QPR sunk to the bottom of the Championship with a wholly inevitable and entirely comfortable 2-0 defeat at promotion chasing Leeds on Saturday.
One of those days where a non-believer asks why you do this to yourself and all you can do is shrug. There is no answer any more. I don't know myself. I hate it.
I’ve been to, essentially, every Queens Park Rangers game for the last 30 years. I can tell you about people, and places, and pubs. Peaks and troughs of emotions and experiences. Highs and lows on and off the field. And oh so many ‘do you remember that time when…’ stories. We sit together, drink train beers and reminisce about great teams, magnificent goals, and just how terrible Zesh Rehman really was. It’s part of the fabric of our lives, it’s our identity with our friends and colleagues, it’s the thing that brings us the most joy. That little quiver of excitement when the alarm goes off Saturday morning and you realise it’s a) the weekend and b) a football day. That warm glow of walking through London mid-Tuesday afternoon when everybody else is at work but you’re heading to the station for a midweek away. There’s nothing we’d rather do with our time.
Not this Saturday though. This Saturday was the worst. Long, drawn out, expensive, miserable. A jalfrezi enema. Zero pleasure and maximum pain. Overcrowded trains on diversion, because of course. A ground parked miles from anything useful, accessible only via an arduous walk through abandoned industrial units in a major European city without a public transport system. A laughably excessive stewarding operation, more appropriate for a demilitarised zone than a football game, where every person in the away end gets a yellow-coated jobsworth each and every orifice, crack or hole has to be poked, prodded, explored or sniffed by a dog in case somebody tries to commit the heinous crime of wearing a hat, taking a bag with them on a 12-hour awayday, or sitting in the wrong seat. Two hours standing behind a concrete post for your £30, surrounded on all sides by chinless gibbons more interested in staring and gesturing at you than watching the game. A wholly inevitable defeat from a game that played out like some mismatched cup tie – Leeds one of the five richest kings of Europe, QPR some idiot non-league scum just happy to be there on a big day out. Oh at least it was only 2-0. Fuck me.
Savage amusement. Demoralising and depressing. And what makes it worse is we knew it would be all of those things before we even set off. It felt like going to a burial.
Leeds won. Naturally. Easily. They won in their sleep. Clunking somewhere between second and third gear all afternoon. Like Middlesbrough on Tuesday the only surprise was the goals took as long to come as they did, and that there weren’t a lot more of them. Like Burnley on our last away trip the only mystery and intrigue in the match was quite why the home team felt the need to piss around quite as much as they did when a straightforward pummelling was there for the taking. I swear modern managers do it to show how smart and clever they are. Just go forward with some pace and some width and win the game 5-0, but no, instead let’s fart arse around building up from our own half to try and "tempt out” a team you could presently distract with a shiny piece of paper. Like a cat with a fucking mouse. Just kill it. Kill us. Put us out of our misery.
The goals the hosts did score, through Jayden Bogle on 19 minutes, and Joel Piroe five minutes into injury time, were defensively shambolic.
Mateo Joseph, Manor Solomon and Willy Gnonto, looking somewhat braver and more interested in this game than he had been at Loftus Road in April, all missed very presentable chances in the immediate run up to the first. Calm down lads, compose yourselves, clear the ball. Instead of accepting those reprieves, QPR’s defence collapsed in on itself in an insanely blind panic. All rushing back to the goalline rather than marking or challenging their man, falling over en masse like a drunk stag party on a Christmas skating rink, bumping into each other like a bunch of gormless tossers. In the end Bogle couldn’t do anything other than score, which he did almost by accident. Leeds 1 Fred Karno’s Army 0.
You’d perhaps forgive a game-sealing second so deep into stoppage time at the end of the game. Team commits men forward looking for an equaliser, caution thrown to the wind, caught with numbers up field and sprung on a counter attack. We know how these things can go. Well done for giving it a go. Except QPR hadn’t given it a go, and there were eight men back in and around the box to defend just four attackers. Piroe slipped through to score anyway, such is this Rangers team’s timidity and total aversion to tackling anybody, at all, ever.
