A third defeats of the season to the division's whipping boys Peterborough United put a horrible dent in QPR's flagging play-off aspirations, and turned the Loftus Road crowd on players and manager for the first time in several seasons on Sunday morning.
My God, where do you start?
Of course, the answer to that is an introductory colour paragraph on the great Swindon Town capitulation of 1993/94 (Ollie) where QPR lost twice to one of the worst teams the Premier league has ever seen, spurning a chance to go second in the top flight in the first instance, and then crashing 3-1 in the return fixture in W12. The mirroring of that second scoreline here against Peterborough — who have won eight of 42 games this season, three of those against QPR — makes it all too perfect. But I’ve written that tiresome ‘typical bloody QPR’ drivel too many times already, and I am no more in the mood to do so again today than you are to read it. So, let’s be grown ups about it, you and I can both acknowledge the colourful context introduction goes here, and move on without actually writing/reading the fucking thing.
I’ll leave the team selection, tactics, and seemingly wild substitutions for a little later, because I have Some Questions about all of those which I’m going to attempt to do firstly respectfully, secondly out of genuine bafflement and a desire to learn, and thirdly in the hope that some of the things that cooked my brain in the Loftus Road sunshine yesterday might have had a similar effect on you and we can discuss and suffer together up here in the cheap seats. None of it is leaning in any way whatsoever towards regime change. I will attempt to avoid dipping into graphic sexual imagery where possible, but please be aware that I’ve been fighting a strong urge to Arthur Fowler my sitting room for the last 24 hours and possibly the only thing that’s prevented me from doing so thus far is that I spent Saturday dusting and hoovering the bastard thing instead of watching QPR because QPR decided they wanted to give away a rare Saturday 15.00 kick off and play on a fucking Sunday breakfast time this week to give the poor little lambs some extra rest after their midweek exertions in defeat at Nottingham Forest. Perhaps next time just play it where it lays and stop fucking us all about eh? Reliving it all again may be the thing that tips me back over the edge, and both you and the soft furnishings next door should be prepared for that.
Let’s instead go through the motions of writing a report on the first half of the Peterborough game — a first half you may remember from such films as QPR 1 Cardiff City 2 and Man vs Nature: The Road to Victory. Off we popped at something that might pass for an acceptable pace. Albert Adomah, recalled at right wing back, advanced into acres of space on seven minutes with Gray in support and got the pass wrong. Soon Gray and Amos were combining in a press to win the ball back high up the field with Peterborough largely committed the wrong side of the possession, and that allowed Amos to stride forward completely unchallenged and pick his spot from outside the box with a beautiful finish and opening goal. Come here Luke let me give you a cuddle. A QPR central midfielder stepping on, pressing an opponent, driving towards goal, running beyond the strikers, having a shot, scoring a goal — you want to watch yourself boy, they’ll be chucking you off a cliff to see if you fly if you’re not careful.
Soon Ilias Chair had Gray running neck and neck with the last defender chasing a bouncing ball towards visiting keeper David Cornell, of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, and given his recent hot streak of three goals in three games, and the fact he got to the ball first, and the keeper being stranded well out of his goal, the simplest bit of the whole thing seemed to be the chipped finish, but Heidar Helguson he is not, and the media boys won’t have to waste any time clipping this botched job for the end of term highlights reel. Hopeless.
Better though. High up the field. High up the field. Gray won one back, teed up Ilias Chair, he shot wide. Offered two chances and the largest urban development site left in the Greater London area to produce a cross from the right Albert Adomah picked out Gray who headed against the inside of the post from the edge of the six-yard box. Chair also came very close to scoring direct from a corner against this opponent for the second time this season — striking the top of the post.
What did we learn from Cardiff boys and girls? Second goal when on top. School for the fucking gifted. One long ball down the field isolated Dion Sanderson against Jack Marriott in the penalty area which wasn’t necessarily terminal as long as he didn’t allow the Posh forward to turn but became a big problem as soon as Marriott did exactly that — I’d use the old cliched comparison with a turnstile to describe Sanderson’s defending here but Marriott was able to click through him a lot easier than I’ve been able to gain access to Loftus Road this season. Although debutant goalkeeper Keiren Westwood initially made a fine save the danger remained and Jonson Clarke-Harris buried the rebound low and true. Westwood had, bizarrely, spent sometime pre-kick off squatting down on the penalty spot and hiding under a towel. He may have been starting to wish he’d stayed under there.
