QPR finish a hectic first month of the season, and head into the international break, with a home game against Coventry City, who’ve started similarly well.

QPR (2-2-0 DDWWDW 5th) v Coventry (3-0-1 WLLWW 4th)

Mercantile Credit Trophy >>> Saturday August 28, 2021 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather — Grey but dry >>> Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium, Loftus Road, London, W12

I’m drawn back to Warbs Warburton’s programme column from Tuesday night’s win against Oxford.

This is, in part, the start of my guerrilla campaign to keep people buying programmes, because the EFL rather coldly removed the legal need for them to be published a season or two back and the pandemic has been seized upon by clubs as an excuse to do exactly that. Several Championship clubs aren’t bothering this season. I think this is a shame, another part of old football being swept aside by new football because life apparently doesn’t exist now unless you can scroll morbidly through it on your phone, and besides it’s going to blow an even bigger hole in my ‘during the war’ collection of the damn things than even my mother - whose house they’re all stored in - would like to.

It is also in spite of me quoting them in the Oxford match report where, chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve read them already. Bite me. The novelty starts to wear off very quickly when you’re covering seven games in 21 days, two of them requiring international travel, and the “creative process” was rather rudely interrupted yesterday morning by the arrival of some correspondence from Humberside Police about my rate of progress on the A1079 past Beverley at twenty to one in the morning last Thursday. Turns out QPR weren’t the only ones bringing three points back from Middlesbrough. Do, please, keep those Patreon subs coming. Anyway, these previews don’t write themselves alright?

I found them interesting, so here they are again…

“When I first took the job at the club I was asked what my targets would be for the season and longer term. The only target in my mind, then and now, is to fill the stadium with as many Rangers fans as possible. Why? The more fans we have coming to watch the team, the more we know that our supporters are enjoying watching the side play. The more they’re enjoying the football, the more successful we know we will be with the results, which in turn means we’ll be pushing at the right end of the table. There’s no better indicator of a team doing well than a packed home support producing the type of noise that can so inspire the players. Our main goal will always be to fill the stadium. I hope very much that we can produce a performance this evening that you do indeed enjoy.”

Now, I suspect there’s some dramatic licence in play here. What little you and I know of Mark Warburton would surely lead us to think that he’s not going to bowl into a job interview John Candy style and tell the assembly that as long as everybody’s having a lovely time it doesn’t matter if they finish first or fiftieth. No, there will have been pie charts, key performance indicators, lines on graphs, projections. It’ll have knocked Schteve’s “Quality. Professional. Relentless.” PowerPoint presentation into the cocked hat it belonged, and been a part of the reason he got the job.

The combination of the two, the ideals and the principals, have made Warburton something approaching the ideal manager for QPR at the perfect time. He knows, appreciates and works within the restrictions, but he likes football played in a certain way, and that luckily corresponds with how the majority of QPR fans like to see themselves and the club.

We’re not quite at West Ham delusions of grandeur levels, where it’s now physically impossible to ever meet a male from Basildon, Romford, Dagenham or Leigh-on-Sea over the age of 35 who won’t swear blind they stood on “The Chicken Run” every other Saturday of their lives (capacity, presumably, somewhere approaching 2.6m people) and watched “The Academy Of Football” strut its stuff for seven or eight decades, never once missing a beat, getting relegated, turning out a horrible long ball team, and winning the World Cup for the Queen Mum along the way. QPR fans were brought up on some brilliant, attractive, often innovative teams that punched above the weight of the club. Obviously the 60s and 70s with Stock, Jago and Sexton; Marsh, Bowles, Francis, Thomas etc. The 80s with Venables and then Jim Smith’s wing backs, the 90s with Gerry Francis’ wingers crossing for Les Ferdinand with Ray Wilkins making the whole thing tick. But there’s been some pragmatism in there — Venables’ offside trap — and some real, real drek. Those same people who went from Venables, Smith, Don Howe and Gerry Francis, ended up watching Houston and Harford’s catastrophe of Morrow, Kulscar, Scully, Ready, Slade and others in double quick time. There has been plenty of anger along the way, and the recent onset of money and a couple of flurries of Premier League football built on foundations of sand raised expectations and attracted hangers on who quickly became impatient and aggressive. The Fifa generation live to demand more signings, more sackings, more blood, festooning Twitter and “Insta” with “#announce” banality. There have also, on occasions, been complaints - when even a relatively high achieving QPR team was doing so through more rudimentary means - about what we were paying to watch each Saturday. This became particularly acute when Ian Holloway, first time around, was entrenching himself and doubling down against Gianni Paladini’s mismanagement of the club and chucking out a basic bitch of a side designed to ground out 52 Championship points and keep him employed in the face of ever decreasing resources and fast escalating boardroom farce. He’d taken over the team at one of its lowest ebbs, he’d rebuilt it magnificently, he’d restored pride, he’d won promotion, he’d signed modern day legends, he’d given us amazing nights, but two, three, years later that midfield of Georges Santos and Matthew Rose started to wear thin.

