With two more loan signings taking QPR's total to six we take a look at what they're all bringing to the team and whether we made a mistake by not signing two of their predecessors permanently.

Picture the loan
I remember when Flavio Briatore first breezed into town one of the positive impacts I thought the takeover would have would be the reduced reliance on loan players. We had just stayed in the league under John Gregory largely thanks to the efforts of Lee Camp, Michael Mancienne, Jimmy Smith and, briefly, Inigo Idiakez and were already frantically scrambling around to borrow the likes of Mancienne again, Ben Sahar, Rowan Vine, Hogan Ephraim, Jason Jarrett, Martin Cranie and others to stave off the latest threat of impending doom.

However a year on and here we are again borrowing players from elsewhere to cover for our own shortcomings. Emmanuel Ledesma, Sam Di Carmine, Daniel Parejo, Gary Borrowdale, Lee Cook and Heidar Helguson are all available for selection against Wolves this weekend but none of them are actually ours.

Now you can dress this up any which way you like – we have a fee agreed for Ledesma to sign permanently, albeit an extortionately high one, and Borrowdale, Helguson and Cook could also pen permanent deals once their current temporary ones come to an end should we wish them to do so. In theory therefore you could say that we’re operating a sensible try before you buy policy and that is to be commended – no doubt most supporters would have signed Lee Cook for £1.5m straight off in the summer given the chance, now I bet most would be reluctant to do so with his form so far failing to impress greatly. Likewise Emmanuel Ledesma who many said after the Carlisle match should be snapped up immediately before the likes of Barcelona came sniffing about – now it’s a little bit cold and his new player freshness has warn off he looks wholly ineffective and lightweight. I bet I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who think we should pay £3m for him and one of those is the Genoa chairman.

Borrowdale is here to cover for our shortcomings in the transfer market that have lumbered us with two of the worst full backs we have ever had at the club and the same could be said for Helguson who joins a strike force that was not boosted during the summer when it blatantly needed to be. However even when the weather was warm and the trees still had leaves there was little talk of actually signing a striker, more loaning one – Ched Evans, Daniel Sturridge and a whole load of other people we have absolutely zero chance of signing permanently were linked. Don’t get me wrong I support the loan signings of Borrowdale and Helguson and I hope they both start this weekend, but I would have been more in favour of a permanent signing in the summer so we do not have to adopt these short term quick fixes later on.

A well timed and planned loan signing can be a terrific fillip for any club. Norwich survived on them last season, QPR the season before, and the two teams currently top of our division both have Premiership players on temporary deals in Michael Mancienne and Nicky Hunt to add a bit of quality and cover for injured players relatively cheaply. However QPR are now rapidly approaching the position, again, whereby we have too many loaned players to field all at once. You can field five at any one time and we have six now – Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds have both been given slaps on the wrist and nothing more for fielding six and seven respectively in recent seasons but the league won’t be that lenient forever, and have a history of holding QPR to account to set an example.

I’m forced to wonder just what our six temporary players are bringing to the set up. Like I say Borrowdale and Helguson are covering for previous mistakes and that is acceptable – we’ve been crying out for Helguson or a striker of any nature for weeks now. The other three or four though I’m really struggling.

Daniel Parejo is currently a young and inexperienced player slowly being destroyed before our eyes. His confidence is visibly draining away with each match to the point at Palace where he could not even control the ball on several occasions. The long raking passes he played in his early appearances with QPR are conspicuous by their absence and he is shrugged off the ball like a wet piece of tissue paper. I feel sorry for the lad at the moment, there is all this talk in the press about him coming from Real Madrid and getting paid a barrow load of money and that means the spot light is on him and he is out of his depth at the moment.

There seems to be an option to loan him for a further year, but we have little or no chance of buying him permanently so we are essentially giving him experience and trying to toughen him up for Real. Even ignoring the fact that playing poorly, getting constantly pushed off the ball and being abused by his own supporters at 19 years old will do him no good whatsoever is it really our job to prepare players for Flav’s mates, especially when it is to the detriment of our own team as Parejo’s presence was on Saturday?