Rangers had been the better team, created the better chances, led the game against the team lying bottom of the table, but you couldn’t say this hadn’t been coming for them, or Sanderson. The visitors were wide open through the middle, and Norwich City loanee Bali Mumba was so haplessly out of his depth Grant McCann had no choice but to keep switching the wing back to whichever flank the play hadn’t been down for a while and then sub him at half time. But they could have scored after four minutes when Sanderson, inexplicably, turned from a forward-facing position back towards his own goal and calmly slipped a perfect through ball in for Marriott to have a clear run on goal — a first save for the new keeper to make straight away, welcome to QPR Keiren, we do shit like that a lot. On 21 minutes muscle-bound Sammie Szmodics hit the top of the bar from just inside the area with a chance created entirely by impressive visiting centre back Josh Knight striding out of defence with the ball and driving into the opposition half, with all the panic that inevitably brings. I remember when our centre backs used to do that and wreak similar havoc. Your flesh mother used to bring me pudding.
What I hoped for in the second half was more of the stuff that had worked, and less of the stuff that hadn’t. Well, derrrr. You may think that sounds ridiculously simplistic but given what QPR actually decided to do instead I don’t think anything goes without saying with this lot at the moment. More high press from the midfield, more central midfielders stepping out and onto their opponent, more men committed to the attack. Just flood the Loft End and overwhelm them for goodness sake, play at a pace and tempo they can’t live with — one away win all season and 76 goals conceded in 38 games tells you they can’t live with very much at all. Keep the ball away from Dion fucking Sanderson, go down the Winchester, nice cold pint, wait for it all to blow over, etc etc etc. Instead… my goodness. A shitting of the bed so comprehensive there was more shit than bed by the end. Easily the worst 45 minute performance QPR have produced under this management.
An abysmal, embarrassing shambles than started with Jimmy Dunne’s lazy hack at Munba’s replacement Harrison Burrows for a penalty kick that raised precisely zero objections. If David Webb is getting the decision correct it must be pretty obvious. If Uncle Frank says no, it must be really bad. Clarke-Harris dispatched, though for one glorious moment it looked like Westwood had bailed his new team mates out on debut — he looked disappointed, having gone the right way, and perhaps with more match practice he would have got there. Not a lot he could do two minutes later mind, with Marriott giving the Wheel of fucking Fortune playing right centre back for QPR another spin out in the channel again and marauding into the area before dispatching the ball brilliantly into the far top corner. Sanderson could scarcely have done more for the Peterborough cause here had he been playing for them and trying to do it deliberately. Gus Caesar levels of just terrifyingly, rank incompetence that would finish, three minutes from time, with him deciding to have a go himself from the edge of the penalty area and getting the shot so hopelessly wrong and wide it hit Albert Adomah, the right wing back, on the side of the head and nearly knocked him clean off his feet. It’s in the top ten individual nightmare showings this one — agonisingly close to a never-seen LFW rating of 1/10. Made Jack Marriott, five goals all season, look like a Greek God.
Then, Warbs’ McClaren moment. A triple substitution on the hour in which it was decreed that Andre Gray, who’s scored three in three and had a hand in setting up the opening goal, would be removed so Charlie Austin could play alone up front; actual goalscorer Luke Amos, the only midfielder we have who is currently willing to press high and run beyond the strikers, should be removed for Jeff Hendrick who does none of that and looks thrilled to bloody death about it; and Andre Dozzell should come off for George Thomas. At one point it seemed like Jimmy Dunne was going off, which would have made some sense as you obviously don’t need a back five when three one down at home to Peterborough U-fucking-nited but was clearly the wrong man with Sanderson absolutely begging to be put out of his misery, but then they changed their mind, stuck with the failed system, left Austin to slob about up front alone, and posed precisely zero threat of ever getting back into the game for the final half hour of play. For the first time in Warburton’s reign, open dissent and revolt rolling down from the stands at this point, exactly as Schteve suffered here in his last week in charge when he had also started to make changes the paying punters could not compute. A third defeat of the season to the worst team in the league in the offing — you humiliate your supporters in this way, that often, at your peril.