When Holloway returned for a second spell in more recent times I was excited about the appointment, loved the nostalgia and feel-good factor it brought after the theoretically correct but practically dire appointment of Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink, and stuck up for a lot of what Olly did. We had some great moments in that spell, beating Wolves and Sheff Utd at home inside four days, who went on to be promoted, one of them deliberately doped into the Premier League by Middle Eastern money and an unscrupulous agent bringing Champions League-quality players into the Championship for his and their financial gain. A 3-1 win at Villa Park. Luke Freeman and Bright Osayi-Samuel signed; Ryan Manning and Ebere Eze introduced into the team. There were bad times too, more than one sequence of six successive defeats, a chronic failure to compete away from home with every game drifting away into the nuclear option of chucking Matt Smith on for the last half an hour to try and head the two or three goals we needed by then to get even a point. When these things happened I would point at the circumstance and the budget. What, exactly do you want him to do? He’s inherited this squad earning this much, he’s been told to get to this squad earning half that, and we have to stay in the Championship at the same time. He, and Hasselbaink to be fair, fulfilled the remit they were given and were sacked regardless.

Warburton, though, has shown what was/is possible. He has the pragmatic, financial mindset that means he has understood the budgetary challenges and worked within them. He took over a team already heavily reliant on loans having lost Alex Smithies, Nedum Onuoha, Jack Robinson and others. He immediately had to sell Luke Freeman, Mass Luongo, Darnell Furlong and others. He has since had to lose Ebere Eze, Manning, Osayi-Samuel and others. And yet the team has got better, the league positions higher, and the football more attractive. It’s not all him — head of recruitment Andy Belk we’re looking forward to catching up with on the Patreon in the international break, dog whistle criticism of Les Ferdinand and Chris Ramsay has noticeably subsided on social media — but he’s been a key part of some turnaround here.

The football QPR play now is as watchable as it gets at this level. His commitment to it, and chasing further goals rather than indulging in the sort of gamesmanship that is rife and unchecked in this division, might at times be idealism over realism. But would I rather be Barnsley last week, who came up with the perfect potion to knock QPR for four, five, maybe even six, but abandoned the plan at two in favour of shithousery and time wasting and ended up with a 2-2; or QPR at Middlesbrough the previous week who didn’t let a sending off distract them from passing the ball, attacking in numbers, trying to score goals, exploiting where they knew Boro were suspect, and winning the game? There’ll be times this year where I just want us to choke the life out of a game, maybe tomorrow, and there will be plenty of occasions when it doesn’t work, but in general I prefer Warbs’ values here, and a league-leading 39 points from losing positions since he took over tells its own story. Yes we concede, yes he’s sometimes too Warbs for his own good, but we are successful, and we’re good to watch with it. However this season goes, whenever it goes wrong, I enjoy watching QPR now, I’m excited about going to the games, it’s football worth investing in.

Now, having been so well run off the field for a good five or six years, while the team on it floundered, it’s the back office that needs to keep up. We have a ticketing website that works when it likes, depending on what device you’re using. We have a digital turnstile entry system that admits or dismisses people that approach it completely at random — don’t come at me with your “scanned too quick, scanned too slow, didn’t let the turnstile clear, didn’t understand” bullshit because I’ve watched young, tech savvy, head of IT at law firm people turned back from the gates already this season because the turnstile took against them for no reason. I know people who didn’t go to Oxford during the week because the ticket map showed a full stadium, so they couldn’t get four seats together where they wanted, when in actual fact the website just hadn’t got round to releasing the untaken season ticket seats until 13.00 on the day of the game. I know people who sat on hold to the box office phone line, counting down from seventeenth in the queue to first, at which point it hangs up on you. I’ve had that experience myself. When you get to speak to a human in the box office, they’re unfailingly brilliant at their jobs, surprisingly polite given the shit they’re taking from above and below, and sort whatever issue it is immediately. But the rest of the time you’re at the mercy of a TicketMaster system, for which we pay £3.50 every time we take a shit, and TicketMaster are infamously a company that exists for one purpose, which they’re biblically useless at. Huge queues and similar problems up and down the leagues, from Liverpool and West Ham, to Rotherham in League One. You had 18 months to prepare for us coming back, and this is what you did with it.

