Known unknowns - Preview Thursday, 31st Dec 2015 19:17 by Clive Whittingham It’s all eyes on the team sheet on New Year’s Day as Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink searches for his first QPR win at the sixth attempt against Hull. Queens Park Rangers (15th) v Hull City (3rd)Championship >>> Friday January 1, 2016 >>>Kick Off 17.15 >>> Weather — Cloudy, windy, rain later >>> Loftus Road, London, W12 Managers at QPR get a carriage clock for long service if they can last more than a year in the job these days. My own ‘managerial career’ such as it was, lasted even fewer than the five matches Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has had so far at QPR. My secondary school - an unforgiving festering pit of a place, often well ablaze - split the PE lessons in two in the latter years so the boys doing the subject for GCSE went off with an actual PE teacher and learned technique and sports science, and those of us just doing it to fulfil the government minimum requirement were handed an old football and pointed in the direction of the field to amuse ourselves unsupervised. At the end of the year the lads from the GCSE group challenged the other group to a two-legged play-off in the final week and I was chosen to manage the underdog team — essentially because I watched more football than anybody else in the group. Ten years trawling the country attending awful football matches gave me lots of, I thought, very brilliant ideas about how I would set my team up. Starting with an out and out front three in a 4-3-3 formation, it turned out, left the midfield rather exposed and after a sound thrashing it was all I could do not to be sacked after one match. In the second game we went 4-5-1, packed the midfield, dominated the game and could easily have won before settling for a 1-1 draw. The PE teacher wrote me a nice bit in my end of year report about this astute tactical change. And that was basically it. I played in goal at university, I play small-sided games twice a week after work, I’ve refereed to a decent level and I’ve now completed 25 years trawling the country attending awful football matches. What I’m attempting to do here, rather than start the world’s least-read autobiography, is establish that relatively speaking — compared to somebody like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink — I do not understand what I’m looking at when it comes to professional football. I’ve written about on here mostly for fun, I’ve written about it professionally for the Telegraph, but really I don’t know understand how it works. Nor, I tentatively suggest, do many of you reading this. There are ex and current pros who attend QPR matches regularly — Wayne Fereday, for instance still comes to the home games. Kevin Gallen, Marc Bircham, other old QPR boys are regulars. Craig Norman, who set all manner of penalty taking records for Kettering Town back in the day, sits in South Africa Road. These people may be able to offer insight and opinion with added life and career experience. But generally, I dare say the average man in the crowd at that Huddersfield game hasn’t had much more or less football experience than I have. Not that this should preclude you and I from having opinions about what we saw on Monday — that’s what football fandom is all about. It’s only Robbie Savage and Steve Claridge who seem to think that as they’ve played the game and everybody else hasn’t their opinions are correct and everybody else is wrong — makes them odd choices for spots on talk radio stations but anyway. To talk to five QPR fans about anything is usually to get five diametrically opposite views. You only need to watch social media and message boards whenever the club we all support does something like put out four potential new badge designs to see that. I can find you QPR fans who thought Ian Holloway did a bad job here. But there are some majority opinions kicking around at the moment. For instance, the church seems to collectively believe that Karl Henry is playing rather more than his ability should allow. Personally, I think the fact that he can actually run about, complete 90 minutes and puts in a lot of effort makes him useful for defensive central midfield duties where we are short of options with fully functioning knees/brains. But starting him at right wing, or worse still as the most advanced midfielder supporting an attacker, I find a bit much too. Massimo Luongo is another who, generally speaking, the majority cannot understand why he’s being left out. Playing with no striker, starting remorselessly with Leroy Fer despite his loss of form and confidence, leaving Ben Gladwin and Michael Harriman out on loan when they’re playing better than the players in their positions back at QPR… all of these issues have sizeable pockets of us laymen on one side. What QPR’s