A very final round up of the key winners and losers on and off the pitch at QPR and LFW in 2011/12.
In January Alejandro Faurlin ruptured his knee ligaments in an FA Cup tie at MK Dons. Had he remained healthy he would have been the Queens Park Rangers Players’ Player and Fans’ Player of the Year by such a considerable distance it would have been difficult to name another contender. Later that same month Heidar Helguson succumbed to a non-descript muscle injury that was initially scheduled to keep him out for a fortnight but ultimately ended his campaign too. He was the only person close to challenging Faurlin for that award.
What was left was a two horse race which was won, on both counts, by centre back Clint Hill. His leadership, bravery and performance level was second to none at the heart of our defence and he paid a bigger role than most in keeping us in the division. Given that he’d ended last season with a cement mixer for an ankle joint, and that he’d never really played Premiership football before, and that he was 32 years old, and that the manager who previously rated him more than any other, Neil Warnock, loaned him out to Nottingham Forest at the beginning of the season his performance level was remarkable. When the LoftforWords message board community voted for their Player of the Year at the end of the season Clint Hill won reasonably comfortably.
But when the LoftforWords writers gathered for the end of season barbecue, drink up and chocolate button fight last week a different name was agreed upon; that of Jamie Mackie. For a player so raw and limited when he arrived to have progressed as much as he has into a Premiership quality winger capable of terrorising the division’s most established full backs is remarkable. That he’s improved as he has while also spending nine months out with a broken leg is extraordinary.
Jamie Mackie remains underrated by sections of our support, but he is a superb player and he is improving all the time. He delivered our Goal of the Season at the very end of the Match of the Season against Liverpool. We’re lucky to have him.
Awards:
Message Board Player of the Year: Clint Hill
LoftforWords Player of the Year: Jamie Mackie
LoftforWords Goal of the Year: Jamie Mackie v Liverpool
LoftforWords Match of the Year: QPR 3 Liverpool 2
Rangers found themselves with a uneven spread of refereeing appointments this season, with Howard Webb, Mark Clattenburg, Mike Dean and Martin Atkinson taking almost as many of our games (17) as the rest put together. The marks from the LFW match reports ranged from zero (Neil Swarbrick v Norwich, Lee Mason v Man Utd, Martin Atkinson v Bolton) up to nine which Howard Webb managed twice. Unsurprisingly the World Cup final official was the best referee we had this season by some distance with an average of 8.25 from four matches officiated.
The final refereeing league table, with their individual marks and average, looked like this:
Howard Webb (South Yorkshire) – 7 9 9 8 = 8.25
Jon Moss (West Yorkshire) – 7 8 = 7.50
Phil Dowd (Staffordshire) - 6 8 8 = 7.33
Mark Clattenburg (Co Durham) – 7 7 8 6 = 7.00
Andre Marriner (West Midlands) – 7 8 6 = 7.00
Mike Dean (Wirral) – 6 7 7 7 = 6.75
Kevin Friend (Leicestershire) – 7 5 = 6.00
Oliver Langford (West Midlands) – 6 = 6.00
Anthony Taylor (Manchester) – 6 = 6.00
Martin Atkinson (West Yorkshire) – 7 8 8 5 0 = 5.60
Chris Foy (St Helens) – 5 6 = 5.50
Mike Jones (Cheshire) – 6 5 = 5.50
Michael Oliver (Northumberland) – 6 3 7 = 5.33
Lee Probert (Wiltshire) – 3 6 = 4.50
Lee Mason (Bolton) – 7 0 = 3.5
Stuart Attwell (Warwickshire) – 3 = 3.00
Neil Swarbrick (Lancashire) – 0 4 = 2.00
Ahhh yes, the fortnightly ball ache that is the Awayday column. These are read by very few people (we get a breakdown of the figures) but those that do follow them avidly, and start getting uppity on the message board and via e-mail when they disappear from the site for a while. That’s quite frequently to be honest because they take up a lot of time, and they’re the first thing to get cut when time is short. I shall endeavour to produce a full set next season, but I’m making no promises.
