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Table-toppers to mid-table-floppers — Knee Jerks
Monday, 22nd Aug 2016 17:23 by Antti Heinola

Antti Heinola reflects on a difficult afternoon all round for QPR as Preston win 2-0 at Loftus Road.

Firsts

What a game of firsts for the Championship season: first match without a penalty; first time Chery hasn’t scored; first time the team hasn’t scored; first time we conceded at home; first time we lost at home; first time our plan didn’t work at all; first time an opposition has been flagged offside more than 87 times in a game. A lot firsts, most of them not very good firsts. Would be good to have less firsts in our next game, although I suspect ‘first time we’re humiliated this season by lower league opposition’ is only hours away…

Alex Smithies

Also the first time I’ve seen him play and been disappointed. I saw some criticism for him for the free kick against Barnsley, but that looked like a pretty special free kick to me, just dipping under the bar, but he was undoubtedly at fault for the first on Saturday. His first big blooper for the Hoops. He knew it too. The mitigating factor was the wind, which was swirling and whirling and causing all kinds of issues, but, still, it was a powder puff punch that he should have caught.

He seemed to decide to punch a few times on Saturday, which caused great consternation in a crowd that was very short on patience (more of which later), and I can only think that was because he was struggling to judge the flight of the ball in the wind. And, yet, in the ten minutes after the first goal, Smithies caught two far more challenging crosses than the one he’d elected to fist away.

Overall he looked less confident than he has done since he broke into the team, which perhaps was a symptom of the ten players in front of him under-performing, but then, if the team is doing badly, that’s when you really want your keeper to be at his best. Hopefully, just a blip and he’ll go back to doing what he does very well — catching crosses, not flapping at them.

Conor Washington

You could watch that game ten times and struggle to find the positives, but perhaps Washington was one. He changed the game when he came on with his energy, a bit of speed and a willingness to shoot, and actually, with a bit more luck, he might have dragged us to within a chance of an undeserved draw. He had three chances of note. The first, following a brilliant bit of movement and a Taarabt-esque pass of quality from Chery, should certainly have brought a goal, especially once he controlled it on the run… but somehow it got caught in his feet and the ball was smuggled clear. The second was from a cross and he hit it well enough, only for two deflections to take it wide. And the third was a fierce shot from the edge of the box that the keeper did well to save. Some really good signs there, although the problem remains that he’s essentially being kept out the team by Chery, our most dangerous player.

At the moment, my view is that he’s a good player and with a goal or two under his belt he could become first choice… but yet I can’t see where he fits in — unless, potentially, we switch to more of a 4-3-3 with him and Chery buzzing around Polter. A tough one to crack.

Steven Caulker

I was a little disappointed with Caulker on Saturday. I thought we saw a return to the worst of his defending too often, when his headers are a little soft with not enough distance. Two or three times he opted to try and head away a long ball to one of our players, but got it wrong and gifted them possession. Clint Hill, in the same position, would have been heading it into the crowd, Warnock’s words about them not being able to score from the stands echoing in his head. He didn’t have a terrible game, but I felt he should have been more aggressive, more dominating than he was and could have been a little more decisive in his play. Hopefully the return of Hall will allow us to re-build this defence that looked so strong for the first two games.

Jordan Cousins

Not going to dig him out as he clearly has a great attitude and great application, but it wasn’t his best day on Saturday. Playing on the right as we have so few options there, he never offered the width we needed, particularly in the first half. He tucked in a lot, perhaps trying to make us compact, but it made us very one dimensional going forward. We never really got the ball wide until Nasser came on and only then did we really start to threaten on the flanks. With Yeni needing a bit of time to get used to the English game, a new team and a new environment, our lack of width was painfully obvious throughout the game. Phillips and Hoilett were not everyone’s cup of tea, but they could make things happen. Not easy to replace.