rapid fire approach to appointing and retaining managers has done is provide us the opinion of several people who have the experience, as players and as managers, and have the qualifications. Not only that, but their opinions and decisions are based on seeing the players every day in training, knowing their physical and mental state, knowing how they’re behaving and fitting in, knowing what’s going on with them at home. Information we’re simply never going to be privy to. And these professionals, from a wide variety of experience and background, are mostly coming to the same informed decisions. Neither Neil Warnock nor Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has entertained Luongo. Warnock, Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp, Chris Ramsey, Warnock again and now Hasselbaink have all ignored Harriman. Redknapp (largely), Ramsey, Warnock and Hasselbaink have all completely written off the idea that Yun Suk-Young should be the starting left back, despite him seeming a younger, quicker, fitter, more talented option (which the club actually owns) for that position than Paul Konchesky (who is only on loan). Three managers have ignored Gladwin, three managers have picked Rob Green over Alex Smithies, four managers have picked Karl Henry and two of them have picked him right wing, four managers have picked Fer whenever he is fit, two managers have now tried playing without a striker, four managers have moved Matt Phillips away from the right wing to the left or the centre… Flavio Briatore would simply have denounced them all as idiots (“every idiot we found, not an idiot left in turn”) but it’s not likely is it? What it’s doing is creating a frustration and confusion among us common or garden football fans. Because we look at the difference even a rudimentary centre forward like Seb Polter makes, and we wonder how you can ever start without one again. We look at Henry, hopelessly out of his depth in that further attacking role on Monday, and we wonder why Luongo, who I had down as our best player in the first ten matches, can’t get a look in. The managers are rarely asked these questions, and when they are the answers are heavy with PR and light on their true feelings, and so into this knowledge vacuum we shovel scapegoats and conspiracy theories. Is Tony Fernandes (or Ruben) influencing the team selection? Is Les Ferdinand interfering with things? Has the manager been told he has to pick the big names? Is the manager actually an idiot? Should we sack the manager? Should we sack the director of football? Should we start a petition? (No to the last one by the way. Always. Jesus). And as we all take our sides and pick our person who we think is at fault we become closed minded. The bigger picture is our starting 11 has gone through at least four complete and utter overhauls/transformations in the last five years and still isn’t that good. It wasn’t that good before Karl Henry and Rob Green, and it won’t improve or decline much when they’ve gone. We’ve had five different managers since Neil Warnock led us to promotion, and again the performance level and results have stayed pretty much the same. The results and performances were much the same before Les Ferdinand as they are now. Whatever problems you perceive the team and club to have they’re probably not down to an individual, and therefore won’t be solved by dropping or sacking whoever your current personal figure of hate is. As I said last week by historic league positions, size of gates and size of income we’re just about exactly where we should be in the league ladder. We’ve lost just one single home match all season and if the club itself hadn’t come out and suddenly said the goalposts had moved and promotion was the aim, we’d currently be in exactly the league position we were told to expect. So it’s not like the great plague is upon us, it just feels that way to be around the club and its support base — particularly on social media. But all in all, it just feels a bit odd right now to me. Like there’s something big we’re not being told. Like something isn’t right, but we can’t place exactly what it is. Like somebody has slept with somebody’s wife, and half the squad secretly hate the other half. The atmosphere at home matches starts off quiet, then gets frustrated, and then turns quite nasty and spiteful as substitutions are made either to the crowd’s liking or otherwise. The very best QPR teams in recent times have been the ones where Gerry Francis/Neil Warnock and the supporters knew exactly who would be starting the game six weeks from now, as long as everybody was fit. Stejskal, Bardsley, McDonald, Peacock, Wilson, Sinton, Holloway, Wilkins, Impey, Ferdinand, Allen. Kenny, Orr, Gorkss, Connolly, Hill, Faurlin, Derry, Mackie, Taarabt, Ephraim, Helguson. We can only hope that the situation comes