I feel the need to say every time I have this rant that I appreciate staffing, isolation, global pandemic, NHS app, temporary staff and all the rest of it must be a complete nightmare at the moment. I’m not ignorant to this. But football clubs should be falling over themselves for customers right now. They haven’t had gate revenue for 18 months, they’re presumably terrified of having what gate revenue they’re getting now taken away from them for the exciting “Echo variant” winter that lies ahead of us. This is literally hay making, sun shining time and yet our message board and the club’s socials are riddled with people who were literally desperate to buy tickets, or gain entry to the ground having done so, but found their path blocked by technology. Only four clubs in the Championship are currently tracking at higher attendances than they had pre-pandemic, two of those are promoted teams and one of them is Coventry on their return to the Ricoh. Barnsley and Boro are the others, QPR's stats do not include the Barnsley game where the gate was sub-12k. Everybody else is down.

People are wary about coming back, people are skint, people have found other things to do with their time, people are scared. They don’t need another excuse not to come. It should be the easiest thing in the world to give QPR money and buy a ticket, they should be hooking us in off the street. Instead, it’s becoming like a round of the Krypton Factor. However much money it saves, and staffing shortages it solves, replacing a gate operator with a machine, it is not progress, and is false economy, if that machine means you used to be able to turn up at five to three and see the kick off, but now you’re not even guaranteed that if you’re there after 14.15. The club are pleading with people to trun up earlier and earlier. That's not a system getting better, that's a system regressing, one that you have to make allowances for rather than rely on. Away games, at the far end of the country, stuck on sale six days before kick off, another example.

Warburton’s fulfilling his part of the bargain. This is football people will pay to watch, and I’m so confident it will be again tomorrow it’s scaring me because the last time I was this sure we’d win was Huddersfield at home last season — the last time we failed to score. For the first time in years, the logistics have now started lagging behind the team.

Links >>> Cov three from four — Interview >>> Gould’s resignation — History >>> Whitestone in charge — Referee >>> Coventry City — Official Website >>> Coventry Telegraph — Local Press >>> Sky Blues Talk — Forum >>> Sky Blues Blog — Blog >>> Sideways Sammy — Blog >>> The Lonely Season — Blog >>> Sky Blues TV - Clasic Match Highlights

Below the fold

Team News: Jordy De Wijs came off at half time against Barnsley last week with an ankle injury and missed the Oxford game this week but has trained ahead of this one — though Jimmy Dunne was a seriously impressive deputy against both the Tykes and Oxford in the cup. Lyndon Dykes, too, has trained having missed the last two games with illness. His stop-start beginning to this season thanks to that bug will now include a fortnight of three matches for Scotland rather than rest, which I’m sure will do him the world of good. Not at all surprising that “we need to do three international fixtures in each break because it’s a short season” has quickly morphed into “we’re going to do three international fixtures in each break because you’ve shown you can and it makes us more money” and Scotland, in an absolute triumph of common sense and logistical planning, will next week fly out to Denmark for one game, back to Scotland to play Moldova, and then straight back out to Austria for another. Honestly, football, I want to love you, but you don’t half make it difficult sometimes.

Also back from the sickbay, Sam McCallum got through an hour of the cup tie so should continue to fill in for hamstrung Lee Wallace at left wing back against the club he made his name at and played on loan from Norwich last season. As we draw mercifully near to the end of the transfer window QPR continue to be linked with a loan move for Andre Gray but his wages mean he probably won’t arrive unless a taker be found for ostracised Todd Kane. Coventry are said to be close to signing him, giving him a chance to go somewhere else and play second fiddle to a better right wing back, Fankaty Dabo, while no doubt knowing so much more about the game than he does, though that deal is said to be stalling over QPR’s insistence he plays against us tomorrow.

The club has taken the unusual step of Tweeting out pictures of Charlie Austin, Lyndon Dykes, Jordy De Wijs, Ilias Chair, Chris Willock, Stefan Johansen and Albert Adomah all training in the last few days. Given how cagey Warbs likes to keep his team news, and the “nothing you don’t already know about” line in his build up to Hull which presumably referred to the interviewer rather than us because Charlie Austin didn’t travel, I’m somewhat surprised that everybody we, and Coventry, may have had a doubt about has been snapped and publicised. Maybe we’re double bluffing, and some of them won’t play — a Woodgate. Maybe, coming back to the drop intro, we’re trying to shift tickets, alarmed at the low take up for Man Utd, Leicester, Millwall and particularly Barnsley. Maybe, with Andy Watkins off, the workie is in charge of the socials. Or maybe a LFW site editor is drunkenly hunting for angles for match previews.