Booing

Yep, you pay your money, you can do what you want. But I’ve got to say I’m getting a bit pissed off with the attitude of a group of QPR fans now. On Saturday, the first boos came after about half an hour. There were more at half time, more in the second half and more at full time. Don’t bother replying to me saying you didn’t hear them or there weren’t many — they were there and they were loud enough.

I don’t get it. I’m not a happy clapper. I certainly wouldn’t class the performance on Saturday as anything other than poor. But I can’t get my head round this. At half time we were still well in the game. It was only 1-0, Preston hadn’t exactly been laying siege to the goal and the goal they did score was down to an individual error. I understood the frustration with players earning huge money at QPR clearly not giving much of a toss. But with this team? Have they really got so little in the bank with us fans that at 1-0 on a blustery day in their fifth game in 14 days that we’re going to boo them off? Really?

The lack of patience baffles me. When I started going to football in the 80s, booing was much rarer. It might have come during an absolute pasting. It usually only came after a series of poor results and, perhaps, if this had been the fifth game in a row where we had played badly and were heading for yet another defeat I could understand the frustration, but this was on another level.

And in amongst the boos came the wearisome, dull shouts of ‘forward!’ every time someone dared not to lob the ball into a channel and decided to play it sideways, or, under pressure, knock it backwards to keep possession. Always a favourite. And the reaction to Chery trying to swing a corner in from a different angle was ridiculous. I saw the post on here today: ‘short corners don’t work’. Here’s a newsflash: long corners don’t work either. The most comprehensive study on corners in the English game taken a couple of years back looked at 13000 corners. Less than 3 in 100 were scored. It’s not that short corners don’t work — statistically they’re probably just as likely to succeed as long corners — it’s that fans hold bizarrely high expectations of a goal from a corner, when in fact they are pretty rare. In fact, the two best balls put in to the box came from Chery crossing from a different angle after a short one.

Someone else on here gave the entire team 0/10. I’m not going to argue that anyone even merited 6/10, but what exactly is going on here? What I saw on Saturday was a bad display. It looked like we thought their central defenders were slow to turn and had a gameplan to get balls beyond them because we fancied Polter would out-pace them. A mixture of poor balls and a difficult wind put paid to that and we failed to adjust, but what I didn’t see was a lack of effort. I didn’t see anyone pulling out of challenges, or not chasing back, or giving up hope. Someone else has described this as one of the worst three QPR performances he’s *ever seen*. I mean, it was not good, but, seriously?

This sort of reaction is a consequence of how fans have been treated over the last 20 years or so and how they have correspondingly reacted. Treat them like customers and they’ll behave like customers and get pissed off when they pay big money to watch well-paid players arse about for 90 minutes and not give a stuff about the result. They’ll sit with arms folded waiting to be entertained rather than putting their hands together and encouraging the players to entertain them. That culture is, it seems, pretty difficult to turn round, even when wages and transfer fees have been yanked down to more acceptable levels. Similarly, once you decide the best route to success is to have about a dozen managers over a five or six year period, fans become addicted to the cycle of change and hope. Impatience is ingrained within them and the one thing that will make everything better is yet another new manager (even though, these days, Pep Guardiola is labelled a fraud, van Gaal is laughed at and Pellegrini patronised — just who is a ‘good manager’ anymore?).

It’s profoundly depressing this — I found the booing and impatience, in fact, far more depressing than the actual performance of a team that has had, yet again, another big turnover of staff this summer (as it has done every summer for years). Reading the board this summer, I thought things had changed. We would be patient. We understand this will take time. We’re not expecting to win every game.

To head off the inevitable complaints: No, I don’t think we played well. No, I don’t think it was acceptable. Yes, JFH could have done things differently. No, I’m not saying you don’t have free speech or that you don’t have a right to boo your little heart out if you want to. I just don’t understand it and think the reaction to a single early season defeat was shocking on Saturday and has been shocking since.

