR like – until Genoa turn around and say somebody has offered £6m for him and our agreed fee isn't worth the Cipriani napkin it's written on of course. Then again most of what has happened over the past few months has been very un-QPR like, it just doesn't feel like the same club any more - we've won two League Cup matches in a season for God's sake. We have Ledesma to thank for that more than most after he tricked, twisted and turned his way through a Carlisle side with few answers to increasingly taxing questions in the second half on Tuesday night.

At half time I was readying the whiskey in preparation for another cup disaster and clearly the little Argentinian was thinking the same – the difference between him and me of course is that he can actually do something about it. With due respect to his predecessors the difference between Ledesma and most of the players we’ve had in the last decade or more is he can actually do something about it. Three sublime goals and an assist later and the third round welcomed us as the team nobody will want to draw away from home.

Ledesma is the kind of player you don’t mind paying money to watch. He wants to take every corner, free kick and throw in, he wants to be on the ball all the time and when he finally does get it things happen. I had to laugh during the Barnsley match when he got bored of waiting for possession so wandered over to the left hand side and took it off the toes of Blackstock and Cook before setting off on another run. His team mates didn’t look very impressed, and ordered him to return to his pre-determined position, which he did with a big grin on his face. After being booked for celebrating his goal too enthusiastically on Saturday he was pointing to his nose in Matteo Alberti’s direction and doing Fitz Hall’s A sign all over the shop at Loftus Road on Tuesday. He just looks like he’s having a thoroughly good time.

Compare and contrast his bright smile and attention deficit disorder affected behaviour with the hang dog expression and laid back attitude of fellow foreign loan star Daniel Parejo and the difference is stark. I’ve rarely seen anybody look like he wants to be on a pitch less, but don’t let the looks and manner fool you - we’ve got another star on our hands here by the looks of things. He swivelled and played a 20 yard, reverse chipped ball over the defence to Dexter Blackstock’s feet on Saturday that arouses me even now writing this four days later. I’m told Parejo ran 50 yards back into his own half to challenge a Carlisle player and win a goal kick in the final minute on Tuesday with the score 4-0 and the game over. A fine display of work ethic and commitment even if he did look miserable doing it. Sadly my commentary on QPR World had cut out before then and been replaced with samba music and a summary of Leeds 4 Crystal Palace 0. Missing these midweek games is killing me, damn job.

However, as the title suggests, feet on the floor. It was only Doncaster and Carlisle and just a week ago I was writing in this column about an abject performance at Sheffield United. The change in system and formation appears to have balanced us both width ways and in attack and defence and repaired a lot of the problems we had at Bramall Lane but in fairness Doncaster offered little by way of a test and by all accounts Carlisle didn’t trouble us unduly either although they showed more vim and vigour than Rovers did at the weekend.

This Saturday we travel to Bristol City and there can be no better game to see if we really have improved from the Sheff Utd disaster than a trip to Ashton Gate. Ledesma and Parejo weren’t nearly as effective in the Bramall Lane match as they have been at Loftus Road although hopefully the five man midfield system we’ve now adapted will help in that. Again referring back to last week it's important that this Saturday we do the basics right at the back and down the spine of the side to lay a platform on which these stars can perform. As the Welsh rugby team found with Iyesten Harris, it's no use just handing the ball to the best player and shouting "you, win this game for us." It's a team game and we looked like a bunch of individuals in South Yorkshire, hopefully that was a one off.

Even if we pass the test on Saturday the cold winter nights are just around the corner. That’s always said to be the acid test of these fancy foreign footballers and I give it another fortnight or so before Championship managers decide the only way they can stop Ledesma and co is to kick them. Hard.

With some ridiculous play acting still a clear tick in the negative column for Ledesma in particular I wouldn’t anticipate too much protection from referees as one talentless thug after another heaves him up in the air midway through one of his jinking runs. Expect to contrast the relative positives and negatives of metaphorically grabbing a kid by his ankles and shaking him until the dinner money falls out of his pocket or nipping round his ankle and picking his pocket without him realising. Still Sean O'Driscoll laboured the point about the size of our team at the weekend so maybe we can do some bullying of our own this season to go with the magic tricks.

The mood swings of the average QPR fan at the moment seems to be akin to that of a heavily pregnant woman and one defeat to Bristol City will bring the moaners and groaners out of the closet again. It’s perfectly possible, this will be a whole different kettle of fish to Doncaster and Carlisle, but it’s fine to get excited about your own team once in a while and with the players we currently have at our disposal we’re capable of going there, and anywhere else in this league, and getting a result. Here’s hoping it turns out Sheff Utd was the one off and this week is going to be the norm rather than the other way round.

The importance of Gavin Mahon
And yet with all the flicks, tricks and talent displayed by the plethora of attractive, creative players we seem to have stumbled across one of the most impressive players so far for me has actually been the one that could unkindly be called a ‘clogger’.

