This week we look at some meagre aims for the rest of the season, and I bet yours are different, and the apparent departure of Steve Brown from the youth set up.

What is your deepest fear?

I went out for a Gordon Ramsey pie on Tuesday night. That is not rhyming slang for something else, it is as it sounds. Regular watchers of his various Channel Four swear-a-thons may remember him turning around a restaurant in Sheffield a couple of weeks ago and after hearing good reports Mrs Clive and myself decided to try out their ‘pie night’ this week when neither QPR nor Ipswich had a Tuesday night match. It was excellent in case you are interested, I have never been to a restaurant where there is only one choice for starter, main and desert but the food was really good all the same.


On the tram home I grappled with my crusty old mobile phone for a bit trying to find out what had gone on in the world of football while I was literally eating all the pies. We know now that Swansea, Birstol City and Burnley all suffered surprising set backs against teams from the lower reaches of the league. Bizarrely this meant QPR actually moved up a place some ten days since we last played a match of any sort. I should have been delighted with this. The weather and cup tie induced gap in our fixtures has enabled other teams to pull away and over take us in the top ten of the Championship and having left the field at Nottingham Forest last week as a play off chasing side we will take to it again on Saturday evening firmly ensconced in mid-table - through no fault of our own at all. To see us pick up another game in hand while our rivals picked up a solitary point between them should have warmed the cockles of my heart.


I just cannot get into it though. I have tried to be interested in what Swansea are doing and working out what it all means for us and crossing my fingers for other results but in truth the only time I have really cared about something that is happening to another team in our league was on Monday when Cardiff were at Arsenal and I wanted Arsenal to win so we did not lose our Sheffield United Saturday home match. And I only cared about that because I have already bought train tickets to get to it. The fact is I am not that interested in making the play offs this season and would be pretty terrified if we were to somehow make the jump up to the Premiership in May.


I know I am a miserable bastard sometimes and it seems strange not to want swift and immediate promotion for our team but my feelings are for once born out of a feeling of happiness and contentment with the state of things in our team at the moment. I like watching QPR under Paulo Sousa. I have confidence in our defence and I am impressed with our midfield. We often look like we might struggle to score but we have bagged seven goals in our last three away games which is as many as we had managed in the entire season up to that point and I am happy that I see progress being made. I worry that if we go too high too fast then we may spoil the steady progress that is being made.


You may counter that by asking were Hull City really any better than us this time last season and were they ready? You’d be right to do that. But I would suggest that Hull may still be relegated this season, and if they avoid it they will have done so only through results achieved early in the season when they were still riding the crest of their promotion wave and several teams underestimated them and were not expecting them to come and attack them. If they don’t come down this season they will next. Watching them against West Ham a fortnight ago was embarrassing.

A glance down to the bottom of our league at the names of Charlton, Southampton, Watford, Coventry, Norwich, Derby and Forest reveals just what damage can be done by relegation from the Premiership and I have little doubt that if this QPR team was to be promoted this season it would take more than £50m worth of players to give us even half a fighting chance. Sunderland spent £70m and still nearly came straight back and they were better when they went up than we are now. Derby are the best example of the damage that can be done and there are more Derby Counties around than there are Hull Cities.


I do not think we are good enough yet to make the top six and I certainly won’t be losing any sleep over other teams’ results. So rather than fretting over other results and hoping we win all our games to make the six between now and the end of the season I would like to see the following:

- Balanta and Rose given a chance. Both have shown in flashes that they could be important players for us in the future. Rather than giving other club’s players a run on loan lets give our own a go and see how they do. Giving them first team games now when the pressure is off is money in the bank for later when injuries and suspensions may force us to rely on them in a more hostile situation. Balanta in particular has been out, served his time, and should now be given a chance to show us what he can do.

- Rowan Vine in some sort of action. He will be like a new signing in August and will pep up our attack considerably. Add in Akos Buzsaky who would thrive in the role currently occupied by Liam Miller and our attack looks as exciting as our defence for next season with no need for additions.

- A settled side playing with freedom. I think after a couple of months of chopping and changing we are now getting to see what Paulo Sousa believes is his best side and by and large I agree with the side he has picked in recent matches. Let’s give this side a chance to gel and play in this system between now and May so everybody knows their role come August. Sure put Balanta in for a few games, give Rose a run out, let’s see if Lopez can do a job for us long term but hopefully the team announcements bearing six changes for each match and a new system each week have gone now.

- The Lee Camp situation resolved. He is either going or staying. If he is going then let’s set Forest and any other suitors a clear deadline with our terms and then if they do not meet it that is it. If he is staying then let’s have him training with the first team and either in the team or on the bench. No more bumping him off to the juniors with Reece Crowther on the first team bench. If he is staying then no more interviews with Radio Nottingham. We do not need to be debating this whole thing again after we play Forest next season.

- The scouting situation resolved. QPR do not currently have an official chief scout. Who is watching players? Who, for example, is at Ipswich tonight watching our opponents on Saturday? I presume Sousa will be at Portman Road tonight and was at the Emirates on Monday watching Cardiff and was at Hillsborough last night watching Barnsley but then who is watching Barnsley and Cardiff for us on Saturday? We were spoilt with Mel Johnson but a club needs a good scouting network and a chief scout and it is one of the things I worry about.