Coventry have defensive shuffles to consider. They were without Michael Rose, who scored an own goal here last season, and Chelsea loanee Jake Clarke-Salter for the win against Reading a week ago and the fix of moving Dabo further back into the central three was a failure that required mid-game surgery. Ben Sheaf filled in there post changes, dropping back from midfield to great effect, but it’s likely to revert back to Hyam, McFadzean and whichever one of Rose or Clarke-Salter is fit again this weekend. Matt Godden , who scored against QPR at St Andrew’s last season, got the winner against Reading but isn’t likely to be fit enough for a start with Gyokeres likely to be given the nod instead, either alone or alongside the so-far-misfiring Martyn Waghorn. More details on all of this should you be interested in the excellent Sideways Sammy blog.

Elsewhere: A full round of a dozen games from the Mercantile Credit Trophy on this final Saturday of August, and it’s a real mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly; the bad, the mad and the sad; and Huddersfield v Reading.

Two derby games to start the day. In the East Midlands, one crisis club meets another. In the shit corner, Wayne Rooney’s Derby County, who missed the August 24 deadline to refile three years’ worth of accounts without all the unicorn sales on them this time (colour me shocked), and are now apparently in negotiations with the EFL over a deduction of nine points for their years of financial mismanagement and deliberate rule breaking (because of course you can negotiate what punishment you’d like best with the governing body of a soundly run sporting competition). A new deadline has been set for the filing of the accounts, which replaces the old deadline, which in turn replaced a previous deadline, and should this one not be met I’m sure Derby will suffer a long and tedius exchange of emails about what punishment and new deadline they feel is appropriate for this. Honestly, football, I try to love you… In the clown car, Nottingham Florist, who dipped out of the League Cup with a 4-0 defeat and 24% possession against Wolves so they can concentrate fully on extending a sequence of four straight defeats to begin the league season. Fear not, they’ve signed another full back, former Ram Max Lowe on a season long loan from Sheff Utd. If that doesn’t work, there’s a growing consensus that they might like to try sacking the manager again, so magnificently well has that worked before. Goat rodeo begins at 12.30. As, indeed, does Bristol City v Cardiff down in the South West.

Some real genuine intrigue around in the 15.00s as we try and work out exactly what the lie of the land is in this division. Fulham, a s we expected, have started well (3-1-0) and were exceptional in parts in last week’s win at Millwall (though it was only 2-1 in the end). They host Stoke, who nobody really fancied but have also matched that record so far and scored 11 goals in six league and cup games doing it. Not so rosy for our other top two tip, Sheffield Red Stripe, who did at least score their first goal in four league games at home to Sporting Huddersfield last week, but still lost 2-1 as Slavisa Jokanovic continues to stubbornly force a squad built for Chris Wilder’s progressive back three into a prehistoric 4-4-2. They’ll have all on improving a dismal start at our dark horses Lutown, although their results have been all over the map so far with a big win against Peterborough, a narrow defeat at West Brom, a narrow win at Barnsley, and a 5-0 home thrashing by Birmingham. Brum travel to the Tykes in this weekend’s exciting game between two teams beginning with B.

Preston Knob End got themselves off the mark with a hard fought 1-0 win in the Darren Ferguson derby against Peterborough last weekend, and beat Morecambe in the cup, but aren’t doing much to dispel our fears they could really struggle this year. More clues to be had in a home game against Swanselona whose football so far has been predictably beautiful and completely ineffective. Blackpool travel to the Marxist Hunters, two teams yet to win this season, Blackburn get their date on the Fourteenth Annual Neil Warnock Farewell Tour, and Tigers Tigers Rah Rah Rah (three defeats in a row without scoring) host Bournemouth.

There’s some early concern to be had in Peterborough’s results. Their win was only secured against the Wazza’s Travelling Circus thanks to two defensively catastrophic goals in injury time, and the draw saw them surrender a two goal lead to Cardiff. They were beaten 3-0 at Luton, 1-0 at Preston (who we strongly suspect are complete crap), and 4-0 by Plymouth in the League Cup. Very interested to see whether the suspicion of a thrashing at home to West Brom, defying learned predictions from wanker website editors that their ageing squad would never possibly cope with Valerian Ismael’s Ultimate Fireball, with three wins and a draw and 11 goals scored.

Remember though, it’s August. Barnsley won none of their first seven last year, Reading won all of theirs, Dave Jones always had Cardiff motoring in November before a blow out, Millwall were top at Christmas once and got relegated.

Referee: Championship mainstay Dean Whitestone has the whistle for this one. Details.

