The decision by Paul Hart to resign last week after just five games in charge at QPR has sparked another round of general pointing and laughing from the back pages of the papers. LFW examines the last seven days coverage of our club in the media.

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A friend of mine, scrambling round on the bottom rung of the journalism ladder like myself, forwarded me an e-mail recently from her editor listing different angles she wanted to see covered during the “big freeze” which included the simply wonderful line: “the council have told us in statements that they have plenty of grit and supplies are not running out but we need stories saying they don’t and they are.” I was reminded immediately of the classic Family Guy line from Asian reporter Trisha Takanawa: “Is Quahog in the grip of a serial arsonist? The police say no but my producer says yes.” So close to the truth it’s scary.

Of course this week there has been no need to dig frantically for an angle at Loftus Road - the story of an ever deepening farce perpetuated by three exceedingly rich men whose knowledge on running a successful businesses could fill volumes but all of whom would apparently struggle to fill the back of a postage stamp using a thick pen with tips on succeeding in football rumbles on and on and on.

While the initial stories solely focussed on the farce that QPR has become may have subsided, journalists across the board are using QPR as an example of bad practice when writing about success stories elsewhere. Richard Williams’ Guardian profile of Tony Pulis’ success at Stoke included several paragraphs on our club, with Briatore put across as the polar opposite of the Coates regime that has lifted Stoke into the Premiership and kept them there. Williams said: “Whatever Briatore's record may be in other areas of business, his stewardship of a club founded more than 120 years ago is a scandal, violating every tenet of tradition and common sense.” Indeed.

Overall the papers seem to have split into three stories. That Hart was pushed after a row with Adel Taarabt, which you would think is unlikely unless the club has gone completely mad. That he was sacked because the board didn’t like his style of football, which smacks a little of trying to keep the fans onside because we hated it too. Or that he walked away when it became clear he wasn’t going to be allowed to sign the players he wanted, which sounds much more plausible.

The Mirror seems to give QPR more coverage than the other red tops, indicating that they believe they have a decent source at the club. On January 13 the paper reported that Hart would be sacked after falling out with midfielder Adel Taarabt over his lack of starts, and then when he did indeed leave two days later the paper gave it the big ‘as first reported in The Mirror’ before later admitting that a row with the board over transfers was the most likely cause of the departure.

A bigger piece today from the author of both stories, James Nursery, reiterates that Hart was indeed sacked, more on the say so of the players than anything else, and the resignation story is simply a line being put out to save face for both Hart and the club - it doesn’t look good for him to be sacked twice in two months, and it doesn’t reflect well on QPR to be sacking a boss after five games. Nursery also repeats his assertion, denied by Briatore in the same newspaper days earlier, that he will be gone from the club very soon anyway.

When the bad publicity is mounting, get a friendly journalist in - and they don’t come much more friendly for Flavio and Bernie Ecclestone than The Mirror’s Oliver Holt. Twice British Sports Writer of the Year Holt got his big break in 1993 when he moved from the Liverpool Echo to The Times as their motor racing correspondent and he has since cultivated an excellent working relationship with Bernie Ecclestone - he has been photographed sitting with Bernie in the C Club at Loftus Road for QPR matches. Have a vomit bag handy as you recall Holt’s name dropping extravaganza of November 2008 where he assured us Briatore would make a huge success of QPR because he went home with his jacket once - or something. Or his 2007 piece where Flavio is branded a “genius” and we’re told that “generally, when Bernie speaks, you stop.” Or this pearler from 2008: “I sat with Ecclestone and Briatore at Chelsea on Saturday and, believe me, their enthusiasm and commitment are not in question. I'd back QPR to win promotion to the Premier League next season and then the rest better watch out. These are not the type of men who hang about.”.

Holt’s latest exclusive interview with the QPR chairman basically seems to give Briatore free reign to talk complete bollocks with no come back at all. Ignoring the scene setting colour paragraphs at the start, where Holt arrives in Briatore’s office to find the Italian swaggering around amid magazine photoshoots of himself, the one sided bias of the piece is quite staggering and completely out of step with all other coverage and opinion of Briatore’s running of QPR. I can almost see Holt laid out across Flavio's desk signing Carly Simon's version of 'The Spy Who Loved Me' as he conducts the interview.

Briatore again repeats the line about QPR fans who turn up and “pay £20” wanting to criticise without the obvious subsequent questions about QPR fans paying considerably more than that because of his price hikes, or what exactly Flavio thinks he could do with QPR without those people turning up and paying for tickets and merchandise every week being asked in return. He is also allowed to run through the managers he has had at QPR and give some frankly ludicrous reasons why they cannot say they were sacked - “Gregory? Inherited him from a previous regime, Briatore said. Can't say he was fired. Paulo Sousa? He disclosed confidential information to the press about Dexter Blackstock being loaned out to Nottingham Forest and contract was terminated for breach of confidentiality. Can't say he was fired, Briatore said. It was Sousa's own fault.” Again with no comeback question about just what on earth is the difference between being sacked and having your contract terminated.

