QPR have completed the signing of Blackburn winger Junior Hoilett on a four year contract for a fee that will be settled by tribunal.
David Hoilett, named after his football-agent father, is a 22-year-old Canadian-born winger who first signed for Blackburn Rovers’ academy side when he was 13. The Lancashire side recognised his potential immediately but struggled to obtain a work permit for him so sent him out on loan into German football so he could clock up enough appearances in Europe to earn one by right.
In the 2007/08 season he played for Paderborn, scoring once in 12 appearances as they were relegated from the Bundesliga. The following year he spent with everybody’s favourite alternative football club St Pauli – famed for the eclectic mix of their home support – and scored six times in more than 20 appearances as they finished in midtable in the German top division.
Now aged 18 Hoilett returned to the UK and won a work permit on appeal enabling him to start life as a professional Blackburn Rovers player. He scored his first competitive goal in British football in a 3-1 League Cup win against Gillingham in August 2009. He later scored the winning penalty in a 4-3 shoot out victory against QPR’s bitter rivals Chelsea to carry them through another round of that competition. He started his first league game in December 2009, a 0-0 draw against Hull City in the Premiership. It took him until January 2011 to score his first Premier League goal – it came in a 2-0 home win against West Brom.
In January 2012 Fifa named him as one of 13 young talents to watch in the world game. Hoilett is eligible to play for Jamaica and Canada but has committed to neither, and has expressed interest in exploring residency loopholes to enable him to represent England.
He has signed a four years deal at QPR for a fee that will be settled by tribunal.
"Junior is a player I know very well. He was just a young boy trying to make his way in the game when I had him at Blackburn. It was difficult for him then because of work permit issues, but I had him training with the First Team very early on because his talent was there for all to see. We knew then he was going to have a great future and he's certainly showed that talent over the last few seasons at Ewood Park. He's shown he's a player of top quality and a player that can makes things happen, both on his own and as a team player. He's certainly a player that will enhance what we've got in the group and I am delighted he's chosen to come to us." - Mark Hughes
The manager obviously played a big part in my decision to come here. He's someone I know well here having worked with him and his backroom team at Blackburn. I signed my first professional contract under him and I will always remember that and be grateful to him. Working under such a great manager will help me to develop my skills and further my career. I have not achieved anything yet. I am still at the early stages of my career and have a lot to learn. As a young player it is important to stay humble, and listen to your family and friends. I'm really happy to be here and can't wait to pull on the Rangers shirt." - Junior Hoilett
Players like Hoilett are the future of this club. He is young, pacy, an old fashioned out and out winger who can scare the life out of experienced full backs. He represents a massive step forward for us, and along with Diakite is my signing of the season thus far. - LOTR
Hoilett, Mackie, Taarabt and Ji-Sung Park can all play wide left, wide right, in the middle and behind the striker or even up top if really need be. You can put Wright-Phillips in that category as well, but based on his form, you'd probably want to try and keep him in his best position as much as possible. We've a real nice mix of pace, flair and hard graft in there, with options to lean more one way or the other depending on the opposition. - Neil SI
It’s usually a good sign when QPR go shopping and come back with a young talent from a Lancashire club beginning with B.
Be it Dave Thomas bringing his rolled down socks south from Burnley and coming within a whisker of winning a league title at Loftus Road, Simon Barker clocking up ten years of service in W12 having left Blackburn Rovers, Trevor Sinclair winning England caps after a £600,000 move from Blackpool or Clarke Carlisle who looked set to do the same until his knee fell apart and his demons got the better of him – Rangers have always fared well shopping in this part of the world.
All the signs are good that Blackburn’s Junior Hoilett is going to prove another shrewd acquisition having moved south at the end of his contract. His age, 22, is good news for QPR who consistently fielded the Premiership’s oldest team last season and have done little to address that this summer, but will require a tribunal to set a fee for the transfer.
