With the transfer window fast approaching we look at what corners of the market QPR should be scowering for signings and whether Lee Cook should be one of the permanent new arrivals.

Because he’s worth it?
I have often been mocked on this website for my apparent love for Lee Cook. His plethora of man of the match awards in my reports during his previous spell here led some to speculate that there was more to our relationship other than just a fan and a football player, speculation that was hardly dampened when he turned up to be interviewed by me in Italy wearing only a bath towel.

Things came to a head when I received a signed photo of the lad as a gift on Valentines Day. Nice gesture. It currently sits on my desk at work in case you were wondering. You weren’t? Ok let’s carry on.

The simple fact is of course that Lee Cook kept getting man of the match awards on this site because he was the man of the match every week. In his first spell with us, beginning with a draw against Brentford and ending with a thumping Cook inspired home win against Cheltenham, he probably kept Holloway in a job at a time when even a bunch of car mechanics could come to Loftus Road and win. Although he didn’t initially recapture that form after signing permanently 18 months later he had been outstanding for Watford in the meantime and when Gary Waddock took over from Olly he was absolutely unplayable at times.

In 2006/07 with first Waddock and then John Gregory in charge Cook was the outstanding left winger in the division, topping the assists chart in a struggling team and strolling to the QPR Player of the Year award. It was no surprise when Fulham spent £2.5m on him that summer and we all wished him well, especially as he left his signing on fee behind to help QPR through hard times.

If you had said on the day he left that Lee Cook would be back a year later, for half as much money, I would imagine the reaction from many QPR fans would have been pretty favourable. If reports are to be believed that is about to happen – his boss at Fulham Roy Hodgson even admitted as much in a recent press conference. In January QPR will sign the left winger on a permanent deal for about £900k following half a season back on loan with us during which he has played 23 times and set up three goals. You would have thought that I would be at the front of the queue to welcome him back with open arms but to be honest I’m a little uneasy about the whole thing and speaking to the other Rangers fans I know I am not alone.

When asked for reasons why we should spend the thick end of a million pounds on Cook supporters of the idea all list reasons based on past achievements. He did this, he was this, he used to be that – and he can be again. Maybe.

You may have noticed I cut away from the story of Cook’s career early. After moving to Fulham for £2.5m he actually never played a game for them. He left QPR with a knee injury, passed a medical at Craven Cottage similar to the one Dean Sturridge took at Loftus Road, had half a match against QPR in pre-season and then spent the rest of the year on an exercise bike. By the time he was fit enough to play Lawrie Sanchez, who signed him, had been sacked and Roy Hodgson was the manager. Several players were ahead of Cook in the pecking order and he spent the tale end of last season on loan at Charlton, playing against QPR at Loftus Road for all of 15 minutes before leaving the field. Injured again.

Now before I move on to anything else imagine your reaction if I told you we were spending £1m on a player who was not Lee Cook who had been out for more than a year with a knee injury. You would hardly be jumping for joy would you? ‘Risky’ you could say. And you would be right.

In an effort to alleviate the risk QPR set up a loan deal for Cook, a chance for him to play some first team football and prove himself and a chance for Rangers to do a little try before you buy exercise. This all seemed very reasonable to me and I was delighted to see him sign back in the summer.

Now it seems we have tried, and we’re going to buy. But why? Has Cook really shown very much at all since arriving back in August? He started slowly, went out of the team but looked fresh and impressive on his return against Blackpool, Derby and Birmingham before slipping back to his form from the start of the season. I did not expect him to be the outstanding player in the team as he was last time because we are a different team now and he has had a bad injury but I expected, I don’t know really, more than we are getting.

There are reasons for this decline. Firstly when he was so good in his last spell he was crossing balls for Nygaard, Jones and Blackstock who were all very good in the air and played in partnerships up front. This season he is mostly just been crossing to Blackstock by himself, less options in the penalty box and the worst of the three headers left. When he was here before Cook was just about the only player we had with any ability – we got the ball, we gave it to Cook and we left him to it. Now the team has improved Cook is no longer the go to man. Less possession, less importance to the team and therefore less influence on games and less to aim at seem reasonable reasons for a lacklustre start to me.

Excuses or not though Cook has not been particularly impressive this season and I do wonder about the wisdom of spending a significant six figure sum on him. Cook has never been a winger that relied on blinding pace, an Andy Impey or Wayne Fereday type figure who pushed the ball past the full back and ran past him, and he has never been a winger that relies on getting to the byline to produce like, say, Andy Sinton. His forte is close control, beating a full back, and delivering a quality cross from 30 or 40 yards off the byline into the corridor of uncertainty between keeper and back four. Consequently he should not have suffered too much from any loss of pace caused by his injury but he will have suffered through us only having one target for him to hit. Either way he certainly has not done much of what he is good at this season.