The same applies to Sam Di Carmine who has scored one wonderful goal against Birmingham and has at least shown, on occasions, a bit of upper body strength and capability of coping with the physical demands of this league. That is only on the odd occasion though and mostly he has been ineffective and contributed little. Di Carmine is another we seem to have little chance of signing permanently, not that we would want to, so again we just seem to be preparing him for the big wide world at Fiorentina. Di Carmine’s presence is even more damaging than Parejo’s in my opinion because it has resulted in Angelo Balanta being loaned out to Wycombe – make a point of seeing his goal last night for the Chairboys, it’s fantastic. Now I personally fail to see the logic of picking Di Carmine ahead of Balanta, not only because one is ours and one isn’t but also because the one that is ours is a better player.

The same applies to Emmanuel Ledesma who has kept Hogan Ephraim out of the team. Ledesma justified that with good early season performances but is less impressive now and while you can justify it as a try before you buy exercise I would still rather see Ephraim given game time than him and it is arguable whether we ever seriously intended to spend £3m on him however well he did this season. It is also debatable whether Cook or Ledesma will feature very often in the diamond midfield system Sousa seems to favour – both will seemingly have to compete for the spot behind the striker with Rowlands, Parejo and eventually Buzsaky. Five into one doesn’t go.

Loan deals certainly have a place and a role to play – that role is either adding that little bit of extra quality to boost a team as Wolves have done with Mancienne, or to provide short term solutions to problems between transfer windows as we have done with Borrowdale and Helguson. They were a terrific way of keeping our place in this league when we were skint and simply could not afford to buy players that were good enough but that is no longer the case. I’m not convinced we need or should have six or more temporary players in our squad, especially when we seem to just be building them up for other teams to the detriment of our own. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts as always.

…and while we’re on the subject
Thanks to the travelling and extra previewing/reviewing required when QPR play Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday this is the first column I have had since our former loanee Michael Mancienne was called up the England squad for the friendly in Germany. It’s also the first one since we got our first sight of Martin Cranie back at Loftus Road with Charlton.

Mancienne arrived shortly after John Gregory was appointed along with Jimmy Smith and I got the impression that Gregory had been aware of them for some time and was just waiting to get a job so he could snap them both up. Initially it was Smith that impressed the most with eye catching long range goals and a good work ethic in midfield although that faded in the second half of the season and he found himself either stuck wide on the right or out of the team altogether. Mancienne went the other way, starting slowly and then improving.

One of the games early on in Gregory’s reign was a 3-2 win at Luton. On the way to that game Northern the Elder and myself were joined in our carriage by a man in a Chelsea training jacket – once he’d overheard us discussing the match he proceeded to ring several of his friends to tell them, bizarrely, who he was, where he was going and that he was a Chelsea scout. I would have presumed that as he was ringing them they knew who he was, where he was going and that he was a Chelsea scout but then I also presumed that it was more for our benefit than the person on the other end of the phone, if indeed there was anybody on the other end of the phone.

Anyway this Chelsea scout that was coming to our Luton match said to his phone that the only player worth watching on either side was Michael Mancienne. We raised our eyebrows at that a little bit because at the time we did not think he was playing particularly well but he quickly settled down and became one of our best players that season, if not the best.

Mancienne was one of those loans necessary to boost the quality of a poor team and his resigning for the whole of the following season was seen as a real coup at the time – especially with the spectre of transfer embargoes and administration hanging over us at the time. However last season Mancienne to me seemed to stand still and make little progress. He did not seem to be any better at the end of the season than he was at the beginning. I obviously was not the only one that thought so either because he failed to usurp Damion Stewart, Zesh Rehman or Matt Connolly from the centre of defence despite the amount of goals we leaked and spent almost the entire campaign at right back where I felt he was mediocre at best, though still a whole lot better than what we have in that position now.

Luigi De Canio advised the board he wasn’t worth pursuing for a third time and I cannot say I disagreed with him much. It did not surprise me when he went to Wolves because they have been sniffing around for a while but I must say I was shocked when he got his full England call up. Stuart Pearce said he had been one of the Under 21s star performers in recent games and while he was exceptional for the last half an hour of the second play off leg against Wales he was not for the first hour and looked totally uncomfortable with Reading’s Simon Church in the first leg culminating in a very poor defensive goal against. I think his full call up is somewhat premature.

This weekend Mancienne is back at Loftus Road with Wolves and while it will be interesting to see how he does it is worth bearing in mind that he is facing minimal opposition from our forward line. Wolves do concede a lot of goals despite their lofty position but I think by the end of Saturday’s game we’ll know no more than we do now – that Mancienne is a far better centre half than he is a right back.