- Dead wood clearance completed. Parejo, Ledesma, Tommasi and Rehman have gone and that is a good thing as far as I am concerned. One of them could not be bothered, one of them was too old, one of them was not good enough and the other showed flashes but was not consistent enough and, at the end of the day, was not our player and was obstructing the path to the first team for players that we do own. Much as he shows the odd nice touch and a good awareness of space I would hope and presume that Sam Di Carmine will not be kept on. He may go on to make me look very silly and be a world class player, he certainly has the positional awareness to do it, but at the moment he goes to ground too easily and brings a fraction of what Helguson does to our team. Gary Borrowdale too is drawing a handsome salary for no return. Our squad is a reasonable size. With three departures and three new arrivals I think we would be just about there. We are weak at full back and in attack. There is no need for the major surgery we have seen in the last three transfer windows this summer in my opinion.


I’ll continue to moan and shout and go mental when we score and be devastated when we lose and live and breathe the club, but my ambitions for the rest of this season are simple ones out of fear for what we might go on to achieve and what might happen to us if we do. Anyway I have been playing with the new LoftforWords league calculator and I have us finishing ninth with 70 points which is fine by me. Wolves and Reading are the top two in my little world with Cardiff, Birmingham, Swansea and Preston in the play offs in that order. Although looking at my results I have Wolves getting 98 points which I don’t think they will and Burnley missing out on the play offs with 72 points which should be a pretty safe total to guarantee them a top six finish. As you all know I’m rubbish with predictions anyway. You give it a go and let me know how you get on.




Looking after pennies or pinching them

It is yet to be confirmed by the club but the Kilburn Times, Ealing Gazette and other papers that cover Rangers are reporting that Steve Brown has been relieved of his duties as youth team manager due to cost cutting measures taken by the club. Brown has just returned with his team from Italy where they won one and lost two games in a difficult group in the Copa Carnevale tournament and his role will apparently be filled in house by Keith Ryan and Stephen Gallen.


As it is yet to be confirmed there is little point in speculating whether or not this is even true, although the papers reporting it are in different league to the likes of the Sub-Standard when it comes to reporting on QPR so I’ve little reason not to believe them. It could be that Brown is to be replaced by somebody else in preparation for an impending switch to academy status. Yeh, I know, optimistic. I told you I was feeling pretty content with life at the moment. It just seems a strange place to make a saving, and a small saving it will be, when you consider we have just signed another midfield player this week and still have Gary Borrowdale on our books.

I am sorry to keep coming back to Borrowdale but he cost us anywhere between £100k and £750k in transfer fees depending on where you get your news from, plus an agent’s fee, plus a weekly wage which will be a tidy sum if our other signings are anything to go by. Yet the manager didn’t, and apparently still doesn’t, want or need him. Not his fault, but when you are splashing out that kind of money in those kind of circumstances it seems strange to fire the youth coach to save costs to me.


It is fairly obvious to me that QPR will run at a loss this season. A big one. I base this on the fact that prior to the takeover we were getting gates similar to our current ones or bigger, we had an inferior playing staff on a fraction of the wages the current lot earn, we had done nothing to the ground for years and we still lost millions a season. Even with the new sponsorship deals, the increased ticket prices and the ridding of the ABC loan interest it is hard not to see QPR making a big loss this season - several million at least. We are playing in a ground devoid of pitch side advertising and paying customers in both the executive boxes and C Club don’t forget.



The new owners must have expected that. Loftus Road is not big enough to hold more than 18,000 people even if it sold out every week which it doesn’t so to pay the wages of players like Routledge who get you into play offs and promotion races they were always going to have to put their hands in their pockets. But hopefully this was budgeted for, these people are seriously experienced businessmen and have not made their money by throwing it around after all. It is a concern that we are laying off a youth coach for cost cutting reasons - a youth coach would surely have been part of said budget? Running a successful youth set up can actually save the club money as I discussed last week - it could have saved us some this year had we left Parejo and Ledesma where they were and played Balanta and Rose instead.



Brown is apparently, and almost certainly, not the only member of staff to be released in recent weeks as this cost cutting continues. If we really are skint (again!) then perhaps my first part of this article should be revised, perhaps we need to be into the Premiership as quickly as possible to start paying bills. That however would go against the long term plan stated by the board members when they arrived and hint that perhaps they did not anticipate and budget for losses quite on the scale we have made. Hopefully this is not the case.




I look forward to this story being confirmed or denied by the club and, if it is true, reasons given. While some wringing their hands and moaning will be the same people that complained when Brown was brought here in the first place to replace the popular Joe Gallen and said he was simply one of Gregory’s mates being given a ‘job for the boys’ it is certain that a youth team needs a coach. Hopefully this is a forward thinking move than a penny pinching decision taken for tiny short term gains at a time when the club is wasting so much money elsewhere.




...and finally

Congratulations to the QPR Football in the Community Scheme which became a registered charity this week. The hard working staff on the scheme joined the first team squad and others at a House of Lords Reception on Tuesday night.


The only serious coverage this scheme has ever had outside of the match programme and official website is in the Daily Express and associated columns where our old chum Mick Dennis, in amongst rants about the lack of hot drinks in the School End a decade ago, decided to give it a bit of a panning for failing to submit anything worthy of praise to the Football League Awards that he sits in judgement on. That completely ignored the hundreds of thousands of young people in deprived boroughs around Loftus Road that have been helped and coached by QPR staff over the years but it gave him a chance to talk about Norwich City in glowing terms again which was of course the intention. There has been no mention from Dennis this week about QPR’s trip to the Lords and future plans for their community scheme needless to say.


I will write in more detail about this next week as I am attending a presentation by the community staff at Loftus Road on Saturday before the Ipswich game but it would have been remiss of me not to mention it this week with all the coverage it is justifiably getting floating around various websites.

Photo: Action Images

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