QPR’s return to pre-season training has seen three players and a coach leaving the club meaning as well as the inherited problems of last season Jim Magilton now has to tackle a load of new ones.

Definition of insanity
Having said that the fixture release last month had brought the buzz back for me I’m sorry to say that I’ve now slumped back into my pit of apathy just a month before the start of the 2009/10 season. Have you ever looked forward to the return of football less than you are doing at the moment? Last season was like injecting heroin into your eyeballs, painful at first but eventually you just go numb, and with QPR’s incoming transfer deals so far number zero the team has exactly the same problems it did in May.

They say it is the definition of insanity to repeat the same actions over and over again and expect a different result. Despite optimistic claims that we will add 30 goals to our team next season simply by having Vine, Buzsaky and Rowlands available again does little to persuade me that we are not doing just that. Vine was criticised before his injury for poor heading, work rate and goal scoring figures, Buzsaky came back from his last injury a shadow of his former self and Rowlands’ form last season was mediocre at best. That’s probably me being my usual miserable self but inflated expectations turned Loftus Road into a nasty place to play and watch football last season and I fear if fans are told to expect all three to come flying back into form and everything in the garden to be rosy and prolific again next season I feel it's important to put across the alternative point of view which is – none of them are getting younger, and no player has ever come back from injuries like that even better than they were before.

QPR failed to score on 23 occasions last season and drew 0-0 on 11 occasions. Since then no new strikers have arrived. How we can possibly think things are going to be any different if that remains the case into August is beyond me. Now it is worth pointing out that this June/July time is always a horrible one for supporters. People in football go on holiday, very little business is done, fans get impatient and suddenly it seems like everybody is spending millions while you stand still. At the moment only really Sheff Utd and Cardiff are making any serious moves and it’s not July 8 you need to be worried about lack of team strengthening, it’s August 8. Ian Holloway didn’t add people like Paul Furlong to our squad back in the day until the week leading up to the big kick off so there’s no need for flag burning and pitch fork waving just yet. Have them ready though, because at the moment in addition to last season’s problems we now have several new ones thanks to last week’s rush to the Loftus Road exit door.

Firstly we now need a new reserve goalkeeper with Lee Camp Forest bound and Jake Cole released, probably to Barnet. The end of Camp’s QPR career for such a paltry transfer fee and with so few tears shed is sad in my opinion. In three different spells Camp played exceptionally well for us at times – helping us to secure promotion and playing a huge role in two successful relegation fights. That he was dropped from the team on the say so of a man with no history in football whatsoever and left on the bench while message board keyboard warriors peddled stories about his private life sums up everything that is bad about QPR at the moment in my opinion. Radek Cerny had a terrific season last term and is undoubtedly our number one keeper, Lee Camp was earning too much and his desire to be a number one somewhere was too great to justify leaving him in the South Africa Road stand indefinitely just in case Cerny ever got injured so the move makes sense for all concerned and the money is about the best we could have hoped for having made it blatantly obvious he wasn’t wanted to Loftus Road. However the way his position became untenable, the first deal offered was snapped up and somebody who did great things for us was waved away amid a raft of “good riddance” “disruptive influence” and “he didn’t wave to us at Nottingham Forest” message board posts left a sour taste in the mouth. Hopefully he will be given a good reception when he returns to Loftus Road with Forest in August.

Likewise Damien Delaney who left on the same day last week to Ipswich. Fans often say after big defeats “I wouldn’t mind losing like that as long as the players try.” Damien Delaney is living proof that that is absolute bollocks. A likeable man off the pitch and in interview, honest and forthright with opinions, and a real one hundred percenter on the field Delaney could never, ever be accused by anybody of not trying for QPR or anybody else he played for. Even at Watford away last season, when this site awarded him a record low mark of one for his performance, he didn’t hide and kept trying. With Delaney what you see is what you get – committed, wholehearted, limited footballer. QPR fans didn’t rate him much because of the latter, and they will do well to remember that whenever they trot out that load of old tat about being happy in heavy defeat if everybody tries their best.

Regular readers will know I do not rate Delaney very highly, and I think we have done a terrific bit of business recouping £700k for him. However it is only a good bit of business if a replacement is brought in. Tommy Spurr is stalling on a contract at Sheff Wed and he’s the man we should really have bought in the first place. To shoehorn Matt Connolly into the left back spot, where he is barely adequate as opposed to his orgasm triggering brilliance at centre half, or rely on the mythical figure of Gary Borrowdale who hardly tore up any trees on loan at Brighton and Colchester last season would be a step backwards. We may as well have kept Delaney as do that. Bearing in mind Magilton tried to sign Delaney for Ipswich when he was there I fear this may also have been a decision made by the non-football people at the club. Whoever decided to sell him, it is now another problem to solve.