back together, where Joe Bloggs in the stand and Jimmy Floyd on the touchline are on that same page in a similar way, because it tends to mean the team is settled and successful. Sadly at the moment, the unveiling of the team sheet an hour before kick-off is substantially more interesting and exciting than any of the matches. Links >>> Jones scores in Gregory’s first game — History >>> Stroud’s red run — Referee Highlights from the 1-1 draw between these sides at the KC Stadium in September. Charlie Austin got the QPR goal, for a change. New Year’s DayTeam News: Charlie Austin is unlikely to be fit to play against the team that turned him down on medical grounds two and a half years ago. A shame, as he’s scored twice against Hull in the last two meetings between the sides. Jamie Mackie made his long-awaited comeback in the Under 21s earlier this week but is still some weeks away from a first start. James Perch (knee) remains sidelined. Michael Dawson and Alex Bruce are medium term absentees from the Hull defence. Moses Odubajo (calf) and defender Andrew Robertson will both be monitored in the run up to the game. Elsewhere: Yet another full set of Championship fixtures, spread over two days this time, starting with Brighton, suddenly without a win in five, at home to Wolves starting things off on New Year’s Day at 15.00. Everything else, after our early evening game of course, takes place on January 2. The Champions of Europe have Franchise, miraculously the game hasn’t been televised by Sky although given Leeds’ justifiable frostiness towards the broadcaster perhaps we’ll finally see some let up in the ceaseless coverage of their midtable campaign soon. Middlesbrough v the Sheep is obviously the game of the weekend, pitting the top two against each other, while Barings Bank v Huddersfield is so completely the opposite it’s hard to believe it’s the same sport never mind the same division. Birmingham and Brentford is this weekend’s match between two teams beginning with B, while the Red Dragons welcome the Mad Chicken Farmers and Charlton are at home to the Trees. Preston against Rotherham and Waitrose v the Wurzels complete the list save for Tarquin and Rupert providing lashes of quinoa for the Sheffield Owls. Referee: Experienced Football League official Keith Stroud takes charge of this one. Once something of a lucky omen for Rangers, the R’s have now lost their last two matches with him without scoring including the 1-0 defeat at Derby in November where James Perch was sent off. That red card is one of seven Stroud has shown in his last dozen matches. For his extensive QPR case history, and his intimidating recent stats, please click here. FormQPR: The Huddersfield game encapsulated QPR’s problem this season — while they’re rarely beaten at home (just one defeat so far) they’ve drawn seven and won only four. Five of the last seven and six of the last nine have finished level and only lowly MK Dons, Rotherham and Bolton have lost here along with Leeds who were badly out of form at that point. The R’s have lost only two of the last nine, but won only two of them too. Just too many draws to move significantly in any direction on the league table. Hull: Hull have also only lost once at the KC Stadium this season, but unlike QPR they have converted more of the stalemates into wins — nine maximums and just two draws so far. Just as well really as their away form isn’t that good at all, with just four wins (Brentford, MK Dons, Cardiff, Forest) and five defeats. They’ve lost the last four road trips in all competitions, including defeats to lowly Rotherham and Preston in the last two games without scoring a goal. Prediction: Reigning Prediction League champion isawqpratwhitecity tells us… "Hull's recent away form has been abysmal, losing the last three games to bottom-half clubs, with their most recent poor effort at Preston. But we are QPR, we help players and clubs turn around poor runs of form. Besides, what have we had to boast about recently? I don't know if it is geographically specific, but Steve Bruce is today's featured article on Wikipedia. An omen? Who knows? “In my dreams, Seb Polter, starting as a revolutionary new class of player called "striker", muscles his way through to a physical first goal. Late in the game, after Hull have inevitably equalised, the last minute inclusion to the bench, "Our Jamie Mackie" (Registered Trade Mark), comes on and immediately dashes through to slam home the winner. Cue crowd goes wild, Jimmy finally pops his champagne and Sepp Blatter, a surprise attendee given the extradition risk, apologises to Football and promises to give back the money." Jim’s Prediction: QPR 2-1 Hull. Scorer: Polter LFW’s Prediction: QPR 0-0 Hull. No scorer. The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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