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What have we learnt this week?
What have we learnt this week?
Thursday, 24th Jan 2008 11:15

A solid win against Barnsley but room for improvement, and news of Christiano Ronaldo's bedroom antics.

Buzsaky is wasted on the wing
Reading threads on a Plymouth message board over the festive period, wherever the bloody Plymouth message board maybe these days (thanks a lot Sky), the fans were wondering why Buzsaky had suddenly started to add goals and consistency to his game after years of blowing hot and cold on the south coast. The answer could lie in Buzsaky’s chronic homesickness he suffered while playing for Argyle, a problem largely solved now by his return to civilisation and more importantly a club near an international airport serving Hungary.

A more likely suggestion though is the way QPR have used the ‘Magical Magyar’ since signing him, in a free role just behind a lone striker. Plymouth have been under the guidance of Ian Holloway for the majority of Buzsaky’s career at Home Park and as we know from Olly’s time at Loftus Road the thought of playing anything other than 4-4-2 and pumping balls into the channels for quick, physical strikers to chase after bring him out in a cold sweat. Holloway watching other teams play with a man in a free role, or a sweeper, or anything other than 4-4-2 really is like people sitting down thirty years ago and watching Thunderbirds for the first time. Mouths open and eyes wide they gasped “Christ will the future really look like that?”

Buzsaky has six goals in 14 starts and a sub appearance with QPR, and he only scored nine in some 120 appearances in Plymouth green. Clearly when used as an attacking midfielder, or as a compliment to a strike force further forward, he’s a seriously good player and real threat at this level. Plymouth rarely, if ever, used him in this way – choosing instead to hammer him into the round holes they had trouble filling wide in midfield. Holloway tried something similar with Jamie Cureton of course, and was rewarded with seven goals from 46 appearances compared to the 31 Jamie scored in 56 appearances at Colchester.

Players play well when you play to their strengths. Therefore it’s a concern that Buzsaky has spent the last game and a half stuck out on the left wing. The decision to move him out there against Sheffield United killed QPR completely as an attacking force and it was only when he came back infield in the dying embers of the game as we stared defeat in the face that we almost bagged an equaliser – his shot cleared from the line in controversial circumstances by Matt Kilgallon. After that it was a disappointment to see him start wide left and remain there against Barnsley. He was a shadow of the player we’ve seen annihilate Scunthorpe and Colchester on his own this season. A thread on the message board asking for players of the season so far yielded his name more than any other but he’s no kind of left winger and shouldn’t stay there for any length of time.

With Blackstock struggling for form and Ephraim chomping at the bit on the sideline it can surely only be a matter of time before Buzsaky is partnering Dave and Ephraim is starting wide left again. In my opinion we’re still a quality left winger and an Earnshaw style goal scorer away from being a serious threat at this level. Paul Jewell clearly doesn’t have any time for Earnshaw at Derby while there’s a very good left winger, proven at this level, looking for a game just the otherside of Hammersmith Broadway. Come on you R’s, you know it makes sense.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, or a player by his debut
On the face of it Damien Delaney is a strange signing. He’s only ever played a handful of games at the top level and was quickly dispatched to lower echelons on loan deals and then a permanent transfer to Mansfield Town. He’s spent most of his career to date in leagues lower than the one we’re in now and although he’s been bought to play left back for us that’s not even his natural position – he started out life in Ireland, and at Hull City, as a centre half and not a particularly eye catching one at that. The £600k (and rising) we’ve paid to secure him seems a little steep and the Hull fans certainly aren’t sorry the club snapped our hands off and paid for his train fare down.

But we’ve been in this position before. When Georges Santos arrived from Ipswich the Suffolk club’s fans laughed at us and told us what a mistake we were making. QPR fans immediately turned on Georges before he’d even started playing for us, and poor performances in the first two away games of the season at Watford and Sunderland didn’t do him any favours. But he improved and turned into a mainstay of the side – Holloway did him no favours by moving him into midfield and then, ridiculously, attack but that was hardly Santos’ fault and he turned out to be a great signing for QPR. He was just the kind of experienced, level headed player we needed to help our side consolidate their place in this league.

With very few people having a good word to say about Delaney, and frankly I’m not sure what we’ve seen in him to spend all that money, there’s a danger he could fall victim to Georges Santos syndrome. Patrick Agyemang had a similar thing earlier this month but has quickly silenced doubters with two goals in two starts. Delaney, like Big Dave, started with a bang on Saturday with the best display we’ve seen at left back since Gino Padula was last with us. Gino won the hearts and minds of QPR fans with a fabulous performance in a January game at Loftus Road against Barnsley and history repeated itself at the weekend with Delaney taking the sponsors' Man of the Match award.