And while the jokes, justified though they are, about our fondness for central midfield players continue the welcome departure of Liam ‘tissue paper’ Miller and less well received Jordi Lopez move to Swansea, if that is where he ends up, leaves us once again facing up to life with the dynamic duo of Leigertwood and Mahon at the heart of our four man midfield – a concept that didn’t work when the players first arrived here and hasn’t got any more effective as they have increased in age, inconsistency and slowness. No team is ever going out of this league in the right direction playing 442 with Mahon and Leigertwood together in the midfield. It's just not going to happen.

To be honest I don’t mourn the departure of Lopez with quite the vigour of some. QPR fans are easily carried away on a modicum of success and quality and many would have paid the £3m for Ledesma at the end of August last year only for him to suddenly regress into a a bit of an ineffective lightweight. Lopez did score a wonderful goal against Bristol City, and he did put his foot on the ball and lead us around the park in a sort of Ray Wilkins like way that certainly nobody else at the club currently is capable of doing. However his set pieces were poor by and large and even his famous goal came less than five minutes after he’d drilled an identical opportunity straight into the wall. If he is indeed seeking £11k a week plus, which personally I doubt despite it being widely reported, then maybe we’ve done the right thing. While I appreciate I’m setting myself up for a big fall here if he takes the division by storm in Swansea colours next season we cannot on the one hand complain about wages and length of contracts being given out and then on the other moan that the club didn’t give another one out to Lopez on the strength of twelve reasonably impressive games last season.

However Lopez’s passing and awareness will be missed, especially if Mahon and Leigertwood take to the field against Blackpool again, and so Magilton could also do with finding a central midfield ball player in his own mould. Perhaps the rumoured signing of Argentinean playmaker Alejandro Faulin could be the first piece in the puzzle.

Magilton also needs a new fitness coach after the departure of John Harbin. Initially seen as nothing more than one of Dowie’s hangers on and an inevitable departure following his sacking Harbin’s popularity grew at Loftus Road and he will now be greatly missed. He spoke an immense amount of sense, his programme notes were the highlight of the publication and more importantly QPR seemed a lot fitter than ever before last season. Gone were the plethora of last minute goals against from the previous year and gone, by and large, were the regular stream of one month hamstring/calf absences. If QPR players were injured last season they were broken, ruptured or torn, they were not (Fitz Hall excluded and he’s fast turning into a lost cause in my eyes) pulled or strained. Pre-season training without a fitness coach, a bloody good one at that, is not ideal especially when he has decamped to a team that will be rivalling us in the Championship this season.

Work to do for our new boss then.

A unique opportunity
As you may or may not know LoftforWords has recently dipped its toe into the murky MI6-leader-holiday-photo-infested-waters of Facebook. Basically anybody can join our group and once the season has started a weekly digest of everything remotely interesting, and some of the really boring stuff as well, will be neatly packaged and sent to your inbox in the form of a new weekly diary entry. It has provided a purpose to Facebook for me other than looking at pictures of former girlfriends and the usual work avoidance techniques that everybody else uses the silly thing for.

Now if at this point you’re thinking that you don’t use Facebook to look at pictures of former girlfriends then I contest that you are a liar, somebody who does not have former girlfriends, or somebody who is steadfastly (either through age or stubbornness) refusing to be drawn into its sordid little legalised stalking world. If it’s the latter then I salute you because while you arrived at work this morning and came straight to LFW, I had to first wade through some “I hate Amy Whinehouse” and “I bet I can find a million people who hate cheddar cheese” requests. For the rest of you fear not, there’s no shame in it, we all do it – wondering just how horrendous life might have been if we’d stayed with that fat sweaty one after all.

Life is full of choices and rarely do you ever get an opportunity to go back to one you made a long time ago and see how things might have turned out had you gone another way. Paulo Sousa’s appointment as Swansea City manager gives QPR fans a chance to, as Jim Bowen might have said, see what we could have won. I do not wish to dredge over the filthy way Sousa was removed from his position at QPR again, but I am delighted that he is back in the game so soon and looking forward with some trepidation to this unique opportunity we now have with him safely in position at the Liberty Stadium.

There are two schools of thought on Sousa’s time with QPR. Everybody seems to agree that during his time here the matches were largely very dull, that the team was changed too much, that we didn’t score enough goals, and that QPR were not very good to watch. However opinion forks at this point into those like myself who feel that Sousa was simply doing what he could with what he was left by Iain Dowie and then given by Gianni Paladini in January and those that think he should have done a whole lot better and would have made the play offs if he had played a more attacking line up and left the starting eleven alone from one week to the next. That people are now trumpeting our potential chances this season based on the returns of Vine, Rowlands, Buzsaky and Agyemang – players Sousa rarely if ever got to use – adds weight to my argument I feel.

