Antti Heinola says QPR manager Chris Ramsey simply wasn’t positive or daring enough with his team selection and substitutions in Saturday’s blown must-win home match against West Ham.
If Ramsey's argument for keeping that midfield together was because of a strong performance against Chelsea, then I find it difficult to understand why you'd change the back four. I think Dunne is a good player - he looked finished during the second half of last season at times, but he's probably been our best centre half this season (not that that's saying a great deal), but picking him here looked like a bad call from the moment the team sheet was released. Unless Ramsey was convinced we'd be facing Carlton Cole with Nolan just behind him, I can't really see the thinking behind breaking up the Onuoha-Caulker partnership which was finally starting to bear fruit - not least because taking Onuoha's pace out of the centre causes us problems beyond just having someone who might have been able to keep up with Valencia - it means a deeper defence, a slower defence and more ground for our one-paced midfield to cover.
Then you have the issue of Mauricio Isla. If we're being loyal to Karl Henry, why drop Isla after he did such a tremendous job against Hazard and Chelsea? Was he dropped because he was facing the wrong way when Green ballooned his kick straight to Hazard? If you're dropping him for that, then why not drop Green too? Not playing Isla meant Phillips only had Onuoha to support him, who's not in Isla's class when it comes to passing, movement, vision or attacking ability. I could have understood Onuoha at right back against Chelsea, to do a job on Hazard, but here, in a game we had to take to the opposition, it seemed perverse.
Still, Ramsey has earned some faith, so let's say before the game he perhaps wanted to keep things very tight, with the idea of stepping on the accelerator and taking some risks late on if we needed a goal. A bit cautious to my mind, but fair enough.
The way we were set up, as with Chelsea, made it very clear that we had two outlets: the long ball to Zamora, or a pass to Phillips. That's it. Everything - *everything* - that wasn't pumped to Bobby went down our right side - not ideal when Cresswell had such a good game against our most dangerous player. Let's just accept that line up for a moment - but then come the fifty fith minute, come the sixtieth minute, come the seventieth minute, for Christ's sake come the eightieth sodding minute, surely we had to sling on someone from the bench to play on the left who might offer some kind of threat and some diversity and unpredictability to our attacks? And this is not a dig at Henry, who played well, but he is not and never will be a 'danger' to any team. That's why he didn't play much last season: teams defended against us in numbers and his brand of steady, controlling midfield play was rendered obsolete. We often didn't really need a holding midfielder; we needed someone to create chances.
Had this game been two weeks ago I would have had sympathy for Ramsey because he had no choices, but on Saturday he did. He had several choices in fact - the prime one being the unpredictable maverick with a good record against West Ham who will, given even ten minutes, be guaranteed to create something.
We *had* to win this game. We had to. A draw was never going to be enough. So we might as well have gone down attacking than whimpering off clutching what will almost definitely be a useless point. After 70 minutes, Henry was offering nothing in terms of what we actually needed. Indeed, he drifted so far into the centre that the left side of the pitch was almost empty. Ramsey did try to address that by bringing on Yun, but again it was the wrong substitution. With Yun at left back and Henry playing almost in the centre, he couldn't maraud because he had no cover. Had he come on for Henry (or Sandro, with Henry going inside), and played left midfield with Clint sweeping up behind him, that might have made more sense, but as it was, the change really changed nothing at all. Worse: within ten minutes it was obvious it wasn't changing anything and yet still Ramsey sat on his hands.
West Ham were awful - as awful as we were, and while we had some poor luck in terms of the disallowed goal (which, if we're honest, would get disallowed 19 times out of 20) and Charlie's miss, we never really looked like winning the game. They were absolutely there for the taking - a kinder opponent at this stage of the season we could barely have wished for.
And as this a knee jerk column and there should be some controversy sometimes, I'll say this: I was behind Ramsey. I was impressed. I felt it was difficult to judge him when he barely had a squad to choose from. But yesterday he did, and he blew it. He was cautious in the extreme. If you can't gamble in a game like that with 20 minutes left then I'm afraid you're not a manager. You're just not. Can you imagine Warnock in that situation? For the last ten minutes we'd have been three (maybe two!) at the back, two holding midfielders and everyone else up front. Ramsey did nothing. And that, in my opinion, was unforgivable. He cannot have gone to bed last night thinking, 'Well, I did everything I could,' because he didn't. He froze, and we're down. And on Saturday alone, I wouldn't give him the job.
The Pictures - Action Images