Turns out the Express do let their reporters write stories that don’t include references to Diana or “Maddie”, and we still await the next Ronaldinho to emerge from our youth set up

You couldn’t get a hot cup of tea in our away end eight years ago
That’s right folks, hold the front page. The Daily Express’ Mick Dennis has been getting stuck into our club again this week. Last week he accused us of ruining football through having rich owners while good old Norwich City did it the honest way. Apparently our club, when it was busy trying to keep itself alive, should have been doing more to improve the facilities in the away end aswell.

Once we’d got over the shock of the Daily Express carrying a story that didn’t refer to Princess Diana, Madeleine McCann or an influx of immigrants taking our jobs and houses we managed to come to the crux of his complaint.

Basically in 1989 his kids got a bit scared when the Ellerslie Road bogs were over crowded, and then he came back in 2000 and the tea machine was broken. For those reasons we don’t deserve our new investment and are destroying football with each passing day. Thankfully QPR fans have been occupying the small minded git with e-mails and letters for the last ten days explaining to him how it’s a bit of a shame that a little club like us should be accused of such a multitude of crimes basically because he couldn’t get a cup of tea eight years ago. Rangers fans have also been editing his Wikipedia page, and slating his book on Amazon. You’ve got to laugh really.

Sadly the e-mails must have dried up this week as he’s back again with another anti-QPR tirade based around our lack of nominations for a 442 community award that he judged. Apparently we made a grammatical error in one of our submissions as well. Christ - hold the front page again. Presumably Mick misses the irony in trying to pass off “And?” as a grammatically correct sentence not three paragraphs later, and giving the word “award” a capital A throughout his piece for no discernable reason whatsoever.

Norwich are of course fantastic in the community – providing help to asylum seekers apparently. The Express won’t like that Mick, don’t let your news desk find out!

The fact that our community scheme, that does a huge amount for young people from poor backgrounds in West London, was rewarded by the Prince's Trust for their hard work just last season didn’t warrant a mention. Neither, it seems, does the fantastic, respectful reaction of the fans players and officials of QPR when we visited Carrow Road for Bryan Gunn’s first match following the death of his daughter.

We like a centre half at full back
In a week when Marcus Bignot has departed for pastures new after a hugely successful second spell with QPR we’re eyeing up two northern defenders for our troublesome left back position. Sheffield Wednesday’s Tommy Spurr is a player I rate and have admired on my visits to Hillsborough over the past couple of seasons since he broke through into the first team – it’s so refreshing to see QPR linked with players I’ve seen and liked in past matches, rather than forcing me to log in to Soccerbase trying to find out just who the hell our new signing is.

We’re also after, and almost certain to sign either today or tomorrow, Hull’s Damien Delaney. Now Spurr and Delaney both play left back for their clubs but that’s not all they have in common – both players are unusually tall for full backs and both started out life as centre halves.

Now Spurr is a player I’d love us to sign, Delaney isn’t really. I’m not sure Delaney is actually that much better than Chris Barker who currently occupies that position, but that’s not the point I’m going to labour on at this juncture. It’s clear that the traditional little, nippy ball playing full back in the Marcus Bignot/Clive Wilson/Rufus Brevett mould is a thing of the past at Rangers. The more sober amongst those that travelled to Sheffield last week will have noticed the cross for Big Dave’s goal came from Matt Connolly – another tall centre back turned into a full back and encouraged to bomb down the line.

Connolly is a product of the Arsenal academy and can clearly play a bit as well as defending solidly so he seems ideally suited to the position – although he did give the ball away too cheaply in the second half at Bramall Lane, we’ll forgive him that as he’s young, just arrived and learning a new position. Spurr has settled down well to the role at Wednesday while Delaney may well tax the coaching abilities of De Canio even more than Rehman and Malcolm did if he’s to become the left back we’re so desperately crying out for.

De Canio regularly changes tactics and formations during the match so these defenders comfortable in more than one position will certainly come in useful as the season progresses. Whether we’re going to stick with a flat back four and have tall full backs, or switch to a three at the back system which would certainly suit Connolly on first glance, it seems the days of us being beaten to crosses at the back post are coming to an end.

Still, it would be nice to have a cultured right foot like that of David Bardsley delivering the ball from deep right again – hopefully Connolly’s assist last week is the first of many.

Our youth team continues to disappoint
Remember when we spent all summer fretting over Shabazz Baidoo signing his new contract? We were all panicking about him going to Norwich (don’t worry Mick, we’ve finished with you for now) and his agent was playing silly buggers and all the rest of it. He ended up with a two year contract when all our other juniors were getting one year, and he ended up earning more than the rest of them as well. We all breathed a sigh of relief, a precious jewel secured for the future. What shrewd business it looked as well when he slammed in a last minute equaliser against Leeds United at Loftus Road.

Some would say his Devon White style punched equaliser against Luton Town at Loftus Road was worth the contract by itself but in the end that only set us up for a miserable replay at Kenilworth Road and, well, we all know what happened next.

Overall though it was bad business. Baidoo left the club six months early this week, possibly to join Dagenham and Redbridge, with just four goals to his name. His supporters will say that, like Jamie Cureton, he’s suffered from the QPR disease of assuming little pacy strikers automatically make good right wingers but basically he wasn’t good enough for the Championship, and didn’t really show enough to suggest he’d be any more useful one league lower.

Another youth team graduate falls by the wayside. Dean Parrett and Ray Jones apart we haven’t produced a talent of our own since Richard Langley, and even he didn’t turn out to be the world beater we’d all hoped for. Not since Gallen, Quashie, Dichio, Challis, Perry, Brazier and others came out of our youth team has the set up actually produced a batch of players good enough for the first team, and only three of them went on to have any kind of career.

The youth team is under funded and under staffed. It relies on the donations and fund raising of our fantastic supporters and it has academies at Fulham, Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and others right on its doorstep ready to poach the odd Parrett or Oliver Sprague we do mange to unearth. The boys also spend their Saturday mornings playing the likes of Brighton, Orient, Brentford and Colchester.

Do we honestly expect to produce players this way? The boys need proper coaching, and to play in a challenging league. If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing right – we either scout, coach and play our boys properly with a view to bringing three or four first team quality players through every year or we give up altogether. The set up we have now is not fit for purpose, and it’s not fair to the boys that play in it. I hope a decent portion of our new found wealth is put towards a long term plan for attracting and developing players of our own, rather than buying dodgy full backs from Hull City.

Photo: Action Images

Blackpool Polls