That interview with the Mirror was described slightly less kindly than I’ve just done as an example of “shameless brown nosing” in the Kilburn Times this week. Reporter Ben Kosky a has long been a critic of the new regime at Loftus Road, even before it was fashionable to be so. Their lack of investment in the youth set up has been a regular, and fully justified, target of Kosky’s angst and where unfounded comments that he was simply bitter about losing his position as club commentator after the takeover used to greet his pieces now it seems that the rest of the press and supporters have simply caught him up in the opinion that these three running our club might not actually have much of a clue what they’re doing. His latest article is more of the same but it is hard to find much to disagree with amongst it.

In times like this, with a smaller non Premiership club like our own, papers like the Kilburn Times and Ealing Gazette are invaluable to supporters. Nationals will cast a cursory glance at us and have a good chuckle at our mad chairman, do a few top tens of shortest ever managerial reins which of course never go back any further than 1992 when football was invented in this country, and then move onto their next carcass. People like Kosky, the Gazette’s Yann Tear and Paul Warburton and freelance BBC writer David McIntyre have been covering QPR for many years and will often provide a much better, more in depth and closer to the truth line than the national press. There is also a new blog out there from Alistair Kleebauer, another freelance who provides copy for the Hammersmith and Fulham paper which is worth a read. While Sky Sports proudly declared their exclusive on Hart’s departure late last Thursday, it was the Portsmouth equivalent of our local boys giving them the story.

Having said that, the Gazette’s continued reliance on the unnamed “QPR insider” is wearing as thin with supporters as it did with former manager Ian Holloway who speaks at length about just who he thinks that insider might be and how he uses these anonymous quotes in papers to undermine the manager in charge at the time. Last week’s insider line from The Gazette “QPR haven’t got the players to play long ball – it was suicide for Hart, and no good for the club’s ambitions” smacked of somebody desperately trying to make out Hart’s departure was entirely to do with the things the fans hated him for, rather than another argument over who is responsible for transfers at a time when Gianni Paladini’s role in this complete mess is coming under ever increasing scrutiny. And why would an anonymous insider want to make sure everybody thought that I wonder? It's a shame that our club, and more specifically our managers, continued to be undermined by these "anonymous insiders" four years on from Ian Holloway's messy departure.

With the advances in technology, the internet and 24 hour rolling news channels less and less people are getting their national and international news from actual newspapers. You’ll probably read the Metro if you find a copy laying around on the tube in the morning but less and less of us are going out of our way to spend 60p on The Times. When a big story breaks like an earthquake or a terrorist attack it’s phones and computers we turn to, rather than news stands. The Guardian was said to be losing £100,000 a day last year and has only stemmed those losses through a paid for App on the Iphone. Local newspapers providing much more indepth news coverage of specific areas can still rely on a more old fashioned style of reporting but for national newspapers to survive and compete they are increasingly having to focus on opinions, comment and campaigns. In the sports pages this tends to mean getting ex or current professional footballers and managers to write regular columns - The Times has Tony Cascarino, and he has had his say on our club this week as well.

Writing in his blog for the “Football Pools website Cascarino said: “The situation at QPR is laughable; they have chopped and changed their managers far too frequently for the players or team to build any momentum. Paul Hart was at the club for a very short period of time which was also disrupted by the recent weather conditions. Paul was unable to do as much work on the training ground as I’m sure he would have liked but still his departure is just another embarrassing managerial casualty at the club.

“QPR fans certainly don’t deserve what is happening to their club, the fanfare regarding the takeover suggested they would be the new Chelsea or Man City in terms of spending but that hasn’t really materialised. If the owners continue to illustrate their lack of knowledge of how a football club should be run, then for me, they won’t be promoted to the Premier League in the near future and in all honesty they deserve what they get.”

While agreeing with much of what Cascarino said I couldn’t help but laugh at this talk of a “fanfare” regarding the takeover that suggested we would be the new Chelsea. Was that the fanfare that Cascarino and the rest of the media created because QPR being the richest club in the world was a good line? I do love it when the media whip up a storm and then step back and tut at the over reaction to it forgetting that it was them that perpetuated it in the first place. The Brand/Ross/Sachs “scandal” is the best recent example.

I have also quickly tired of this idea of “poor Paul Hart”. Oh poor Paul didn’t have much time on the training ground. Poor Paul couldn’t get his ideas across. Let’s be perfectly honest here, it is absolutely crazy that our sixth permanent manager in two years has only last five matches but I’d struggle to find a QPR fan anywhere who thought Paul Hart’s “ideas” on how we should be playing were anything other than prehistoric nonsense. Standing Patrick Agyemang up front and lumping balls at his head is not an idea that takes too long to get across - in fact despite the training ground being under a foot of snow for the majority of Hart’s reign in charge we seemed to be getting to grips with it rather nicely. Hart said we wouldn’t be pretty, just two months after we played our best football in years and won handsomely with it, that we would be more direct and that we needed more performances like our “battling” one at Sheffield United in the FA Cup - for “battling” read boring and horrible to watch.

