Andre Gray became the tenth and final signing of QPR's prolific, expensive summer recruitment drive today, adding further weight to the idea that the club is dead set on a promotion push this season.
Andre Gray is a 30-year-old, 5ft 10 in striker who initially came up through the youth ranks at his hometown Wolves, and later at League Two Shrewsbury.
He made five sub appearances without scoring for the Shrews’ senior side, played six times and scored once against Stafford for Conference North side Telford, and was eventually released to join Conference North side Hinckley in the summer of 2010 having also had a previous five-game loan spell there. He was with Hinckley for two season, scoring 14 goals in 35 appearances in the first, and 23 goals in 45 in the second.
This was enough to tempt then Conference National outfit Luton Town. He moved to Kenilworth Road in March 2012, with the idea that a longer-term permanent deal would be offered that summer if he impressed. He scored on debut against Grimsby, and in his first four matches for the Hatters as they headed for the Conference play-offs. He scored in the semi-final against Wrexham, and the final against York after 74 seconds, but Luton lost 2-1 and missed out on promotion. Needless to say, he’d done enough for the deal and a further 18 goals followed in 50 appearances in 2012/13, a season which included FA Cup giant killings of Wolves in round three and Norwich in round four, but Luton missed the play-offs entirely. Town won the Conference title in 2013/14, with Gray banging in 30 goals in 44 appearances, including a red hot streak of 19 goals in 15 games through the winter with hat tricks against Nuneaton and Hereford.
As the Conference’s top scorer, and Luton’s Young Player of the Year, he attracted attention from higher up and moved for an undisclosed fee in the summer of 2014 to join Mark Warburton’s Brentford. A sizeable three division leap to the Championship took some time to get used to, though there were early goals against Rotherham and Brighton to go with on in a 6-6 draw against Dagenham in the League Cup. Again, he hit a purple patch in the cold weather, seven in eight through November and December, and Brentford made the second tier play-offs in their first season after promotion before losing in the semi-final to Middlesbrough. Gray finished with 18 in 50 appearances, and scored against Boro in the semi.
Goals against Ipswich and Bristol City in the opening two matches of 2015/16 was enough for Burnley to take him before the transfer window closed for an undisclosed fee, said to be a club record north of £6m. He scored on home debut against Sheff Wed and continued to net prolifically for the Clarets, ending up with 25 goals across 44 Championship games. He was named the club and division Player of the Year as Burnley won promotion to the top flight as champions. In his first Premier League season, 2016/17, he scored on his second appearance as Burnley shocked Liverpool 2-0 at Turf Moor. He bagged a hat trick in a 4-1 New Year’s Eve win at home to Sunderland — Burnley’s first top division treble since 1975. His final totals for the first year at the top table were ten goals in 36 appearances.
Premier League Watford then paid a fee reported anywhere between £11.5m and £18m, depending on which website you’re using, to bring him back south to Vicarage Road. His time there has been less successful, with five goals in 33 apps in year one, nine in 34 in year two, two in 27 and a relegation in year three, and then just five in 30 appearances back in the Championship as Watford were promoted in second last season.
Internationally Gray scored twice and won six caps for the England C team while playing non-league, but as of March 2021 is a full Jamaican international. He won five caps at the end of last season, scoring in a friendly against Serbia, and turning out three times in the Gold Cup over the summer.
"Obviously the manager had a massive part to play in it having worked with him before. I wanted to go somewhere where I can try to get back to my best and I felt this was the best option. It was an easy decision. I love playing in the Championship, I love the Tuesday night games. I was in a position where I could have gone abroad and had a nice lifestyle and enjoyed the sun, but that’s not what I wanted to do. I want to come in and score goals. I want to bring that to the team but I have changed as I have got older — it’s more about the team now.” -Andre Gray
"I am absolutely delighted we have been able to bring Andre in. I know him very well, he is a very good character around the place and he will fit in very well to the group. He has pace and power, he knows the division, he has a fantastic work ethic, an eye for goal and is a real athlete. I also think Andre has a point to prove and I very much hope he does that here with us. Andre’s arrival is a statement of intent and concludes a very good window for the club.” -Warbs Warburton
Let’s do the football bit of this first, because in football that’s apparently all that matters. Andre Gray is a striker whose career has rather stalled and lost its way since he moved to Watford. He scored a goal every other game for Luton (55 in 106), not far off that at Brentford (20 in 52), 33 in 78 at Burnley, and then dipped down to 21 in 59 starts and 67 sub apps at Watford. Always a raw and pacy striker who "needs three chances to score”, he’s become a raw and pacy striker that needs six or seven chances to score. The Watford fans aren’t shedding any tears at his departure, but then the Hull fans weren’t too fussed about Jordy De Wijs, we were ridiculed for paying what we did for Lyndon Dykes, Sheff Wed fans hate Moses Odubajo and so on.
