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Me and a couple of mates decided to pick a random team from the FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round a few years ago. The idea being to follow their progress until they were knocked out and then ‘adopt’ the victorious team until they in turn were eliminated. The ‘random team’ were Cray Valley Paper Mills, who were drawn against Oxford City after a couple of early round wins. We all trooped up to Marsh Lane, where the ‘Hoops’ won 5-0. Anyway, I spent the afternoon fantasising that I was witnessing a never-to-be-forgotten QPR FA Cup victory for the ages!
This is a great thread. Respect to all those actively engaged in winkling out ever more obscure examples of blue-and-white hoopery. It’s beginning to resemble the increasingly difficult search for new prime numbers though!
Another endorsement for Gerry’s from me too. Was a regular visitor during my 80’s flirtation with the wine/continental lager trade while based in Brighton. That front window display is a work of art in itself. Once had a bucket list dream of sampling every drink they had in stock. I was clearly quite delusional in those days.
I thought the same about Mendy, the Senegal keeper. Booked for gobbing off at the ref in the initial melee, he then got in Diaz’s face and prevented the penalty from being taken for a considerable amount of time, so second yellow should have been given. I don’t blame the ref for bottling it in that cauldron though.
Think I’m the same. The kit and the name cannot be underestimated. Mum was Charlton (grew up in a pub in Woolwich) and Dad was Tottenham (out of Edmonton). I still remember him telling me about a Spurs player, John White, who’d been struck by lightning on a golf course and killed. Dad took me to his amateur football games every Saturday and on the way back we’d pick up the Evening Standard to read the match reports. For some reason I thought that Rangers’ Loftus Road ground in Shepherd’s Bush sounded rather exotic and this sparked my initial curiosity about them.
Fast forward several years and I still hadn’t settled on a team I could call ‘mine’. Then a group of us from school, probably because QPR were on a bit of a roll at the time (1973), decided to trek across London one Tuesday night for a League Cup game against Plymouth Argyle. Rangers lost 3-0 but there was something about those shirts and the grass (it was green in those days) under the floodlights that got me hooked. I was hospitalised soon after with a slipped disc and my Dad, unknown to me, sent off my treasured copy of Dennis Signy’s ‘History of Queens Park Rangers FC’ book, to the club asking Stan Bowles to autograph it. Stan duly obliged with a ‘Get Well Soon’ message and that cemented our relationship for life.
The only family connection I’ve since managed to uncover concerned my maternal grandfather, a publican who at one time kept the Red Lion Hotel, Harrow. A bright lad by all accounts, he was nevertheless forced to leave school early to find work to help out his family. His first job, I’m told, was ‘whiting the lines at QPR’!
(It also helped that Stray, a band I followed as a teenager, all went to Christopher Wren School in Shepherd’s Bush, so that was a bonus).
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