In the end this season I managed to review 12 of our 20 away trips in league and cup and the final league table (marks out of 140) looked like this…
Man City 110, Aston Villa 94, West Brom 94, Newcastle 89, Man Utd 88, Wolves 88, Everton 87, Fulham 86, Wigan 86, Sunderland 83, Bolton 82 and Blackburn 77.
This serves to proves that the marking system used in the Awayday column is a load of absolute bollocks because our weekend in Blackpool for the Man Utd game was the greatest two days of this or any other season and should have been way out in front but was dragged back by the poor performance on the field of QPR and Lee Mason. Similarly West Brom and Aston Villa were instantly forgettable experiences in a shit part of the country but elevated up the Awayday league by the £5 return train tickets we were able to book for them. And because it was over Christmas and I didn’t have time the Swansea trip is missing, which is a great shame because we all went in Colin’s mini bus and it quickly turned into a sort of absent-father-takes-the-kids-away-for-the-weekend sort of an affair that would have scored highly.
The scoring system is under review but to be honest I sort of view the numbers on those things a bit like the final scores on Mock The Week i.e. nobody really knows or cares how they were reached and they were irrelevant to the point of the thing in any case.
The Awaydays are about the people we meet on our travels. There was the Labour party member on the train back from Bolton, for instance, who first of all angrily asked when we’d be getting off, then stole one of our beers, then said she didn’t care about football she cared about the government and the NHS (and you think we have a lot of disappointment to deal with) and then finally gave me relationship advice which basically consisted of her trying to cajole me into joining the party too. There was the world’s drunkest man in Blackpool who offered us money to take Tracey and “Janine” (usually known as Jasmine) off our hands, and the Indian waiter who told Neil Dejyothin he looked “a bit foreign” by way of a greeting, and the 77 year old pensioner I ended up dancing with and the 32 stone tattooed woman wearing a piece of string who Colin compared to a joint of beef ready for the oven. There was the middle aged Brummy desperate to fight Neil and I on the train back from West Brom before being given a public dressing down from his wife (“Oim not cumming to the Baggayes wiv yow any mower if this is how yower gowin to behaive. Yow down’t even now that thowse power people are QPR fans and this is the second toime we’ve had this from yow todaiy”) and the man at Wolves who waited patiently by the fruit machine for two hours of a power cut then shovelled a pound coin in within seven seconds of the electricity coming back on.
It’s also the people who travel the country under the LoftforWords banner. Neil Dejyothin writes some good stuff for the site, but more importantly he keeps me both alive and out of trouble. He protects me from myself basically, and he’s very good at it. Tracey, bless her, is the devil on my other shoulder acting as encouragement. Colin is the responsible adult, Andy and Jas are the newbies who actually managed to stay the course (many have perished before them) and to be honest you’d struggle to find five more random people for a group, or five people who get on quite as well. Thanks to the others for a fantastic season, and we’ll be doing it all again from August I’m sure.
But it’s mainly about pubs, and the LFW Pub of the Year this year is one I wasn’t even there to see. The Fox and Hounds in Putney ticked the football, food and beer boxes at a reasonable price and even put a TV outside in the beer garden on a gloriously sunny day. The best breakfast award goes to the Blue Parrot in Manchester, narrowly beating off a brave bid from the café/hairdressers/chiropodists in Liverpool.
Awards:
Awayday of the Year: Blackpool (Man Utd away)
Pub of the Year: Fox and Hounds (Putney)
Breakfast of the Year: Blue Parrot (Manchester)
You may remember that this time last season we were basking in the glory of a betting column from which both pundits turned over a healthy profit. Boosted by a four-draw-Sunday that they both lumped on midway through the campaign Brian Power and Andy Hillman would have brought in more than £500 for you last term had you backed them every week. Brian continued in that vein again this year, winning another £60 on the final day of the season with his Djibril Cisse goal at any time bet for a profit of £20 on the day and £187.85 over the course of the year. We also added Owen Goulding, professional odds compiler for a leading bookmaker, to our arsenal this year and had you followed his tips week on week with a £10 bet each time you’d have been up £135 on the season overall.