Form

QPR: Rangers are now unbeaten in eight games in all competitions since the 3-1 loss to champions Norwich on April 24 (W5 D3) which is their longest competitive unbeaten run since March of the 2010/11 promotion season when they were unbeaten in ten matches between an FA Cup exit at Blackburn on January 8 and a midweek league defeat at Millwall on March 8. Rangers of course went 18 unbeaten at the start of that season to put them in pole position for the title, but an early League Cup exit to Port Vale means this run of six games without a loss is the R’s best start to a season since 1987/88 when Jim Smith’s team topped the fledgling First Division table heading into an away game at Liverpool after an undefeated run of seven. The Warnock promotion season also featured a 3-0 away win in the north in game two (Sheff Utd then, Hull City now) and an unlikely comeback from two goals down to draw 2-2 with an injury time equaliser in game four (Derby A then, Barnsley H now). Centre back Rob Dickie has four goals in six league and cup games this season, and five in his last 11, three of them from outside the box. Yoann Barbet was rested for the midweek cup game, but should be back to make a sixty-sixth consecutive QPR appearance in the league going back to Huddersfield in February 2020 which was his last miss. The Oxford match in the week took Mark Warburton (104) past Harry Redknapp (103) for QPR games managed. It also continued a record of scoring in every one of our last 17 competitive games, back to a 1-0 loss here against Huddersfield in March. Lyndon Dykes has had a fair hand in that, with 13 “goal involvements” (nine goals and four assists to you and me) in his last 14 outings.

Coventry: Cov have started the season very well, with three wins from their first four league games. They’ve beaten Forest and Reading 2-1 on their return to the Ricoh Arena, won 1-0 at newly promoted Blackpool and lost 1-0 at Barnsley while ditching out of the League Cup 2-1 at home to Northampton. Mark Robins’ side trailed 1-0 in both the Forest and the Reading wins, which shows an immediate improvement on 2020/21. Their 3-2 win at home to QPR in the second match of the season would turn out to be their only victory of the whole season when conceding first. They won one, drew four and lost 17 of the 22 games they conceded the first goal in, and have already doubled that win total just four games into the new campaign. It is probably just about worth pointing out, with the league table in its embryonic stage, that the teams they’ve beaten are currently 24th, 22nd and 18th with just one win from 12 matches played between them and when they came up against last season’s losing play-off semi-finalists Barnsley they lost to nil. Although 2020/21 was played almost entirely behind closed doors, and every Coventry game was an away game with them sharing at St Andrew’s, it was their away form they really struggled with on return to the Championship. Now side in the division won as few as their four on the road (the same total as relegated Wycombe and Sheff Wed) and only three sides lost more than their 13 — relegated Rotherham had a better total with 12. Only three teams (Huddersfield, Wycombe, Sheff Wed) shipped more than their 39 away goals. Needless to say, given they survived, a total of ten home wins was the best total south of the top ten, and two more than eighth-placed Cardiff. No team outside the top ten scored more than their 30 home goals, three more than fourth-placed Swansea managed. Viktor Gyokeres has two goals in four matches so far, having scored just five from centre forward in the whole of last season and just two in the final 17 games of the campaign.

Prediction: We’re indebted to The Art of Football for once again agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Mick_S took the title on the very final weekend of the season last year giving him the dubious honour of finishing our match previews in 2021/22. Here are his thoughts on Cov…

“So hard to call this early as both teams have had a pretty decent start. Based on the goals for and against and that, as yet, Coventry are not particularly prolific scorers, I’m going for a home 2-1 with Chair to score. Home advantage will possibly sway it.”

Mick’s Prediction: QPR 2-1 Coventry. Scorer — Ilias Chair

LFW’s Prediction: QPR 3-1 Coventry. Scorer — Lyndon Dykes

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thehat added 20:00 - Aug 27 Great stuff as always Clive - Lets hope we get a decent crowd in tomorrow a Saturday 3.00pm kick off with Rangers playing some fantastic football. Come on R’rrs fans make the effort these boys deserve our support. Crown and Sceptre for me too tomorrow the best pint of Pride in London. Might also give the new Pie and Mash shop a run out too. Pie and Mash, London Pride and 3 points for the R’rrrs - Just the perfect Saturday!

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CLAREMAN1995 added 00:59 - Aug 28 Great work ,sorry about the speeding ticket always hated those cameras or in my case A policeman who jumped out into the middle of the fcuking road and nearly died because I nearly died of the shock and barely braked in time. We refer to Ticketmaster as Ticketbastard over here just a complete money grab and that is before they send their good seats to their own broker site ,what could go wrong

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