The same can be said of Martin Cranie however I have to say I have big concerns about this boy whatever position he plays in at the moment. When he was signed on loan last season QPR conceded just one goal in his first month and he was absolutely outstanding, showing an awareness and positional sense far beyond his years. The play offs may even have been a possibility had he stayed fit for the full three months of his deal with us – ultimately though he broke his leg against Coventry, we conceded two goals and lost, and then went on a bad run through until the signings of Fitz Hall and Matt Connolly in January.

Many QPR fans hanckered after the return of Cranie during the summer however from what I saw last week at Loftus Road and Bramall Lane, where I was unfortunately present for a dire England Under 21 match, we have had a lucky escape. Firstly Cranie is now playing as a right full back rather than a centre half and much like Mancienne he won’t excel in that position as long as he’s got a hole in his arse. Cranie’s skills are in reading the play and picking off dangerous through balls, they are certainly not in pace and dealing with tricky wingers as he showed at Loftus Road by being done for speed by Damiano Tommasi for QPR’s first goal.

While I’m talking about Cranie’s arse it seems to be somewhat larger than when it was covered by QPR shorts. In face he seems to be somewhat heavier full stop, certainly carrying an excess. Playing full back instead of centre back, severely lacking in pace and carrying extra weight is not a good combination especially when you consider Harry Redknapp’s post cup final comments about Portsmouth’s young players celebrating the success rather too raucously even if they didn’t play on the day.

That seemed to be a barbed comment in Cranie’s direction – without going into details of his Facebook profile he makes little secret of the fact that he likes a drink. Don’t get me wrong, I like to go out wearing nothing but a leopard skin pair of hot pants as much as the next person but when you compare that to the interview in last week’s Guardian with James Milner where he admitted that apart from a taste of his dad’s beer ten years ago he had never touched a drop of alcohol because it would not do his football any good you see where young Martin may be going wrong. I thought he was very, very poor against us last week and not much better against a weak Czech side at Bramall Lane.

So in Mancienne we may have missed out through not playing him at centre half and then not pursuing his signing this summer, but with Cranie I cannot say I’m shedding too many tears that he is now with Charlton and not us. Comments welcome as always.

Palace in worthwhile match programme shocker
When was the last time you actually read a matchday programme? When was the last time you actually bought one? If we’re being brutally honest about them the internet and official club websites has rendered the club’s official matchday magazine increasingly irrelevant and redundant, especially when clubs just copy and paste material from the website and produce staid, tepid copy peddling the club’s views on how wonderful things are.

As with so many things in football as the importance and quality of programmes has declined so the price has increased and for the first time ever I have found myself paying £3.50 for one this season – at Birmingham City, and it was bloody terrible. Don’t tell Flav you can charge that much for God’s sake.

At QPR we have a reasonable programme that has received awards in its class in recent seasons. There is an element of copy and paste from the official website but when you consider that it’s often 60 pages in length and produced by a media staff that only recently increased to three people that’s understandable. The features are well written, although there is the usual element of all in the garden being rosey even when it’s not and there is a hefty whiff of the ghost writer about the manager’s notes, and I have enjoyed the question and answer pieces with some of the players this season – Damion Stewart was particularly interesting I thought, especially with his comments about playing with Fitz Hall.

Still at £3 a throw it is increasingly one of those things that supporters are cutting out of their matchday routine. I religiously buy the programmes to continue my Dad’s collection which goes right back to the First World War and it continues to irk me that I cannot get hold of a Carlisle or Swindon programme from this season for love nor money.

I cannot say I was too impressed at Selhurst Park on Saturday at being forced to fork out £4 for their version but I have to say I was very surprised when I finally got around to reading it. The publication was packed with interesting bits and pieces, including a bizarre ranting column from defender Matt Lawrence which I take must be a regular feature and was hilarious, and well worth getting even at the inflated price. Reading about Palace’s wonderful academy set up in detail was pretty depressing when compared to our own, their under 18s are above Chelsea in the league, but maybe that’s a topic for another column.

Anyway I found a programme entertaining and worthwhile and I thought that was worth flagging up as I don’t expect it to happen again any time soon. How irritating therefore that in my drunken state on the way home on Saturday night I have left the bloody thing somewhere between the 1825 service to Leeds and the chair in my living room. Retracing my steps yesterday yielded nothing and so the collection is now three short – if anybody has a Palace, Swindon or Carlisle programme that I could buy from them please get in touch loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.

Photo: Action Images

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