The sense in splashing cash on him has been called into further question recently because we are no longer playing with wingers. Emmanuel Ledesma is out altogether and, when used, Cook and Hogan Ephraim have had to learn new roles behind the strikers or on either side of the midfield diamond. It does not seem to make much sense to me to be signing wingers for a manager that does not play with wingers, and Cook has not shown a great deal against Plymouth or Sheffield Wednesday to suggest he could be good enough to play that crucial role behind the front two.

I love to see QPR win and on his day Lee Cook is a player that can achieve that almost by himself – I remember a 4-2 win at home against Crystal Palace shortly after Gregory took over where Cook gave Danny Butterfield such a torrid time they founded a charity in the right full back’s name and launched a Christmas appeal for him. If ever there was a one man show in a match between 22 players that was it. If he can get back to anything like that form we have a bargain on our hands.

However I have seen little to suggest that he can get back to that level or justify his transfer fee so far and I would suggest keeping him on loan through to the end of the season and reassessing in six months would be a more sensible option than spending money on him now. I would be interested in your thoughts as always.

All I want for Christmas…
Does it not warm the cockles of your heart to see Hull City doing so well in the Premier League? No, me neither. Anybody who has had the misfortune to visit Hull with QPR in recent seasons is probably, like me, hoping and praying that their bubble bursts soon and they crash through the league to an inglorious relegation. That would of course mean we have to visit there again next season, but it would probably be worth it just to wipe that smug look of Phil Brown’s face. Jealous? Not much.

This time last season Hull had just lost 4-0 away to Southampton and drawn 1-1 at Charlton either side of a victory against Leicester. They were 11th in the table with 31 points from 23 games and were five points off sixth. QPR are two places and two points better off, they are three points off sixth. This time last year Fraiser Campbell was just settling in at the KC Stadium and really he was the only difference between a poor side that lost 2-0 at Loftus Road at the start of November and sat 15th in the Championship table and the one that beat Bristol City at Wembley. One high quality loan and suddenly from battling relegation they won the play offs.

If that, and the dire standard of our games at Hillsborough and Home Park last week, has taught us anything it is that the quality of the Championship is vastly overstated and it really does not take very much to succeed at this level. Even with two full backs that cannot play the game, a midfield with three of four players out of position and a strike force running it’s own miss of the season competition and boasting only three goals away from home QPR are not that far off having a team capable of winning the play offs in my opinion. Two players would do it, Ben Watson in midfield and Ched Evans up front. Both are likely to be available to sign or loan this January.

The forthcoming transfer window will give a real sign of our ambition I think. If we are going for the Premiership this season then I would expect to see Evans or somebody of his ilk loaned in to boost the strike force - Helguson has improved us no end but there are blind people out there that can see we’re still woefully short in attack. That won’t be the only arrival either.

If we are sticking with the three year plan idea then I would hope we will go for more signings in the mould of the Matt Connolly. When he first arrived Flavio Briatore spoke a lot about buying in young talent, allowing a team to grow together and slowly building towards the Premiership. That sounded terrific to me and the signings of Connolly and Ephraim were a great start. The problem is we haven’t made a signing like them since. We have added bog standard Championship players to our wage bill on long contracts – Patrick Agyemang, Peter Ramage, Damien Delaney, Gavin Mahon for example – and tippy tappy foreign kids totally unsuited to football in this country from Briatore’s mates.

Last January those type of signings could be excused because we needed quick fixes to get us out of a tight spot but there can be no excuse this transfer window. The signing of Gary Borrowdale on loan fills me with dread – this is not the sort of signing we should be making, this is the sort of signing we make because he has the right agent that we like to deal with. He is not particularly young or talented. We need another five or six signings like Connolly and Ephraim if we really are building for the future with a three year plan, I fear though we may just see another load of Agyemangs and Borrowdales added to our line up because we like their representatives and can get them pretty cheap.

Better players are out there and Crystal Palace’s Ben Watson would be a superb start. He would replace the laboured and plodding presence of Gavin Mahon and/or Mikele Leigertwood in the midfield and dictate the pace and style of our play. His presence would improve Martin Rowlands no end, and add a goal threat to our side as well. Warnock and Jordan are ramping up their bullshit output this week about hanging on to a tribunal and all the rest of it but Palace got stung at the FA with Bostock and would take a sensible offer in January. So make one.