A rare error from Knight presented Austin with really rather a presentable chance immediately, but he snatched at it horribly. I’m clearly building up here to talking a lot about the loan signings, the formation, the substitutions, where we go from here etc. The knives are out, particularly for Hendrick, and I understand that and agree with it, as I will come onto. But let’s not let Austin’s influence here pass without mention. While accepting the service was crap, and he wasn’t a good lone striker even at the absolute peak of his powers, his contribution here would have embarrassed a traffic bollard. For somebody who made rather the big deal out of only wanting to return to QPR if they were serious about a promotion push to turn up and play like this — and, without wishing to stick the knife in too deep, looking like this — in a game as important as this against a team the rest of the division scores against for fun was really rather irritating, to say the very least. Not good enough by any stretch.
A sad and and desperate dive in the penalty area by Ilias Chair brought more grief from the QPR fans than it did the Peterborough players, and he deserved that. Like Thomas he did at least keep running, trying, and was often the only one on the field talking to team mates during a plethora of prolonged stoppages, but this was a pathetic attempt to cheat the referee. The shock of seeing Hendrick so far forward that he actually managed to glance a near post header wide of the far corner so acute I might actually commission an oil on canvass to mark the occasion. These were Rangers’ only two forays into the Peterborough box in half an hour of regulation time and eight minutes added on at the end for the visitors’ flagrant time-wasting antics. A flock of feral pigeons assembled in Cornell’s penalty box to peck at the grass seed 20 minutes from time and remained there for the duration — they knew as well as anybody this was a safe space for them on Sunday afternoon.
The gamesmanship on show in the final third of this game, at times, had to be seen to be believed. Referee David Webb, as we’re now well aware after previous encounters, is so biblically inept at dealing with this issue it destroys what little credibility and authority he has in the rest of the game. For Cornell to emerge from this without a yellow card was astounding really. With all three substitutions made Jonson Clarke-Harris hit the deck for the umpteenth time on the afternoon holding his thigh suggesting he’d suffered a dead leg or hamstring pull. He limped off to the touchline but then, after a brief conversation with the bench, returned to the field and sat straight back down holding his head. This was then deemed worthy of a concussion substitution allowing the visitors to remain with 11 on the field and, trying not to get sued here, seemed suspect to me. Referee happy to just trundle along with the lies and bullshit.
Football, like both codes of rugby before it, is about to be overrun with concussion protocols, head injury assessments, legal cases, bans on heading the ball, and plenty else besides which will creep and creep and creep until, like rugby league in the UK at the moment, you no longer recognise the sport you’re watching. Any complaint from you and I will be met with accusations that you are a dinosaur who doesn’t care if footballers become dribbling vegetables after they retire, that this is A Very Serious Issue which "football has ignored for too long”. And then you see this. Down clutching his leg one minute, off under concussion protocols the next. At the very least the assessment should be made by an independent, rather than club, doctor to allay any suspicions the player might be rather conveniently concussed in the context of the game.
Each Peterborough ‘injury’ apparently necessitated the on field presence of an enormous man in a yellow suit who moved at the speed of rust — somebody I’m absolutely sure we’d have seen just as much of had they been losing the game 2-1. Most frustrating of all, it was just so totally unnecessary. The game was won, and in fact could and should have been won by more. Peterborough by far the better team now, playing the better football, with Knight pulling all the strings from the back, and Marriott offering all the threat going forwards. It could have been any score the basement dwellers liked, and only Westwood’s brilliant one on one save in injury time stopped it being at least 4-1. QPR were a shocking, embarrassing rabble. The substitutions had such a detrimental effect on the team that not ten minutes after they were made, with Peterborough again putting us through the pain of the bloke from the side of the Mega Bus waddling onto the field to tend to somebody else’s ‘injury’, half the team had to come over to the bench for a re-brief and a piece of paper with further instructions was sent onto the field.