Like I say I know the situation is ridiculous but frankly I’m glad that bumbling old goat only got five matches to enforce these “ideas” on our playing squad. The problem with relying on players and managers for your copy is they all stick together. Jamie Redknapp on Sky is the biggest joke of them all - with his dad and cousin both involved in the Premiership you’re never likely to hear him upsetting anybody, and his opinions in favour of Harry and Lampard are, understandably, as biased as they come. Similarly you will never, ever, ever read Chris Kamara in The Sun saying “yeh, actually, he did a lousy job and deserved the sack.”

This outraged sympathy for “good football men” forced out by clueless football club boards and over emotional supporters is increasingly fashionable. Generally a managerial sacking is accompanied with opinion articles about how little time managers get and how chairman and supporters simply don’t understand the game in the same intricate way people like Paul Hart clearly do. No doubt if we did, we’d see the sense of spending three matches lumping long balls to Patrick Agyemang marked by Chris Morgan. The outpouring of grief in the media over the long overdue demise of Gary Megson at Bolton has had me in fits of laughter for days. Just try and remember it’s Gary ‘odious twat’ Megson we’re talking about as you read the following:

Sympathy will be thin on the ground if Bolton struggle to replace Megson, a hard-working manager who is popular within the game. Daily Mail, December 31

The situation was compounded by many Bolton supporters seeming to live in a bubble, refusing to acknowledge that the landscape of the Premier League has changed profoundly since Sam Allardyce left the club. Having done what he was initially appointed to do — keep Bolton up — Megson set about rebuilding the club, guiding the team to a thirteenth-place finish last season. There have been mistakes along the way — the £11 million signing of Johan Elmander, the Sweden striker, being one stick with which Bolton fans liked to beat Megson — but there were clear signs of a work in progress, even if the league table does not make particularly pleasant viewing. Signings such as Gary Cahill, Matt Taylor, Tamir Cohen, Lee Chung Yong and Ivan Klasnic hinted at a brighter future, but then time was one luxury that Megson was never going to be afforded by the faithless. So the majority of Bolton fans finally got what they wanted. Now they can pray they don’t get relegated.” The Times, December 31

”Unfortunately for Gary, the fans wouldn't quite take to him – they didn't quite endear themselves to him and they always felt there was something they disagreed with, no matter what he seemed to do," Allardyce said. "I always think that's a very unfortunate situation because in the end, if your fans decide that they don't like you then you've got very little chance of keeping your job, no matter how good you are. When you're in the job, you always think you should be given a little longer but obviously both sets of bosses believe they are going the wrong way and want to do something about it. Whether it's the right thing to do only time will tell. But I'm particularly disappointed for Alan [Irvine] and Gary and the only thing they can hope is that the clubs settle their contracts properly and let them move on with their lives.” Guardian, December 31

I find reading all of this hilarious. Megson chucking £11m, a King’s ransom to a club like Bolton, away on Johan Elmander simply brushed aside with talk of “hints of a bright future” closely followed by the truth which, as the league table clearly shows, would hint more at a future knocking about with the likes of us than anything particularly bright. How can sitting in the relegation zone playing terrible negative football be a sign of a work in progress? It’s a bloody disaster waiting to happen is what it is. Poor Gary, sympathy unlikely to be in great supply because he was popular in the game. A Premiership landscape that has changed profoundly so that clubs like Bolton cannot possibly ever achieve what Sam Allardyce did there ever again - conveniently ignoring Fulham last season and Birmingham this. Of course when Bolton did qualify for Europe Megson sent his reserve side to play a second leg tie at Sporting Lisbon, which should have been one of the biggest games in the club’s history. The idea was he wanted his first team nice and fresh for a big game at Wigan that weekend - which they then lost comfortably. Still, poor Gary.

Of all the criticism of Phil Gartside and the Bolton fans I have read not one single line of it has come from anybody who, like them, have put their hard earned cash into Bolton and have had to sit there and watch Gary Megson’s style of football. The problem is much of the criticism of the Hart and Megson departures has come from either people within the game, and the days of Brian Clough on The Big Match actually expressing forthright opinions about the sport are certainly long gone replaced with a Jamie Redknapp era where everybody is a wonderful lad and it’s impossible to say a bad word about anybody, or journalists who like to right copy about what a ridiculous state the game is in. It is, quite obviously, but it’s very easy to sit and write about how terrible the way Hart and Megson have been treated by QPR and Bolton fans when you don’t have to pay £30 every week to watch their God awful style of football.

Photo: Action Images

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