The one thing this current QPR team does lack is pace, since the departure of Bright Osayi-Samuel. Getting in behind teams, particularly at Loftus Road, when they sit in against us can be a problem, and we are occasionally prone to playing around in front of them. The drawbacks of trying to use Charlie Austin as a lone striker were laid bare for an hour against Coventry on Saturday, as was the value in adding somebody completely different to that from the bench — Lyndon Dykes scored after a minute. Gray will run in behind more than those two. He may thrash the thing over the bar when he gets there, but he’s something different. If you’d said, even a couple of years ago when we were choosing between Sylla, Washington and Polter, and talking about how the £8m Gary Madine transfer market made signing strikers of any kind of standard on anything other than loan deals for us impossible, that we’d get Charlie Austin, Lyndon Dykes and Andre Gray in here within our budget, I’d have laughed at you.
The financials of this summer continue to intrigue me. Having spent six years hacking the wage bill down from its extraordinary, unsustainable highs I felt simple maths would dictate that making the Johansen and Austin deals permanent would be beyond us. To have signed up all of last season’s loans, spent a significant transfer fee on Andre Dozzell, brought in several others besides, kept hold of our best players, and now added Andre Gray… I am incredibly surprised to put it mildly. His wage at Vicarage Road was fairly infamous. Getting reasonably big money for Luke Freeman, then £20m for Ebere Eze, has transformed us to a certain extent, but that cash only goes so far, particularly without crowds for 18 months. I would have said even a week ago that if you’ve signed all these players, and you have Dykes and Austin up front already, then you have to probably make do with Charlie Kelman as your reserve through financial necessity, and the fact the team lacks a bit of pace is a first world problem. Kelman, instead, is going to spend time on loan with Gillingham. To have signed Gray on top of it all says to me they really believe circumstances have aligned for us and this is the season to have a dig. Fail in that quest, we have assets in Dickie, Dieng, probably Willock and possibly Chair who we’ll be able to get an Eze-like fee for to cover ourselves. The value of the buy low, develop, sell high, reinvest model really showing through for us.
Off the field is where this one gets a bit icky.
I wrote a piece for A Kick Up The R’s years ago that I now regret profoundly. It was at the start of the Rainbow Laces campaign and I was annoyed for the same reason I was annoyed this time last year when Sky came after QPR over not taking the knee at Coventry - because football obsesses over gestures without ever actually making a significant, positive change. QPR’s commitment to equality and diversity is shown through their recruitment and hiring - more black coaches than the rest of the EFL put together - and for a company like Sky, without a single BAME representative among its European-wide senior management, to come after us because we’d deprived their all-white commentary team the chance to trot out one of their increasingly sickly, trite phrases before kick off pissed me off. The Rainbow Laces seemed very worthy on the face of it but were quickly latched onto by Paddy Power for one of its hilarious viral marketing campaigns and Joey Barton - suddenly the champion of inclusion and diversity because his expensively assembled public relations team had decided it would be useful in their quest to rebuild his tattered image if only he could stop belting people in the face in the meantime. Football feels better about itself, more people bet with Paddy, Joey doesn’t look like a complete cunt for a day, and once it’s all over nothing has changed at all.
I still think that. But where the article went was into that dangerous territory of ‘why do we need to know which footballers are gay any more than we need to know which footballers have a foot fetish’. That old US Army thing of don’t ask, don’t tell. Which I now obviously do not believe, shouldn’t have believed then, and shouldn’t have written. A gay QPR supporter wrote into the following issue of AKUTRs explaining, far more eloquently and politely than I really deserved, why I was wrong. It was a thoughtful piece across two pages when all it needed to say, all I deserved it to say, was "shut up you fucking idiot”. I dare say a few of you will be thinking that now reading this, but having a sport where not one of the obviously many gay people within it feels able to speak about that part of them, in 2021, is desperately sad. It’s important because for gay lads struggling with their sexuality, going through brutal secondary schooling experiences, feeling lonely and ostracised into their later life, or even just quite happily living their lives, seeing openly gay professional footballers, people like them on the field, would be incredibly valuable, make a huge difference to attitudes and help to normalise and de-stigmatise this for generations of young gay men to come. As it is, if you’re a gay lad following QPR at the moment, not only are you watching a sport where none of the gay players feel able or want to talk about it (and there will be gay players, in every team, including ours), but you’re watching it set to the backing track of the oh so hilarious "Chelsea are rent boys, everywhere they go” song.
