In the latest LoftforWords guest column exiled Rangers fan Rob Gilbert speaks about his first year following the R's from New York.

I’m in a smelly, sticky, dark bar and I’m depressed. I am surrounded by hundreds of Man U fans all celebrating the fact that they have just hammered Blackburn at home. The bar has countless television screens blaring images of Rooney, Ronaldo et al high fiving and back slapping. In one corner of the bar I am stood squinting at a small screen with three men beside me. One of them is ecstatic because Ipswich Town have just beaten us 3-1, the other two are as depressed as I am. I step outside the bar, drunk, to read a text from my angry (and now ex) girlfriend who was annoyed I had left early that morning to watch football. She didn’t understand, and even worse none of the men around me understood, I didn’t even have the brotherhood of man to back me up. I was in Manhattan and absolutely nobody walking past knew who, or what a QPR was.... it’s been a long year.

I moved out to New York in September, I said goodbye to friends and family and was able to hold back the tears until Sunday September 14 when I applauded Patrick Agyemang’s penultimate goal of the season as we routed Southampton 4-1. I knew then that it was possibly the last goal I would be seeing live from my beloved QPR for some time. The next day I was on a plane, flying to New York to follow my dreams.

From reading posts across the message boards I know that by no means am I the only QPR fan living in exile. However these fans had something on me that I could not buy, experience. I had never been apart from Loftus Road before and the separation hit me hard. Certain rules were set up with my dad, he had to text me constantly throughout the match with updates and player ratings, he however flagged up the cost of texting America constantly and refused, we settled that all goals their scorers and the minute they hit the net would be acceptable, plus a brief summary at full time. The board had led me to believe that this year I was going to be flying back to London for a glorious day out at Wembley in May as we clinched promotion, I had even booked the date in my diary in advance. Needless to say as the season progressed the texts became less frequent from my dad and as the date in diary drew closer the realty drifted further away.

‘So how did I do it?’ I hear you ask, well I slipped very comfortably into a routine. Saturday mornings I would rise at 9:30, usually hungover, and trot off down to Dunkin’ Donuts to be served by the most sour faced woman in the world who somehow had not killed herself by the time we visited Preston on the final day of the season. A coffee and a bagel from her would set me right up for a morning of football. Fox Soccer Channel then lit up the television and the punditry skills of Warren Barton (yes THE Warren Barton) flooded my front room. Of course it was only ever the big four on the box but it provided me with the backdrop to the real action via the Internet.

It was over to the Sky Sports website for their Soccer Saturday score update thingy, complete with a gurning Jeff Stelling adorning the front page. So I would sit and wait for updates, unable to get the commentary from QPR World to work on my Mac. I would trawl through match threads on websites and desperately try to hype up the BBC’s live text commentary, spending 90 minutes reading ‘Rowan Vine sends in a cross. Clearance by Sean St. Ledger’ doesn’t exactly get the heart pumping. Then my phone would beep. In the time it takes between opening the message and computing the score your head thinks about a million thoughts, the ramifications of a goal, who scored it? Did we concede? Was it Cerny’s fault? Is this the final nail in Sousa’s coffin? Did Jude the Cat make a remarkable comeback and enter the field of play to score the winner? If we have scored then it’s fist punching delight, enough to wake up annoyed flatmates. If we concede, then a sucker punch to the gut and I’m in a terrible mood for the rest of the day. At the final whistle I usually received a call from dad who would mark each player out of ten and assure me that we weren’t getting promoted this season.

Of course at times this routine was interrupted. After a successful night armed with an English accent and some cheap vodka it’s very hard to explain to a girl, who looked more attractive under the glare of a disco ball, that you keep checking your phone every five seconds because you want to know if your football team, who don’t play in a Major League, have pulled one back away to a side called Ipswich Town.

Even harder were Tuesday night games - 2:45pm kick off time in The Big Apple, right smack bang in the middle of a class with a moron for a teacher. By the end of the season I was incredibly skilled at checking my phone whilst the teacher talked and being able to hide the joy of a Dexter Blackstock goal by biting down on my tongue... hard.

There have been times when QPR were on Sky this season meaning that the bar across the street from me would be able to (illegally I’m sure) show the game. I would be excited all week and explain to anyone who cared to listen that my team were on TV. In The States of course every single game is shown on local TV, they don’t know how lucky they are. The first game I watched was away to Birmingham at 7:30 in the morning.... well that was fucking depressing. We then were on live against Reading which garnered a slightly more positive response. Then came the glorious Wolves game.... of course, I missed the second half though. The moron teacher, who was yet to discover my James Bond like skills when it came to processing information when it came across from England, had called us in for an extra class on a Saturday afternoon that was mandatory. So there it was, the one game I would have been able to see us win all season and I missed it. Of course the Ipswich game didn’t live up to anywhere near the expectations I placed on it and that was my lot for watching QPR for the 08/09 season.

I’ve made the decision to stay in New York for an extra year. When people ask me do I miss my family, I always reply ‘yes’ and then let my mind wander off to the silky skills of Lee Cook, the heroism of Martin Rowlands or the no nonsense defending of Damion Stewart. It’s tough to support a team like QPR when you live in England, it’s even more depressing and nowhere near as rewarding when you are on the other side of the world. I tried to replace that feeling by following the New York Knicks, however the only similarities between them and QPR was that they were both useless this season. I’m pretty sure that some cheerleaders that looked like the girls at the Knicks game would be an incentive to raise attendance numbers down at HQ. For all the glamour and comfort of American sports nothing replace the feeling of a cold Tuesday night in Barnsley.

So it’s going to be a more internet checking, mobile phone hiding and lonely celebrating for me next year. My dad told me at a young age ‘We support QPR son, you can’t change that, no matter how hard it seems you will always be a Ranger.” Those words have never been truer.

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