What we have now is a terrific argument settler. At Swansea Sousa has walked into a job with a team very similar to our own. Last season Swansea finished three places and seven points better off than QPR despite the R’s taking four points from them in two games without conceding a goal. We missed Buzsaky for most of the season, they missed Bodde, we won 12 home games, they won 11, they scored more than us, we conceded less. All in all there was little to choose between the sides.

We will now get a very good indication of what Sousa might have been able to do at Loftus Road had he been given time and resources. In Jason Scotland he has a player absolutely ideally suited to a number of the systems he tried and failed with at QPR where Sam Di Carmine was often left to flounder painfully on the end of Chris Morgan’s elbows. If Scotland is sold Sousa will get a fair say in how to spend the money and just to make the test even more interesting he has taken our excellent fitness coach John Harbin, his QPR assistant Bruno Oliveira and possibly our midfield playmaker Jordi Lopez with him. So we will also get to see through the club’s respective injury and fitness records how good Harbin is at his job, and how Lopez would have done over the course of a full season in this league had we met his personal terms.

I get a feeling across message boards that people like me who are intrigued by the prospect of what Sousa may or may not do at Swansea are viewed by others with some disdain. Let me clear one thing up now – I want us to finish above Swansea and take six points from them next season as much as the next QPR fan, and there will certainly be no joy in my ‘I told you so’ if Sousa does succeed with the Swans. But I am interested, fascinated even, and it’s something else that will, despite my constant complaining, keep me glued to the Championship again this season.

Speaking of I told you so…
A letter dropped through my door at the end of last week from our old friends at Rivals.net. It informed me that due to the poor commercial performance of my website and others on the Rivals network BSkyB were exercising their right to put me on three months notice and were closing the network immediately. They thanked me for my efforts and articles and promised that any associated domain names with the QPR site could be transferred back to me if I requested in writing.

I thought the letter summed the way that network has been run since the takeover by Murdoch’s empire nicely. The fact that I resigned from Rivals getting on for two years ago now, haven’t written an article for them since October 2007 and had a long running and ultimately successful battle with them over domain names more than a year ago had once again slipped their minds. I say once again, because despite all of that and my repeated letters and e-mails they have continued to write to me offering Sky Bet discounts if I plug it on my site and invites to their Christmas party (attended by Richard Keys apparently) since the day I walked away.

In truth I’m glad they are gone. A lot of hard work went into that site by me, Ingham, Ron and Simon, Adam and all the other QPR Rivals editors and to see it popping up on Newsnow feeds for the past 18 months with crass attempts at sensational headlines publicising their poll results from a voting pool of seven members really irked me. It also vindicates my decision to leave when I did and brings to an end a two year long farce that was predicted, to a man, by every single editor on the Rivals network back in 2007.

Those that remember our dearly loved old site will also remember that it melted frequently, had server problems on a weekly basis and looked like the website equivalent of the dregs at the bottom of an old Carling can. But the idea worked. The principal of having a site for all 92 Football League clubs worked and Rivals had been around for so long the vast majority of the club sites had active front pages and message boards.

When Sky took it over they promised a much needed revamp and the publishers were pleased however when the first designs came back it looked like the bastard love child of Myspace and Facebook, ignoring everything the publishers had said was important and boasting none of the simple features that fans liked about the old Rivals network. It was laughed out of town. At this point what should have happened was that Sky, and the ever irritating head of Rivals ‘Trevor’, should have sat down with a panel of publishers and worked on some proper designs. The publishers were happy to do this free of charge and would have provided invaluable input. Instead we were told “this is not going to turn into design by committee” and basically when the next designs came out, equally shocking, we would like it or lump it and the site was launched ten days later on the day of the midweek game. I remember laughing as the protestations of publishers on their forum were brushed aside with an order to promote the new sites heavily on the board so that “the excitement will grow in the run up to the launch.”

The fact that they made such a catastrophically poor job of it, ignored us to such an extent that it became laughable, and then closed the whole thing down this week led me to believe that Sky had done it deliberately to direct the many thousands of Rivals regulars to more profitable sites it had acquired such as Teamtalk or 365. I’m told by a man in the business that this is not the case and Rivals will go down in history as one of the all time great internet cock ups. If so then for a company as big and established as Sky to make such a ridiculously poor job of it, ignoring all resources that were available to them, is something they should be thoroughly ashamed of and the brilliant online community Rivals built up has now been lost.

My one regret is that the publishers at the time could not get together and agree as one on an alternative platform to move to and consequently we have ended up with many different networks such as this with 10-15 sites on each and the Rivals community spread out here there and everywhere. Still, LFW lives on despite the incompetence of Murdoch’s minions.

Photo: Action Images

Derby County Polls