Now, I’m not sure what value we get out of trawling back through 20 years of social media posts, to find some stupid thing somebody said when they were a daft kid, and then holding it against them a decade later because they’ve just got a Premier League move, or a call up to the England Cricket Team, other than cheap clickbait. I certainly wouldn’t want you to judge me now against that article I wrote for AKUTRs years ago, because I’ve grown and developed and educated myself and think and feel differently. Andre Gray says he has as well, and whenever confronted with the comments he made previously is very open and honest about it and how he’s changed his views since. But Gray wasn’t a kid, and nor were his comments merely an ill-advised or poorly expressed opinion, it was: "is it me or are there gays everywhere? #burn #die #makesmesick”. The words are so abhorrent, so jarring, is it really enough to say "well it was a while ago and he's a nice lad now"? What education, exactly, was required for a 20-year-old to know gay people don’t deserve to burn and die? Now, if you’re a gay lad following QPR at the moment, not only are you watching a sport where none of the gay players feel able or want to talk about it (and there will be gay players, in every team, including ours), not only are you watching it set to the backing track of the oh so hilarious "Chelsea are rent boys, everywhere they go”, but you’re also being asked to support a player who at age 20 thought you should be burned to death. Still, once a year they’ll change the colour of the corner flags to let you know you’re accepted here.
Everybody deserves a second chance of course. If you’re able to grow, reform yourself and make a success of life from past failures, criminal convictions, tough upbringings, or whatever it may be, they’re often the most heart warming stories in sport. These people are often the best agents for change in society, mentoring others not to make the same mistakes they did. We should absolutely be a club where those second chances are possible. Those comments were made in 2012, the scar on Gray’s cheek is from a gang-related attack in 2011, so it’s fair to say his life is somewhat different now in 2021. His partner, who is in something called Little Mix it says here, gave birth to twins earlier this month. Although, how much Gray has actually reformed, when set alongside last season, when he infamously had more breaches of the lockdown regulations than he did goals for Watford, or a 2019 trial for assaulting a woman in a Las Vegas nightclub (found not guilty, but still not doing much to enhance the overall picture) remains to be seen.
If Andre Gray scores goals for QPR, gets QPR promoted, nobody will care either way. Even before we know whether this is a success, I’m expecting to cop some abuse for being "woke” and "a lefty” simply for expressing the concern I am here. That’s how football works. Observe the complete airbrushing of Cristiano Ronaldo’s sexual conduct from the coverage of his latest move and grotesque salary. Or Man City happily continuing to select Benjamin Mendy, just as Sunderland continued to select Adam Johnson. But as I said when the club came out hot and heavy in defence of Todd Kane, trying to distinguish what is ok and what isn’t between ‘diving cunt’, ‘diving foreign cunt’, ‘diving Spanish cunt’, or ‘diving spik cunt’, when you’re a club like QPR, that sets itself up and presents itself like QPR does, is part of the community that QPR is part of, and has the values that QPR and its support has long held, you have to be very, very careful about turning blind eyes to things that don’t suit that image simply because the guy responsible is valuable to your team for that particular moment.
And if you do want to focus purely on the football, then the team spirit and harmonious dressing room that has been fostered here, and is such a big part of our recent success, is so highly treasured that Todd Kane’s comments about Osman Kakay in an interview with a fan site were treated as a far more heinous crime than his remarks to Sergi Canos. He departs today, literally sent to Coventry, because he disrespected Osman Kakay, not because he got a seven match ban for abusing a player on the field in a manner that referenced nationality or race. Bringing a character like Gray into that is, again, something you must weigh up very carefully, because his behaviour hasn't been great, even recently, and there will be gay footballers at QPR - whether you know about them or not, it’s a statistical racing certainty.
Les Ferdinand and Mark Warburton’s records to this point demand respect and the benefit of the doubt. Warburton has worked with the player before, and hopefully their judgement is sound once again. Warburton, naturally, knows far more about Andre Gray than you or I. If you think he, of all people, is going to do anything to jeopardise dressing harmony then where have you been? I guess I place my trust in them that they’ve got it right again. I’ll be there next week, celebrating when Andre Gray scores, praying he’s the final piece in the promotion puzzle, urging him on. Still, it’s not a signing that sits particularly comfortably with me.
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