Leeds could have scored on multiple, multiple other occasions. Aaronson rattled the bar on 16 minutes, Steve Cook’s desperate recovery lunge denied Mateo Joseph a clear run on the goal 60 seconds later, and 60 seconds further on still Bogle had scored. When Koki Saito, one of the few QPR have got now who doesn’t look completely beaten down by playing for this club, was rewarded for his industry with a free kick, Lucas Andersen wasted both the delivery and the rebound sparking a monster Leeds break with Solomon clean through down the left and another penalty box scramble which fortunately ended in the hands of Paul Nardi. Christ, Andersen looks bereft, and so sluggish - what are we feeding that guy? It's like we've poured diesel into an electric car.
Bogle was soon skipping round the multi-tasking Saito at the other end for a blocked shot of his own which rebounded to Tanaka for a goalbound effort which hit Sam Field just as it was about to fly in. Solomon had a goal disallowed for offside and Sam Byram piled in over the top of Harrison Ashby to meet a far post cross but headed wide.
And that was just the first half.
The second began with Struijk heading a dead ball over from an offside position, and then QPR turning another one of their own free kicks, won well by Saito, into a hugely overloaded counter attack going against them the other way which culminated Nardi saving from Solomon and then pretending to be injured in a desperate ploy to get the game stopped. You could stick Kerry Katona on Mastermind and not come up with stuff as dumb as this. Fuck it, you could put Kerry Katona in charge of our recruitment and not come up with stuff as dumb as this.
Gnonto had a shot deflected wide, and then two minutes later another terrific Nardi save appeared to have got Rangers off the hook again only for Ashby to inexplicably start juggling the ball in his own six-yard box which almost resulted in it deflecting into the net anyway off a perplexed bystander. Much of the criticism of the Ashby loan so far has focused on Isaac Hayden’s revelation that he was 99% done to return to QPR only for them to bring another right back in instead. Moving forward I can see that attention shifting to the fact Ashby seems to be a bit shit.
This is sort of where we are now. Coming away grateful it was only a 2-0 defeat. The whole thing played out a big like Wealdstone playing here in the FA Cup. Brave effort from the boys, happy to go away having only lost 2-0, good luck to Leeds in the next round, back down to our level next week – although I struggle to see this QPR team scoring a goal against Boreham Wood as it stands at the moment.
What was always going to be a tough assignment anyway rendered nigh on impossible by the absence of eight senior first team players, including your best defender, midfielder, attacker and striker. QPR have lost only one game with Jake Clarke-Salter playing and are yet to win without him. Michy Frey has four goals this season, the side out there on Saturday doesn’t have that between them. Daniel Farke, flapping his arms about in the post-match like a manager who didn’t completely fuck a promotion with maximum parachute payments last term, quietly bringing a £10m striker off the bench just to make sure. Must be nice. QPR slung on Crocodile Bennie, and he rattled through half a dozen different positions in half an hour as we scrambled around for answers and solutions. Koki Saito played everywhere but in goal, gave it everything he had, and got no reward at all.
When you are playing cup ties like that, you have to take your chance or two when they come along if you’re to cause the upset. Unlike our pathetic visit here a year ago under Gareth Ainsworth, there were at least three occasions when that might have happened. Jimmy Dunne headed a first half corner past Meslier but also past the post as well when, really, you get your best header of the ball on a cross like that in a game like this and you have to score. In the second half Steve Cook knocked another set piece back into the danger area and Sam Field hooked over from close range when, again, that has to go in. And when Leeds had been lulled into such a false sense of security that they started casually playing opponents through on goal by mistake, Saito panicked slightly with his pass selection and Zan Celar couldn’t even get his shot on target never mind score from inside the box. He, again, looked out of his depth here. Alfie Lloyd once more showing him up in the closing stages, causing Leeds problems by… running about a bit.
