QPR fans will be able to cheer a Ferdinand in Hoops again this season as Les' cousin Anton has completed a big money move to Loftus Road from Sunderland.
Anton Ferdinand is a Peckham born 26-year-old centre half who came through the ranks at West Ham before joining Sunderland for a hefty £8m fee in 2008. He is the brother of Man Utd centre back Rio Ferdinand and cousin of legendary former QPR striker Les.
Ferdinand broke into the West Ham first team in the 2003/04 season, and was a regular the following season as they won promotion back to the Premiership via the play offs. A year later he returned to the Millennium Stadium with the Hammers for one of the greatest FA Cup finals of all time against Liverpool but his experience was to be an unhappy one. After the game finished 3-3 and extra time had been played Ferdinand missed a crucial penalty in the shootout as Liverpool secured a scarcely deserved win.
At Sunderland Ferdinand was part of an expensive recruitment drive by manager Roy Keane following the Mackem’s own promotion into the Premiership. Keane spent the thick end of £70m in his first season as a top flight manager but only kept his side up by the skin of its teeth and left the club midway through the following season as the bad results kept coming despite further significant outlay. Ferdinand has often been named as one of Keane’s most outlandish purchases, probably costing double his true worth at the time. Keane’s prediction that Ferdinand would go on to play for England at senior level has yet to come to pass.
Despite dividing opinion on Wearside Ferdinand has started this season as first choice, partnering former Man Utd defender Wes Brown at the heart of the Sunderland defence in the absence of Titus Bramble.
Keeping up the summer theme of unearthing indiscretions from our new signings – Ferdinand was fined two weeks wages by West Ham in 2007 when he lied to the club about visiting his grandmother on the Isle of Wight when he was in fact going to his twenty second birthday party in South Carolina.
He has signed a three year contract at Loftus Road for an undisclosed fee.
The club's moving forward and things seem to be buzzing around here at the moment. I came down from London on Wednesday and spoke to the gaffer, and was impressed with his thoughts on where the club is going to go. I've heard good things about the manager and, after speaking with him, it's clear that he wants the best for me and wants me to do well. As soon as I came out of the meeting with him, I knew that QPR was the club for me." -Anton Ferdinand
“Anton's a player that I have always admired. He's got so much to offer. When you look at centre-halves in this country, you won't see much better than Anton on a good day. I'm going to try and give him more good days than bad! He's got to work very, very hard, but I see a lot in him. He's got a lot still to prove and hopefully he's with the right team to do that with." - Neil Warnock
Overpaid, overpriced, accident prone, laughably inferior to his brother – it’s all been written about Anton Ferdinand, and a good deal of it has probably been written on LFW before. But, as I’ve written about Shaun Wright Phillips should he sign as well, things in this transfer window are all relative.
Had Chelsea just gone out and signed Anton Ferdinand from Sunderland we’d all be laughing now – laughing very hard indeed. We’d be looking forward to the legendary collapses in concentration, and hoping that they came just at the crucial point of one of Abromovic’s treasured Champions League quarter final matches.
But we are not Chelsea or Man City or Liverpool or Spurs or even Wolves or Fulham. We are QPR, we haven’t been here for 15 years and we’ve already established that our team is lacking in several areas at the new higher level. What we need is to improve our team to a point where it can stay in the league, then improve it again so it can consolidate its position, and then improve it again so it can compete and then maintain it. Fulham spent inordinate amounts of money when they first came into this league on players like Steve Marlet who wouldn’t get close to their team these days. They did it to stay in the league and give them a platform to build on. These days they don’t need to spend half as much in the transfer windows – just enough to keep things ticking over. It’s cost Al Fayed £196m to do this over the last decade, but it seems our new board is happy to swallow similar losses at the moment.
Anton Ferdinand has Premiership experience, lots of it. He knows what it’s like to mark Premiership strikers every week. Sure he’s not one of the best at it, but people like Vidic aren’t going to be hurrying down to Shepherds Bush just yet despite the strides we’ve made in the past week and a half. And considering we lined up at Wigan on Saturday with Fitz Hall and Bruno Perone as our centre backs it would be hard to argue he’s not substantially better than what we have already. Indeed Sunderland fans have actually warmed to his performances over the course of 2011. However it's equally difficult to say, with Sebastien Bassong and Scott Dann knocking around for similar money today, that we couldn't have done a bit better.
The problem I’m finding now reading through message board posts and news comments is that the Fernandes takeover has sent expectations sky rocketing. We are a brand new Premiership club with a tiny ground that cannot sustain a team even in the division below. We’re probably paying wages to people like Barton, Young and now Ferdinand far in excess of anything we’ve paid before in the club’s history and far more than we can afford without hand outs from the board. And yet I’m seeing comments that Young and Traore aren’t good enough, that Michael Owen would be a viable option, or Rio Ferdinand. It really hasn’t taken long for the lunatics to take over the message board asylum.
What Neil Warnock is attempting to do is inject much needed quality into our team by attracting players that want to come to us, and while he's certainly breaking the bank he isn't smashing it to pieces. Barton is a deeply flawed individual, Traore lacks experience and there are doubts about his ability, Ferdinand has a mediocre past history of performance level – but if these players were all perfect and guaranteed success stories they wouldn’t be coming to QPR.
It’s time for the Norwich test again. If Norwich were signing Joey Barton, Shaun Wright Phillips, Armand Traore, Luke Young and Anton Ferdinand this week what would we be saying? Chances are something like: “well they’ll probably stay up now.”
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