Thanks to the imminent melt down at Southampton there are also a number of talented young players who tick every box that Flavio said we should be looking for available at St Mary's. There is rumoured to be Premiership interest but with the wages we pay, the first team football we offer, the manager we have and the part of the country we reside in we could put a very attractive offer on the table for Andrew Surman and Adam Lallana who will be available this January for about half their true worth.

Ched Evans and Daniel Sturridge at Man City are likely to be buried under a mountain of big name new arrivals at Eastlands and available for loan at the very least.

In my opinion is time to make a clear statement – if we are going for the Premiership this season then bloody go for it, if we are building for the future then let’s push the boat out and secure some of these promising young players on the same kind of deals we have afforded plodders like Ramage and Delaney.

Sadly the names I see us lined with hint at more Gary Borrowdale “whose you agent?” type signings mixed in with more youngsters on loan from Briatore’s mates. I will reassess on January 31, but this transfer window more than any of those we have had with the new owners so far will provide a massive indication of just what they intend to do with our team and hope to achieve with it because there are talented young player available at a price we can afford.

Book club
With 12 hours on a train facing me on Saturday morning I grabbed a couple of books on my way out to pass the time down to Plymouth and back. I travelled to Home Park with my brother Paul but I suspected, and was right as it turned out, that he would be asleep by Chesterfield and remain so until Exeter on the way down and then repeat the trick on the way back so books and music were essential.

Anyway I picked a copy of David Conn’s ‘The Beautiful Game?’ on my way out of the house purely by chance really and was so impressed by it I thought I would recommend it here. I initially bought this book before one of our midweek home games this season to read on the train down to London and back but found the first chapter or two dry, hard to read and to be honest pretty dull. It went back on the shelf when I arrived home and remained there. I noticed that my journalism lecturer at university was among the credits and afforded myself a wry smile as the run on, multi clause sentences that he moaned at me about so much about littered this work.

To be honest I have always found Conn’s articles to be very “worthy”. Oh isn’t it terrible that all these football clubs get away without paying the St John’s Ambulance, or wouldn’t it be wonderful if supporters ran every club in the land – that sort of thing. To be honest when your club is about to go to the wall fans care little about paying £900 to the St John’s Ambulance, sad but true, and having sat among QPR fans all my life and listened to them sing “Didier Drogba has aids” I would fear exactly which QPR fans would run the club if it ever came to pass. I am currently watching Bournemouth, one of the first fan owned clubs, just out of administration yet again and struggling with Blyth Spartans. Hardly a ringing endorsement of Conn’s ideal, and even on of the examples he uses in the book of 'how it should be', York City, get relegated from the Football League altogether at the end of the season - but the fans ran on the pitch and chanted 'we'll support you ever more' after the last match so that's ok. He has always seemed idealistic rather than practicle to me and to be honest I only picked his book up because it was reduced to a tenner in the book shop at the railway station.

If you haven’t read this book yet, read it right now. Order it, borrow it, steal it – read it.

Once the first couple of chapters had passed I got stuck into it on Saturday and now cannot put it down. It is superb. Conn talks a lot of sense throughout and his consistent message of living within your means and not as a rich man’s play thing should be ringing bells all over the place with QPR fans.

Among the other tales of what a bloody stupid game we all follow is the one of Graham Mackrell who you may recall spent about ten minutes at QPR working with Gianni Paladini when he was running the show. I do not recall at the time reading anything about Mackrell’s previous role at Sheffield Wednesday where he was, and here’s a title right up there with ‘press officer for the Third Reich’ and ‘head of childrens’ services at Haringey Council’, the ‘safety officer’ in charge of Hillsborough at the time of the disaster. Hillsborough, you may or may not know, was a stadium that, under Mackrell, hosted that lethal FA Cup semi final in 1989 with a safety certificate not reviewed or renewed for a decade beforehand despite numerous changes to the ground such as the removal of crush barriers and addition of fences that proved to be lethal to 96 Liverpool fans.

After the disaster Mackrell refused to resign and issued a 109 page document to the subsequent enquiry denying Sheffield Wednesday’s responsibility for, well, any of it. Later in his career Mackrell worked at West Ham when they fielded an ineligible player, Emmanuel Omoyinmi, against Aston Villa in a League Cup match – a fact only uncovered when a fan wrote to the league to point it out. West Ham, who had won the first match, had to replay and lost second time round. Mackrell resigned immediately because “it was the right thing to do.” Worthy or not Conn is right to say that “we live in a strange country.”

Like I say, if you haven’t read it yet get a copy immediately.

Photo: Action Images

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