QPR were haunted by their former assistant manager on Friday night as John Eustace’s impressive, well set-up, aggressive and positive Birmingham side trampled all over a weirdly passive and sluggish Rangers side at St Andrew’s.
When you lose three key players to injury in the first half, when the referee is behaving like the besotted sugar daddy of one of the opposition players, when centre backs are flinging legs out and inadvertently scoring outrageous donkey-kick goals from corners, when you’re getting penalties and missing them… it’s probably not going to add up to your night. All of this provided plenty by way of mitigation for Queens Park Rangers’ worst performance and result of the season to date at Birmingham City on Friday. Mick Beale, wisely, leant on very little of it in his post-match — his side had been outplayed, well-beaten, and he knew it.
For a notoriously travelsick team, QPR have really enjoyed their trips to St Andrew’s in recent times. Since relegation from the Premier League in 2013 the R’s have won five and drawn one of eight visits, and lost only one of their last six. Yeni Ngbakoto and Conor Washington score for QPR here — it really, up to this point, has been that easy. With five wins from six coming into the fixture, a league-leading four away wins already on the board, and a chance to go back to the summit of the nascent Championship table with a victory prior to the rest of the weekend games the day after, you’d think the London team would have fancied their chances. Perhaps they did, a little too much.
The big pre-match question was whether Chris Willock’s hamstring injury, picked up shortly after scoring a winner at Sheff Utd earlier in the month, would have healed in time for an appearance, or if the comeback would wait until Norwich next Wednesday. The presence of Albert Adomah (a scorer here in our win last season), Mide Shodipo, Macauley Bonne and George Thomas in the B Team’s afternoon 4-4 thriller with Ipswich suggested he would be involved, but in the end Mick Beale erred on the side of caution (never a bad idea with Willock’s hamstring history) and left him out.
By half time, it was injuries to everybody else that was the key topic of conversation. Jake Clarke-Salter, already with one medium-term absence under his belt this season and only just back, twisted his knee early on and - after two prolonged periods of treatment - had to be replaced by Rob Dickie. Tyler Roberts, another who’s basically been crocked since the moment he walked through the door in the summer, phoned in 27 wholly ineffective and completely disinterested minutes before popping off with his latest non-descript calf complaint. And Stefan Johansen, who’s been a problem child for the medical staff here from the second he signed a lucrative three-year permanent deal, limped through to half time and no further.
I’m often accused of being harsh to persistently injured players because, after all, now we’re long past the days of Armband Traore happy to pick up his enormous wadge while not contributing anything, nobody wants to be injured and they’re not doing it on purpose. It’s actually been a deliberate strategy of the recruitment team in W12 to look for players with chequered medical records by way of finding value in the market - because, if always fully fit, there’s no way people like Sam Field come here from West Brom within our budget - and then trust our medical team to get them right (as they have done with Field). If he was always fit and available then Clarke-Salter, who his manager rates as one of the best left sided defenders in the country never mind this division, would not be playing in the Championship, and certainly wouldn’t be affordable to QPR. But sometimes if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a fucking duck — he has only managed more than 30 appearances in a season once in his career (that only 29 (2) for Coventry in 2021/22) and his record to this point suggests he’s not about to start now.
Clarke-Salter’s performances when he does play, and the unspoken understanding this is how players of this ability end up here, has so far seen the fans give him a bit of a hall pass on all this. Those privileges are fast being revoked of Roberts, however, judging by the mood online and in the away end last night. Even when he does play he performs only in fits and starts, and his body-language, moody attitude and sometimes outright hostility to team mates, and little things like how he walks around on his heels which makes him look sulky and disinterested, are fast trying the patience Joe Public. An exaggerated, frustrated thumping of the turf before he trooped off cut little ice behind the goal.
Beale, like Warburton before him, is also struggling to bridge the gap between QPR with a fit Johansen in midfield, and QPR without — none of the alternate options tried there have really worked, and that didn’t change here despite Luke Amos’ spirited effort. Either way, it’s a statement of fact that all three of them are fragile and lack the durability for a 46-game Championship season. That’s a concern given how important they are to the team: the spectre of last season’s injury riddled collapse looms large.
Rangers were already 1-0 down before all of that. Seny Dieng came to punch Birmingham’s first corner of the night but had it taken off his glove by a defensive header which meant he was further forward and left from the goal than you ideally would have liked for the second phase of the set piece (which as Dan Lambert has said in his tactical analysis for us is something QPR have struggled with for a while now). Still, I don’t think you can legislate, or really blame the keeper, for the unique, flukey angle the ball took off Auston Trusty’s outstretched backheel — tell me he meant that and I’ll call you a liar - and although Dieng’s back-scrambling looked clumsy I honestly don’t think he had much chance with it. Even in my mediocre life as a small-sided keeper I’ve had those where you’re simultaneously trying to run backwards and also jump into the air — you pop into the garden tomorrow and give it a go, it ain’t easy to gain any height at all, you basically just collapse horizontally backwards, which is what he did here, landing in the back his net with the ball after just four minutes.