So, like I say, some questions. Of course I’m going to fully Neil Oliver this — admit that I know fuck all about what I’m talking about, and then opine on it for ten minutes regardless when I should probably stick to pointing at the seaside and talking about how pretty it looks. But, like the Swindon introductory paragraph, I’ll keep the qualifying caveat that I don’t know what I’m talking about, never coached, never played, never managed, have no idea about the physical fitness of the players or the sports science status of the squad etc etc yadda yadda yadda brief. Fan in the stand, my point of view, maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have some of your own, maybe you’ll think George Thomas was a six and not a five. Disclaimer seen to be there but not there to be seen.
Here are some things I don’t understand. I don’t understand where Lyndon Dykes has gone, particularly when he’s apparently allowed to go away with Scotland next week having not played for us for five weeks now. I don’t understand why I’m sitting here watching Josh Knight, part of statistically the worst defence there has been at this level for many years, calmly striding out with the ball and dictating play, when that was one of our strong suits throughout 2021 and now ours barely come out of their own penalty area. I don’t understand why, three one down at home to a team with said worst defence in the league, you would take your in from striker off and not go two up front. I don’t understand why, with the game already lost and the team’s promotion chances desperately in need of a win, you would stick with three centre backs and two wing backs right through to the bitter end. I don’t understand why the player who it seems the back three system suits best, who it’s all built around really, has been dropped after 97 consecutive appearances to accommodate Dion Sanderson. He was not only atrocious here, has done exactly the sort of stupid, braindead things this manager usually hates and punishes harshly in the games with Blackpool and Forest and been rewarded by walking straight back into the side, but also necessitates a complete reshuffling of all three centre backs into new positions. The back three system so sacrosanct we cannot deviate from it even for half an hour in a 3-1 home loss to Peterborough, but not so precious that we can’t play musical chairs with the centre backs to accommodate a Premier League loan? We’ve got a player we own - admittedly one who couldn’t get fit often enough but somebody we scouted hard and wanted to sign last summer and has played well for us when he did make the field - currently playing well and regularly out on loan in Germany while Dion Sanderson makes mistakes and learns his trade on our time. It makes such little sense that you now see typical online conspiracy theories bubbling up, that Barbet has been dropped because of a contract situation, that Sanderson has to play under the terms of the loan, that we have to pay more money to borrow him the less he plays. It’s the same with Dykes, it’s just so weird that Chinese whispers start up about it. It’s not just me is it? It doesn’t make sense to any of you does it? Help me out. I don’t just want to shout and swear at them, write the whole thing off as shit, demand sackings and bloodlet. I want to know. I’m curious and utterly mystified.
I didn’t understand anyway why a club that is ostensibly meant to be developing players to sell has suddenly fallen head-over-heels in love with two Premier League loan players who we are trying to crowbar into this team and force-feed minutes whether they’re playing well or fit with the team or not, at the expense of younger players, in better form, who we own. Even if they were playing well, which they’re not, this is not what we’re meant to be doing. Now five goals from central midfield all season and Amos has four of those himself from ten starts and 14 sub appearances, including one here. Only Andre Gray has a better goals-per-minute ratio than him this season. Are they trying to protect his knee? Fair enough. It’s the only thing I can think of to explain the change here. I’m sorry, I didn’t get it, I don’t understand what Jeff Hendrick does at all. Even the fucking piece of paper with instructions from the bench got passed backwards from him and then shifted around the back three. It's just our default. There are rugby league teams who pass forwards more than QPR at the moment.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand how we’ve gone from what we were, to what we are now. Why are we so miserly? Why don’t we go forwards? Why don’t we pass forwards? I just, I can’t, I’m sorry. I desperately don’t want to be the gobshite football blogger, I know I’m just ranting now, it’s been a great season, we’re punching above our weight, financial restrictions, I think this management has done a terrific job for the club, I absolutely want to see them remain in place and go again next season… but I find so much of what’s happened over the past couple of months inexplicable and weird. So inexplicable and weird that you go looking for sense and explanation in conspiracy theories about dressing room unrest, the message it has sent loaning players in and playing them above the players that got us here in the first place — nail me to the wall and I think there’s something in that personally, I think it sends a dreadful message to people like Dom Ball and Luke Amos, you can’t tell me this looks a happy camp now. For me in team selection, signings, style, principals and more we've gone away from what worked for us, and from what we're meant to be about. I come back to the Masterclass with Warburton posted recently on YouTube, talking about how we set up and play, about how we never want two defensive midfielders square of each other, how we always want the wing backs to be high, and the midfielders to be aggressive and stepping onto opponents in advanced areas of the pitch. And then I look at us now and I just, I just shake my head.
