A new day, a new terrifying managerial prospect linked with a move to QPR. It’s an inevitable result of the high gaffer turnover we have had for the last 18 months but there is still hope yet.

Step forward Flavio, your club needs you
You have absolutely no idea what it is like for me to wake up every morning and have my club linked with a move for Jim Magilton.

Any mention of the recently sacked Ipswich gaffer on the message board is now accompanied with the catchline ‘cue Northern rant’ because I just cannot help myself. The mere threat of our club being linked with him sends me off into a towering rage about the state of him, QPR, the world, the universe, life itself. I just cannot contemplate it, we cannot surely to God appoint Jim Magilton as our manager. God? GOD. I’m speaking to you. I don’t think he’s heard me. God. God. God. God. God.

Jim Magilton has at no stage run over my cat, failed to stop for me at a zebra crossing, jumped in front of me in a queue for theatre tickets, turned down my request for an autograph or slept with my girlfriend. This is not a personal thing I have with him. He has however managed my girlfriend’s football team, for three years, and while I wish I could tell you she is one of those girls that goes to the football solely to look at the footballers legs and thinks Stuart Downing is that guy that did 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit I can’t. She knows her stuff, she knows Ipswich Town and she thinks the whole thing is hilarious.

Jim Magilton was fired by Ipswich two games from the end of last season because he had spent a substantial amount of money and not got them anywhere near the play offs in three attempts. The media, and this site too I hold my hands up, quoted £12m as the sum and that was immediately pulled up as being incorrect in our >story last week. Step forward a helpful Ipswich fan to clarify - Norris £2.5m, Stead £600k, Quinn £500k, McCauley £1.5m, Balkestein £150k, Lisbie £500k, Civelli £1m, Schumilokovski £500k, Walters £250k, Harding £500k, Roberts £200k. Soccerbase quotes a number of those fees, particularly the Norris one, lower still.

So yeh, not £12m but not a million miles away and still plenty for a team that didn’t actually do any better than our lot last season. As an outsider looking in I can tell you it gets really, really, really bloody irritating hearing Magilton tell anybody that will listen about his latest transfer target for weeks on end (David Nugent is a favourite) only for it not to come off and three months down the line some other nobody that Magilton used to play with (Pablo Counago for example) turns up instead. So he spent a lot, he achieved nothing, and he irritated the chuff out of everybody along the way. I’ve been mocking Mrs Clive about this for the last 18 months, and now she’s a little bit smug about the roles potentially being reversed.

Magilton is joined on a somewhat desperate list of candidates by Colin Calderwood (sacked by Nottingham Forest last season), Alan Pardew (sacked by Charlton last season), Aidy Boothroyd (sacked by Watford last season), Gianluca Vialli (sacked by Watford back in the day) and need I go on? I don’t like to say I told you so because anybody who didn’t see this coming after Sousa’s departure is a fool.

You cannot turn over managers at the rate we have done for the past eighteen months, with a bucket load of media speculation on boardroom interference to boot, and expect quality managers to keep coming forward wanting to take the position. By losing Dowie and Sousa, two respected if somewhat different football figures, in the same season and all the coverage that has gone with that we have put ourselves in a position where only those desperate for a route back into the game or money will consider taking this job. It's a poisoned chalice to be sipped from only by the terminally desperate or stupid – according to the Daily Mail.

Flavio Briatore can wheel out as many past managers as he likes to say they weren’t sacked, he can threaten action against as many newspapers as he likes for saying he sacked managers, he can plead his innocence in flawless English on the official website until he is blue in the face – the fact is QPR have been managed, permanently or on a caretaker basis, by John Gregory, Mick Harford, Luigi De Canio, Iain Dowie, Gareth Ainsworth, Paulo Sousa and Gareth Ainsworth again during Briatore’s reign and none of them will be doing the job next season. That’s the only fact that any half decent prospective manager will look at when the opportunity to take this job. They won't care if they were sacked, resigned, retired or died they will just look at the number of them and the time it took to work our way through them and think they don't much fancy being the next notch on the bedpost. That and the various stories about Briatore interfering in the team are killing us in this search it seems. Briatore denies that as well of course, but again misses the point when he says he told Dowie to pick Cerny not Camp, told Sousa to play 442 etc. Flavio, mate – it’s the same thing. Even if it isn’t true, mud sticks, the damage is done.

So despite promises from those campaigning for Sousa’s ousting that the board would not allow anything other than the finest candidate to take over from him it now seems that we are readying our barrel scrapers to try and find somebody, anybody, desperate enough to come and work under these conditions. To appoint one of the no marks linked with the job more recently would surely be setting us up for exactly what we got when we appointed Dowie this time last year. Do Jim Magilton, Colin Calderwood and others sound like Briatore appointments to you? Can you really see this working out? They’d be lucky to last as long as Dowie did. I do hope that a good number of these managers are only being linked with the job because their agents are trying to get their names about and there isn’t actually any truth in it.

There is potentially hope other than that though. Briatore, and the manager turnover, may be the problem as far as attracting a good, proven manager to work here but he could also be the solution. Briatore is rich, high profile and influential, he has contacts and along with his fellow board members still has the potential to plough what would be a serious amount of money for the Championship into the QPR first team and treat it as pocket money. Briatore and the other board members have already put the best part of £30m into QPR in various forms to buy the club, pay off dodgy loans, pay off debts, buy new players etc – it’s all there in the accounts. Our owners are going to start to look silly if their much talked about plan for the Premiership drags on for too many more seasons and one thing Flavio cares about more than anything else is image. If he can find the manager that takes QPR into the Premiership he's going to look like a genius, he can laugh in the face of all his critics who have had a field day this season. Added to that QPR have players that every other manager in this division would kill to have – Vine, Routledge, Buzsaky, Gorkss. A high manager turnover and even stories of boardroom interference isn’t necessarily such a turn off in Italy or Spain where we could yet pick up a good manager keen to work in English football with money to spend.

There is so much wrong at our football club at the moment, but none of it is irretrievable. We could appoint a decent chief scout, we could stop getting rid of managers, we could stop spinning nonsense to the fans on the official website, we could start re-engaging with the supporters, we could stop giving mediocre players massive contracts, we could persuade a decent manager to come here and give him total control. None of these things are hard to put in place.

If Briatore can use his influence and contacts to get good managers to at least come to interview and then offer a a clear budget for players, control over the signings, a promise that his interference in the first team will stretch only as far as ringing in from some foreign Grand Prix to ask what the score was and that no judgements or sackings will be made until at least this time next year then we could still attract a very good manager in here. And by God we need somebody better than those that have been linked this week.

The manager should be the most important person at the club. We have clearly lumbered ourselves with a lot of players on massive money and very long contracts - a new man is going to have to motivate and unite that squad. We have a very hands on and overbearing chairman - a new manager is going to have to control that and stand up to him when necessary. We have no scouting network and a questionable method of squad strengthening - a new manager would have to work within that or preferably change it completely. So we need a strong character, with some experience, who the players and board will respect when they speak. We can't just appoint any old eejit because apart from Wenger, Ferguson and Mourinho all managers are much of a muchness and nobody better would join us.

Flavio, it really is down to you now.

Photo: Action Images

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