They went two behind on the other side of the Clarke-Salter and Roberts exits. Referee Tim Robinson might have stopped the move at source for what looked like a foul (free kick for my money), could have done so again mid-flow when the ball struck him but decided to play on as it hadn’t interrupted the Birmingham possession (that one the right call in my opinion), but you still can’t allow the time and space afforded to Longelo to pick his spot from the edge of the box, and I’m actually more worried about Dieng getting beaten from there than anything he did for the first.
Of more concern on the officiating front was Robinson’s infatuation with home midfielder Hannibal Mejbri. The Tunisian, on loan from Manchester United, was the best player on the pitch for the first hour, closely followed by his former Old Trafford team mate and fellow Tina Turner impersonator Tahith Chong — an absolute steal at £1.5m this summer. But, he also should have been sent off, on more than one occasion. Rightly booked after just seven minutes for a professional foul in midfield, Mejbri should have been on a tightrope from that point on, and yet Robinson was so in love with him it became more of an eight-lane motorway. He allowed him to commit three more fouls without a word being spoken, and when QPR tried to get a quick throw in away on a counter attack he jumped in front and obstructed them from doing so with two hands. It started to feel like one of those Sunday League matches where one of the players’ dads is pressganged into refereeing, and that lad gets a free hit. Bielik, Longelo, Trusty, Balogun and Iroegbunam were all booked for offenses that Mejbri was let off with. Tim, mate, if you want to stroke the lovely boy’s big hair that badly then just fucking ask him will you? Maybe he’ll say yes, you can satisfy whatever craven hard-on you’ve got for him, and we can crack on with a match on a level playing field.
The whole thing reached a boiling point in the second half when Mejbri committed another foul, a deliberate trip, exactly the sort of challenge we’ve become accustomed to being an immediate no-argue yellow card in the modern game, and Robinson stood his ground for a fifth time and refused to send him from the field. It was a farce at this stage. Sometimes you get referees at this level, like Oliver Langford, who just want an easy life, and if you squeem and squeem at them enough, they’ll give you what you want just to make you go away — see Todd Cantwell at Norwich a couple of Christmases back. Others, like Robinson here, stubbornly paint themselves into a corner, where they decide, either consciously or subconsciously, they’re not going to be bullied and influenced into doing what everybody thinks they should do. In either case, they’re refereeing a game in their head, rather than the one in front of them, and it leads to obviously perverse and incorrect decisions, like the ones we saw here.
To rub salt into the wounds, Rob Dickie was booked for dissent in the immediate aftermath for pointing all of this out. Two minutes later Bielik committed a far less aggressive and serious foul in a neutral area of the pitch, and was booked. And to then really put the tin hat on that, when QPR were awarded a penalty - ten minutes from time for Ethan Laird catching a high boot in the face attacking a cross at the back post - Troy Deeney was allowed to charge half the length of the field to physically barge into the official and abuse him for the decision without being yellow carded as Dickie had been. What was a yellow card foul one minute, wasn't the next; what was dissent on 56, wasn't on 79. It was an abysmal refereeing performance that the official involved should be personally ashamed of and give very long and careful thought to this week. The farce was complete when John Eustace took the reprieve to immediately replace Mejbri with a substitute, a humiliation for the referee, and Lyndon Dykes saw a nice-height spot kick well saved by the excellent John Ruddy.
The standards of refereeing in this division shame not only these bastions of mediocrity making such basic on field errors week on week, but everybody involved with allowing refereeing in this country to drift as deep into the mud as they have. Once again, these were not difficult decisions to get right. If you will leave Mike Riley in charge...
So, there you go, narrative checklist complete. Injuries. Refereeing. Flukey goal. Penalty miss. If any one of the four goes the other way, perhaps so does the score. As Mick Beale said afterwards, it was one of those nights where everything that could go wrong, did. You’ll get those in sport. A week ago against Cardiff we had one where everything went right, including another shambolic, inept refereeing decision in our favour. It is still ridiculously early in the season. QPR worked themselves up into a hot, soapy lather with their results through the first half of 2021/22, which included a New Year win on this ground, and were pushing for second by the end of January only to crash, burn, and fall away to eleventh. Blackburn, another early pace-setter than and now, descended the table with us, and the teams that came on strong with a peak in March, April and May — Luton, Huddersfield, Forest — were the ones who played in the end of season knockout and ultimately, in the latter case, won promotion. Beale is absolutely right to say the aim is be in touch and in contention at the business end of the season, and to peak then, not now. Rangers, third in the table, are certainly on course to do that, despite this set back. We need, online at least, on social media especially, to be a little bit better at not getting carried away with the highs and lows when they occur seven months out from the end of the season.
But (didn’t you know there would be a but), another lesson from last season was the difference between being what the new manager describes as "results happy” and "performance happy”. QPR’s results and league position are good, but in three of the last four matches the performances have not been.