That may have been harsh on the game’s outstanding player Martin Rowlands, but it was clear that Delaney played very well. Some players suddenly come out of themselves and excel under new managers and in different situations. How many mediocre players have turned into world beaters in Martin O’Neill’s teams for example? Marlon King, £5m to Fulham from Watford this week and yet he couldn’t hit a barn door with either Forest or Leeds. Maybe Delaney can progress in his career to our benefit as part of the QPR revolution.

I hope so because doesn’t it make a difference to have quality full backs? Chris Barker has had unfair criticism this season in my opinion but hasn’t been great, Marcus Bignot was a legend in W12 but had many short comings in this league, Bob Malcolm was awful, Mauro Milanese was quality but really past his best. In Connolly and Delaney we now have full backs who seem comfortable with possession of the ball, are quick enough to keep pace with opponents, are tall enough to win headers at the back post and add a lot to our team going in both directions. It adds balance, attacking options and attractiveness to the way our team plays. I’m particularly impressed with Connolly in the three games so far, he could be a real find.

A word of warning though – footballers tend to excel on their debuts (apart from Big Bob of course) and then regress back to mediocre levels thereafter. Who would have thought Stefan Moore would turn out to be such a painfully poor waste of money after his debut goal against Sheffield United at Loftus Road? Delaney was excellent against a thoroughly awful Barnsley team – let’s wait and see how he settles in and plays over the next 15 or 20 games. I doubt if we’ll play a team as bad as the Tykes again this season, possibly Scunthorpe, and Delaney will do well to maintain that excellent level of performance.

Ronaldo is a bit weird
My Grandad once got caught by a copper putting up hookers’ calling cards in a phone box in Piccadilly Circus. Not something I should be admitting proudly you might think but as with all stories involving my Grandad there was a bit more to it than that.

You see what had actually happened was he’d popped into the phone box after his breakfast on the way to the pub to speak to my Gran – they sort of had this arrangement where he’d ring her mid morning before he started drinking so she would get at least get a coherent word out of him during the day. While in the phone box he knocked some of the cards off the wall as he took his scarf off and rather than just leaving them on the floor he decided to bend over and tidy them up. Of course just as he’d finished pinning them back to the wall a police officer had joined him and a caution was his, despite lengthy protests.

You can see where the copper was coming from really – your first thought upon seeing a 70 year old man in an overcoat thumbing through calling cards in Piccadilly Circus is obviously “dirty old man”. That’s what you associate hookers with; dirty old men who should know better, ugly as sin younger men who can’t get a shag any other way and over worked businessmen sick of her indoors. Christiano Ronaldo is of course none of these.

You don’t have to be a woman, or leaving the pavilion to open the batting with Graham Norton, to know that Ronaldo is quite a good looking young lad – he’s got that whole tanned, toned, been to the gym a couple of times this week thing going on, and a £120,000 a week pay packet of course. I’d imagine, and I’m basing this on the amount of gloriously attractive women short arsed ugly gits like Jermaine Defoe have managed to get their hands on since they became Premiership footballers, that Ronaldo could walk into any pub, club or bar in the land and have his pick of the lady folk in there. And yet you’re more likely to find him counting cash out onto the bedside table of some seedy hotel.

The tabloids claim that he’ll celebrate a victory by getting a few ropey looking call girls round to his mansion for a pool party with Anderson and Nani, while the picture of his latest conquest in the red tops last weekend had me reaching for the bucket. “The winger and his minger” was the headline – not even a little bit unfair. She looked like the result of a drunken fumble between Jade Goody and Avram Grant.

I don’t know about you guys, maybe I’m weird as well, but the best bit of the whole sexual relations bit is often the chase is it not? You see her for the first time, you chat to her, you can’t stop thinking about her, you call, you date, you wonder and doubt and eventually, if you’re really lucky, she lets you take her clothes off while she’s sober and awake. Where’s the fun in simply bunging somebody £200 and riding around on them while they lay there wondering if they’ll have time to fit another punter in later on in the evening? Especially when they look like they’ve been beaten half to death with the ugly stick.

Still people are weird, especially when it comes to sex. First topic on this week’s LFW editorial meeting – whether we should link to the Stefan Postma video should we ever tie up his signing.

Photo: Action Images



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