So what, you may wonder, happened to Andy Hillman who went from tipping extraordinaire to a £252.82 season loss this term? Well, quite simply, he started hanging around with me. Gone are the days when Andy would pore over the form guides for days on end desperately seeking out nuggets of value and information for you all on a Friday afternoon. Now he’s much more likely to be found swigging beer at the top of roller coasters or gate crashing Blackpool cabaret evenings wrongly believing them to be karaoke events. He can be reached on alternate Saturdays, slumped in the corner of the 0820 from Euston spilling coffee over himself, shouting at passersby about the state of the olive oil industry and thanking the lord for Robin Van Persie without whom (it’s like buying money) his debt probably would have reached four figures by the end. A top fella, but most definitely ruined by the LoftforWords curse.
As ever, thank you to our three columnists who give up their time free of charge every week to produce an entertaining, amusing and profitable betting column. We hope to return them next season.
Final Scores:
Brian Power - £187.85
The Pro (Owen Goulding) - £135
Andy Hillman - -£252.82
A really close run thing in the LFW Prediction League this season, but a familiar result with the perennial favourite for these competitions QPR Nippon (Nathan McAllister) winning through to take top prize this season. Our man in the far east correctly predicted six results, ten first goalscorers and 13 correct outcomes (right score, wrong winner) for a total of 64 points narrowly ahead of Crainieboy on 61 who was one goal scorer and one outcome short of the leader. The top five was made up by Wayneranger, QPR_Cymru and MelakaRanger. Congratulations to all, Nippon’s £50 cash prize will be winging its way to him shortly, and the new league will launch before the start of next season. Little does our winner know, we have plans to rope him in for match preview prediction duties next season.
Final Scores:
QPR Nippon – 64
Crainieboy – 61
WayneRanger - 59
QPR_Cymru - 59
MelakaRanger - 54
Nathan finished seventh in the LFW Fantasy League standings as well but the winner this season with 2,209 points was Joe VF with his Boca Seniors team. David Newman’s Squirrels Return side finished second, showing an ability to predict the future when naming the team last summer if nothing else. David Laws moved into third position on the last weekend of the season ahead of Darren Hemmings. The key to this is maintaining interest long enough and keep changing your team throughout the season to reflect form and injury but, for what it’s worth, the team Joe finished his title winning season with was:
Al-Habsi (Wigan), Baines (Everton), R Martin (Norwich), Vermaelen (Arsenal), Bale (Spurs), Van Der Vaart (Spurs), Valencia (Man Utd), Sigurdsson (Swansea), Cisse (Newcastle), Van Persie (Arsenal), Jelavic (Everton).
It has been an extraordinary season for LoftforWords, one I’ve been absolutely taken aback with. The viewing figures this season have, rather sadly, hammered home just how centred on the Premiership football in this country really is. We increased our page impressions three fold overnight simply by QPR winning promotion and by the end of the campaign they were five or six times what we were pulling in two years ago. It remains a labour of love, but it’s paying its way at last which is why we’ve been able to sign picture deals with Action Images, and embark on a site redesign which will be live soon.
Thank you to everybody who reads the site, contributes comments, posts on the message board and comes up to me on random railway stations (or, on one memorable occasion, when I’m being sick on Shepherds Bush Green in the middle of the night) and asks if I’m “Clive Whittingham from that website.” I shall continue to be that guy for the next season at least, which starts later today with the release of a list of dates that will dictate the next nine months of my life. With any luck, and a bit less sleep, LFW will be better than ever this campaign and we’ve already set the monkeys and typewriters to work coming up with some new ideas for content. If you’d like to contribute (one off article, occasional guest column, regular feature, just to say hello) please e-mail loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk or Tweet us like all the kids are doing these days.
Thank you so much for your support which means a lot and keeps me going during the bloody Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday weeks which are thankfully few and far between these days.
See you tomorrow for fixtures day. We shall rise at 8.30 for 9.
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Pictures – Action Images, Neil Dejyothin