I’m sure Warbs would sit down and very calmly, very intelligently and very eruditely explain to me how this player is injured, that player is carrying a knock, this one is fatigued, somebody else went to a back four against Peterborough recently and got their arse handed to them, this player has a problem in his home life, this player has done well in training… I’m sure if we sat at a video screen he’d be able to say ‘look at Jeff here, look what’s done with that, that’s why he’s valuable, that’s why we like him’. I’m sure he’d say teams have done their homework on us, and stopped us doing a lot of the things I miss about our early season performances. And it would all make sense, because he’s the professional and I’m a moany gobshite, and I’d go away from the meeting feeling like an ignorant prick again. I’m sure he’d also tell me he absolutely doesn’t set the team up to go out and play like that, at all, and that he’s as frustrated and annoyed as the rest of us.
But a three one home loss to Peterborough? A third defeat to Peterborough in a season, to go with another against Barnsley? You can’t tell me something isn’t wrong here. Nor that the criticism, on this occasion, isn’t valid.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
QPR: Westwood 6; Adomah 4, Sanderson 2, Dickie 4, Dunne 3, McCallum 4; Field 6, Dozzell 4 (Thomas 57, 5), Amos 7 (Hendrick 57, 4); Chair 4, Gray 5 (Austin 57, 3)
Subs not used: Barbet, Ball, Odubajo, Mahoney
Goals: Amos 9 (assisted Gray)
Bookings: Field 66 (foul)
Posh: Cornell 6; Ward 6, Edwards 7, Knight 8, Kent 6, Mumba 4 (Burrows 45, 7); Taylor 6 (Fuchs 71, 6), Norburn 7, Szmodics 6; Marriott 8 (Poku 76, 6), Clarke-Harris 7 (Taylor 90+2, -)
Subs not used: Grant, Beevers, Blackmore
Goals: Clarke-Harris 39 (unassisted), 52 (penalty won Burrows), Marriott 54 (unassisted)
Bookings: Mumba 45 (foul), Marriott 56 (foul), Nordburn 67 (time wasting)
QPR Star Man — Luke Amos 7 I can only think his removal, and his struggle to get gametime, is them managing his knees after two ACLs in three seasons. If it’s anything else then, I’m sorry, on this occasion his removal for Jeff Hendrick was an absolute joke.
Referee — David Webb (Durham) 5 Goodness me he’s hard work this guy. Play-acting, injury-feigning and time-wasting are chronic and endemic in the Championship. This official, rather than clamp down on it, rewards it. As with every game he’s refereed this season, the goalkeeper was allowed to engage in a whole load of blatant cheating without punishment. At one point the referee actually made the point of marching all the way back down the field to talk to him about it, offer no punishment, and walk all the way back, wasting yet more time. One yellow card for time wasting given some of the stuff that went on in the second half was a total joke. Clarke-Harris going down with what looked like a clear dead leg, hobbling badly on his way off, only to return to the field, sit down with his hand on his head, and then be allowed a fourth substitution for concussion is just wrong. That protocol has been brought in to protect players and their long term health, not for that. And this referee was completely complicit in it. One of the most infuriating officials in a league where the standard of refereeing is racing hard to the bottom.
Attendance — 13,753 (800 Peterborough approx.) Not a single one of them onside with the substitutions — Steve McClaren levels of vitriol pouring down from the stands over those.
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