Now, at Luton last week, and Birmingham yesterday, a hefty slice of credit has to go to the opposition. Nathan Jones is a twat, but he’s also a good manager. John Eustace was unfortunate not to be given a chance to be the QPR manager himself and we may live to regret not doing so. Working under a horrendous ownership situation and financial restraints, at a still-half-closed St Andrew’s, he is showing himself to be an astute tactician, clever coach and excellent motivator. There aren’t many better midfield threes in this league than Hannibal, Chong and Bielik and they absolutely dominated this game from the first minute. Deeney, despite his age and heft, and Scott Hogan, were everything in the Birmingham attack that Lyndon Dykes and Tyler Roberts were not in ours — Dykes a very sad decline from the highs of last week’s all-action show against Wigan. The commitment, the press, the aggression, the purpose, the attack, the tempo… all came from the home team, and it came from the kick off. They won every first and second ball. They won every contact. They were angrier, livelier, more aggressive and more into the game than QPR throughout. As much as we talk tactics and shapes and ethos and styles and whatever, you do still have to earn the right to play football in a football match, particularly at this level, and it doesn’t make you a Pulis/Allardyce troglodyte to value building that foothold in a game by doing basics like winning tackles, and headers, and second balls, and being competitive. QPR did none of that, they just didn’t want to know - they started meekly and fell away from there. Birmingham were absolutely on it, they looked a good team. QPR did not, and frankly for me looked a little bit smug with themselves, like this was going to be an easy win and the real quiz is actually next week at Carrow Road. You can't play like this and expect a result, or blame a referee when you don't get one. The R's paid for that hubris with the final score.
There were, as ever, sliding doors moments even above the ones I mentioned in the intro. Some decent hassle and hustle on ten minutes from Lyndon saw an improvised effort from Roberts deflect onto the Birmingham bar. Ten minutes later Brum were again pressed into a hospital pass across their own area which put the Scotsralian clean through on goal, but his shot was needlessly hurried and sadly lacking in quality and accuracy. Big, big chances. But then only a desperate covering tackle five before half time stopped Hannibal slaloming through and in for a third goal his performance, and that of his side, would have deserved. Dieng didn’t have a great deal to do, but you need only watch this game for ten minutes to see who the better team were. It took until the 90th minute for Iroegbunam to do similar to Chong, Hannibal et al, and actually put the accelerator down and run past an opponent with the ball, removing them from the play to open up space for an attack. QPR were way too passive other than that.
So, result? Fair enough. I thought Birmingham were very decent, and Eustace deserves enormous credit for the work he’s doing there and the team he’s put together under the circumstances. Given what he inherited, it would have been very easy to stick ten behind the ball and just try and grind results out, as Wayne Rooney did at Derby last year to much tickling of his ballbag by a sycophantic press. But no, at home at least, Brum come to play, and with that midfield why not? Certainly the best Blues team we’ve faced in many a year.
Mitigation? Of course. Different luck with injuries, the first goal, missed chances, refereeing, could all so easily have made a different game. Would City have been able to do an hour with ten men? Would they even have been able to survive ten minutes at 2-1 if Dykes had scored his penalty?
Context? It’s very early in the season, we’re travelling nicely, shit happens.
But also, just that little niggle for Mick Beale to take away with him. First Luton, now Birmingham, and to a certain extent Wigan, have combatted our early season tactics well, kept Ethan Laird and Kenneth Paal out of the game, pressed us aggressively and found us not willing to roll our sleeves up and go with them on that.
"Last season, perhaps you didn’t mend the roof when the sun was shining,” was Beale’s assessment of what he inherited here. Third in the table, five wins from seven, the sun is most definitely beating down. But there’s been one or two things this past couple of weeks that might require a ladder and a few fresh tiles before they manifest and cause us a problem.
Links Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
Birmingham: Ruddy 7; Colin 6, Dean 6, Sanderson 6, Trusty 7, Longelo 7; Chong 8 (Hall 81, -), Bielik 7, Mejbri 8 (Bacuna 54, 6); Hogan 7 (James 88, -), Deeney 7 (Jutkiewicz 81, -)
Subs not used: Etheridge, Graham, Bellingham
Goals: Trusty 4 (assisted Bielik), Longelo 29 (assisted Mejbri)
Bookings: Mejbri 7 (miracle), Trusty 35 (foul), Bielik 55 (foul), Longelo 78 (foul)
QPR: Dieng 5; Laird 5, Balogun 5, Clarke-Salter 4 (Dickie 21, 5), Paal 5; Johansen 5 (Amos 45, 6), Field 6 (Richards 81, -), Iroegbunam 5; Roberts 3 (Armstrong 27, 5), Chair 5, Dykes 4
Subs not used: Kakay, Archer, Dozzell
Bookings: Dickie 53 (dissent), Balogun 60 (foul), Iroebugnam 70 (foul)
QPR Star Man — N/A
Referee — Tim Robinson (Sussex) 3 Pathetic. Should be genuinely embarrassed.
Attendance — 19,007 (2,277 QPR) And oh what fun we had trying to find a train to take us home.
If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.
Pictures — Action Images
The Twitter @loftforwords