The second goal left the 1,500 QPR fans (it is quite frankly astonishing that number is still this high) to face the humiliating inch by inch trudge towards the away end’s exits in full view and earshot of the baying locals and boy did they make the most of that. This team and club keep putting these people through this sort of torture, and to this point they’ve taken it in mostly good humour, with precious little protest, and sold-out home games. That surely, surely cannot and will not continue. Somebody’s going to lose their rag at some point. This was another miserable afternoon at the hands of our football club.
Where the blame and protest lands is the next bit of this process. We’ve been through the points where you hope they’ll turn it around, we’ve been through the manager getting the vote of confidence, now we’re into realisation and what usually follows realisation is a blood sacrifice. Ghouls are already gathering in the director’s box – David Wagner fancied QPR v Sunderland for his Saturday afternoon entertainment, for instance.
When this club dismissed Mark Warburton as manager they alighted on the wrong scapegoat. Sure, Warbs made plenty of mistakes, stubbornly stuck with things that weren’t working for too long, took a team with a good deal of cash lavished on it and missed the play-offs with a collapse through the second half of a season. But the main reasons for that collapse were injuries, and slipshod recruitment – neither of which he had very much to do with.
People who bore more responsibility for that failure were allowed to keep their jobs and take another swing, with another managerial appointment, and another transfer window. They used that on a catastrophic recruitment drive of even worse players and characters, and the appointment of Mick Beale as manager with the domino effect disaster which followed.
If this club dismisses Marti Cifuentes it will, in my opinion, be convicting Colonel Mustard when it's Professor Plum they're looking for. Sure, Marti’s made plenty of mistakes, stubbornly stuck with things that aren’t working for too long (still bringing everybody back for Leeds corners when there’s a minute left and you’re 1-0 down), took a team with a good deal of cash lavished on it and collapsed to the bottom of the league. But the main reasons for that collapse are injuries, and slipshod recruitment – neither of which he has very much to do with.
You might get a new manager bounce, particularly if some of the injured players come back into the side (we, of course, far too insignificant to the club to be allowed to know when that might be). It might even keep you up. And if it does, that would be worthwhile. But if I was Ruben Gnanalingam, burning through good money after bad, I would not be in a rush to allow the people who are actually responsible for this to keep their jobs and take another swing, with another managerial appointment, and another transfer window.
I’d take the spade off them now, before they dig you down, dig you down to Grimsby Town.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Messaqge Board Match Thread
Leeds: Meslier 6; Bogle 8, Rodon 7, Struijk 7, Byram 6; Rothwell 7 (Guilavogui 85, -), Tanaka 6; Gnonto 7 (Schmidt 90, -), Aaronson 7, Solomon 5 (James 72, 6); Joseph 6 (Piroe 72, 7)
Subs not used: Bamford, Chambers, Crew, Darlow, Wober
Goals: Bogle 19 (unassisted), Piroe 90+5 (unassisted)
Yellow Cards: Byram 12 (foul)
QPR: Nardi 6; Ashby 4 (Lloyd 81. -), Dunne 4, Cook 5, Field 4, Saito 6; Smyth 5 (Santos 89, -), Morgan 5 (Madsen 66, 4), Varane 5 (Morrison 81, -), Andersen 4 (Bennie 66, 5); Celar 4
Subs not used: Aoraha, Dixon-Bonner, Kolli, Shepperd
Bookings: Varane 47 (foul), Morgan 54 (a proper tackle, from one of our midfielders, note it in the minutes)
QPR Star Man – Koki Saito 6 Gave it everything he had.
Referee – Matt Donohue (Manchester) 6 Strolled through an uncompetitive game awarding every tiny piece of contact as a free kick.
Attendance 36,011 (1,428 QPR) Very good of Leeds to invite Mark Prince to speak here, righting some wrongs from April. They got through the whole thing without heckling him this time as well so wins all round.
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