Two things excite me about Junior Hoilett. The first is the performance he turned in on the first occasion I saw him play live. It was a fairly typical Blackburn afternoon – battleship grey with sleet coming in on an angle and people huddling together around the chip shop fryer for warmth – and QPR were in town for the FA Cup. Back in the day, that match between a struggling Premiership team and the side top of the division below would have been one of the games of the round with the BBC cameras massed on the gantry salivating over the prospect of a cup upset. Sadly, like so many knockout cup games in Britain these days, this was a contest to find out who wanted to win the least.
The answer, it turned out, was QPR. In fact manager Neil Warnock said afterwards that he’d have happily strangled centre back Kaspars Gorkss had his late header from a corner dipped under the cross bar and secured a replay at Loftus Road rather than bouncing away to safety off the frame of the goal. I’ll never say a bad word about the work Neil Warnock did in the 2010/11 season at QPR, but a little bit of me died inside that day when he said that.
Mind you, his point was a valid one. Some 20 minutes before Gorkss’ near miss Jamie Mackie, QPR’s star man so far that season, had been stretchered from the field with his leg in several pieces and his campaign over. He was pursued, at the time and in the tunnel after the game, by El Hadji Diouf who thought Mackie was either faking the injury, had brought it on himself, or both. That gave the game - played in front of a silent stadium that was two thirds empty and included a travelling QPR support of barely 800 at a ground they’d brought nearly 4,000 to at the same stage of the same competition during Ian Holloway’s reign – a lovely sour feeling to take with us on the long, cold, wet slog back to the capital.
That journey was made in defeat because ten minutes from time Junior Hoilett cut in from the left wing and lashed in an unstoppable shot past Paddy Kenny for the only goal of the game. It was more than either team and the game as a whole deserved but nobody unfortunate enough to be present that day could begrudge Hoilett his moment. The young Canadian winger had been the only impressive player on either team. He’d played the game like any other rather than chugging around in second gear like most of the rest and he’d been the outstanding player on show by a country mile. He was quick, skilful, dangerous, relaxed and sharp. He was wasted on that match.
The second thing is that Junior Hoilett was wasted on Blackburn Rovers as well. QPR have it fairly good at the moment – impressive signings, Far Eastern tours, their own plane etc – but fans of every club in the Football League apart from Portsmouth have good reason to wake up every morning and thank God in heaven they have no affinity to Blackburn Rovers.
Blackburn are the midtable Premiership club turned into a Championship disaster zone inside 18 months by the most monumentally dreadful, and arguably corrupt, takeover there has been in this country. A football agent advises a group of Indian chicken farmers to buy a Premiership football club, appoint his totally unproven client as the manager, sign lots of his substandard clients (including his own son from Aberdeen reserves who’d been rejected previously by Leyton Orient) as players and await the arrival of Champions League football. Only in our sport would a takeover where an agent influences the board, manager and playing staff of a club be deemed fit and proper.
The reaction to this from the Blackburn supporters has been wholly understandable: they’re furious. The protests at Rovers home games last season became the stuff of infamy to such an extent that players, managers of other clubs and the press queued up to slate the supporters for hindering their own team – losing sight of the fact that the team didn’t stand a snow ball’s chance in hell from the moment The Venky’s and Steve Kean walked through the door and whatever they screamed and yelled wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference either way. In their final home game, when a defeat by Wigan sealed the inevitable relegation, they released a chicken onto the field bedecked in a Rovers flag. Good on them.
Amidst this carnage, as a football club died on its arse on live television, Junior Hoilett kept playing his game, and kept impressing. To look good in the Premier League in a side as bad as Blackburn’s, surrounded by the turmoil that Blackburn have been surrounded by, and coached by a manager as patently bloody awful and incompetent as Steve Kean, is worthy of high praise. Actually, scrap that, it’s worthy of a bloody knighthood.
The Blackburn fans talk about him being inconsistent – one good game followed by four bad ones – but given the circumstances he was playing amidst that’s not a bad ratio in my book. Hoilett is an established Premiership player, out of contract, who has already shown enormous promise in difficult situations. And now he’s QPR’s.
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Pictures – Action Images