Pictures — Action Images

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RonisRs added 21:49 - Aug 22
Here here, you make some excellent comments. lets stick with and support our team.
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Hadders added 22:40 - Aug 22
I always love your reports and totally agree about the negativity. Going to football is so much more enjoyable when everyone just gets behind their team, ESPECIALLY when they are losing or playing badly - it`s not hard. It`s a shame so many "supporters" expect the players to make a good atmosphere - isn`t that our job?
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Myke added 10:12 - Aug 23
Hi Antti,
A really well observed piece thanks for that. There are so many points to discuss about our season and it's only 5 games old - never boring at QPR! I am going to focus here on supporter discontent. Probably our 'perfect' start ( you would think we won the first 10 instead of 2!) was always going to be a rod to beat the players with once we settled into a more predictable sequence of win some lose some. If it had been in reverse people would be delighted that that we had 'managed to turn our season around' as I see some Leeds fans describing their team (again after 4 league games).

This demand to be entertained is, I believe, not just about the way the fans have been treated over the last decade (or 2) and not just about 'customers' as opposed to 'fans' either - if we were in a brand new 40,000 stadium packed to the rafters I would agree with you but with 'just' 13,000 attendees I would have thought they were mostly 'die-hard' fans - no I believe we are experiencing a much wider malaise than that.

We live in a world that demands instant gratification and, thanks to the internet, these demands are attainable. Since the invention of the TV our ability to entertain ourselves has slowly being eroded and this process has been accelerated to efibre-esque internet speeds since the advent of err.. efibre internet speeds being readily available on every conceivable electronic device from your 50 inch TV to the little scrap of metal and plastic that you could hide in your ear.
Quite simply we have lost the art of entertaining ourselves in the same way as we are losing the art of communicating with each other in any other way except the one I am using here. So combine these 2 factors : a demand to be entertained without any effort on our side whatsoever and an inability to verbally communicate articulately and you are left with boos and grunts and catcalls as soon as there is the first hint of anything less than 'perfection'. (of course JFK didn't help by describing his defence as 'flawless' after Cardiff thereby cranking up expectations even further)
Am I exaggerating here ? Of course. But I still believe this is the nub of the problem with impatient negativity from the fans and perhaps (scarily) I am giving a glimpse of the future!
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Royboy48 added 18:06 - Aug 23
Spot-on Antii

Often bewildered by the rapid descent into booing;

Time to get a sense of perspective;

Supporting QPR is supporting a solid championship club with occasional bursts of consistent brilliance which elevates us to the top level

QPR were in the top division 30 of the first 47 years of my life but I never took it for granted and always recognised – and rejoiced in the fact - that I supported a proper football club that was punching above its weight

By the way I saw my share of poor performances in those days too and I just wonder how some of our current fans would have reacted after Wembley in 1986

Yes of course we were fed up on Saturday but I'll suck it up and get excited about the next fixture even a midweek league cup tie against more modest opposition

I might be fed up after that too but I am a fully paid up subscriber of the win together lose together club.

Time to get a sense of perspective

Please
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JohnMacQPR added 22:46 - Aug 23
My late father had a phrase about any slight hiccup or setback "the worst ... ever". We generally ignored him or thought he meant "that's not so good", as did his neighbours and mates at work - but he didn't have social media!!

Nowadays someone like him would use that phrase on Facebook or Twitter (or wherever) and some other person would say "yeah, you're right ..." and add a comment that builds the point. Then suddenly six or seven people think their dogmatic and negative comments are meaningful and widely supported.

Sadly that seems to be modern life. Most people still keep their opinions to themselves or just share them with their mates in the pub, at work or in the church/mosque/synagogue and their opinions get moderated in discussion. But a few (saddos?) now think their negative comments are relevant and it encourages them to exaggerate.

A good analysis and a valid set of comments, Antti. I agree with most - but not all - of them. My advice is to ignore the boo-boys and don't read message boards. Otherwise you only encourage them - despite not wishing to do so.
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