QPR fans have developed an aversion to holding central midfielders brought on by Ian Holloway’s insistence that any team in any circumstances should have two of them in the middle of the park even if that means playing a centre half there out of position. It always seemed strange to me that Holloway was like this having played at QPR in the role himself alongside a creative string puller like Ray Wilkins. The balance and poise of that partnership was superb and it so effective with Holloway doing the leg work and Wilkins picking the passes – it always amazed me that Holloway never tried to replicate it at Rangers.

Admittedly he’d have struggled to find anybody that could pass a ball like Ray but that’s no excuse for playing Steve Palmer in the middle of midfield. I mean poor old Steve was a steady centre half as long as nobody tried to run at him but it was painful to watch him in midfield. Who can forget the memorable 4-2 defeat at Chesterfield where Palmer partnered Bircham in the middle of the park?

Holloway later replaced Palmer with Georges Santos who, again, was a very good centre half for the level we were at but no more a central midfielder than the fit girl that serves in the club shop. Of course Holloway then lost the plot completely and stuck Santos up front and so began his downfall at Loftus Road. This maddening fascination with the defensive central midfielder and playing players out of position has stuck in the minds of QPR fans who sink a bit lower in their seats every time the middle of the park has a defensive look to it.

This phobia hasn’t been helped much by the partnership of Gavin Mahon and Mikele Leigertwood together in a 4-4-2 formation which often bares a striking resemblance to two drunk men looking for the toilets at a house party and almost always results in a flood of goals flying past whichever unfortunate sod QPR have in goal that week. Their performances together as a pair, ordinary at best and frightening at worst, may have clouded supporter’s judgements of them as individuals, Mahon in particular.

Looking at the various thoughts of message board users on who should be playing where and what the team should be Mahon figures only very seldomly and is more often than not picked behind Leigertwood. I just don’t understand this at all I’m afraid. Mahon never fails to impress me when he plays and does a vital job for our current team with so many attacking players ahead of him. There he stood on Saturday and again on Tuesday night, the last light house keeper on sane island peering out from the edge of the cliff at a sea of attacking madness before him. It’s reassuring for the excitable teenagers that love to go tearing off down field, and Damien Delaney, that waiting for them back at home is Old Father Mahon, ready and waiting with a crunching tackle or a foul or a nice ten yard pass to feet just to calm things down and set us back on our way.

Played with Leigertwood in a 4-4-2 formation it’s a disaster but in our current five man midfield set up he’s an absolutely key figure. If you’re not convinced then take five minutes in the next game you go to and watch Mahon closely for that five minutes, at his positioning, at the little passes he plays, at how well he keeps the ball and tracks runners. Failing that think back a fortnight to Sheff Utd and just how sound we looked without him.

For Watford last season Mahon played 19 games and they won 11 of them drawing another three besides. What Watford would have given for that form in their last 19 games, they’d be in the Premiership now. So far this season for QPR and Mahon it’s played three, won three, conceded one. He may look like Steve Palmer, he may be the evil force of a defensive central midfielder, but he’s vital to us and every bit as important as the headline makers further forward at Loftus Road at the moment. Keep the five man midfield system with him at the base and we really won’t go far wrong this season I don’t think.

Postscript
My Setanta Sports is working fine, thanks for asking. Judging by the amount of people mumbling and grumbling about England games being on there and glancing at my ever decreasing bank balance perhaps I shouldn’t be boasting that I’ve recently invested in a subscription but I have and I am so there. The reason I’ve brought it up again for a second week was a fantastic incident in the Wrexham v Oxford game last Thursday night. Yes I have no life.

No sooner had I written a bit for this column about the channel’s ‘in your face’ approach to covering Conference games with a fit blonde sticking a microphone under managers’ noses during the match and cameras in the dressing room and all sorts of other gimmicks nicked from Sky’s coverage of Rugby League and 20:Twenty Cricket than it blew up in their face.

I quite enjoyed the Wrexham game as a spectacle – ruined slightly by the sending off of an Oxford player but brightened by an eye catching performance from our own Jake Cole, who saved the penalty after the red card among other notable feats. It was finished off with about five minutes to go by a crisp finish from the edge of the box by Wrexham’s Jefferson Louis, who regular viewers of crap football may remember jumping around the Oxford changing room wearing only a towel when they were drawn against Arsenal in the FA Cup a few years ago.The subsequent television footage made even Dion Dublin blush.

Anyway immediately after scoring Louis was taken off by Wrexham boss Brian Little and that was the cue for the blonde to go chasing off down the touchline microphone in hand to get the usual banal description of the goal and hopes for the rest of the season from the goal scorer as he warmed down.

Blonde: “Jefferson, talk us through that second goal.”
JL: “Well obviously with missing the penalty earlier I was keen to make amends and it was nice to score, the ball just came to me really and got my head over the ball, was a nice finish I suppose.”
Blonde: “And why have you had to come off?”
JL: “Because I was fucked.”

A stony silence followed for a good 30 seconds, broken only by the hysterical laughter of the other substitutes in the background. I did say they were asking for trouble. Still, I laughed too.