QPR got the job done at home to divisional whipping boys Sheff Wed on Sunday morning, but the 3-0 win came at considerable cost with four first teamers injured by half time including top scorer Rumarn Burrell.

If there is such a thing as an “unwinnable” football match, then Sheffield Wednesday is probably it for the other 23 teams in the Championship this season.

Theirs is a husk of a football club, hollowed out by the malignant ownership of unshiftable piss-stain Derek Chansiri and facing a long, arduous rebuild to get back even into a midtable Championship position. Still on -6, the Owls face the very real prospect of finishing in the red, and League One has been assured long before even the 18 points they had removed were deducted from the total. I’d have another three from them for this away kit as well.

Remarkably, and to the supporters’ immense credit, they’re still selling out away ends – even this one, for a game moved to the outright cruel kick off time of noon on the Sunday after New Year (in sub-zero temperatures) by our ever-benevolent Sky Overlords. The team they’re watching, though, isn’t really a team at all. Just waifs and strays left behind after the disaster, looking around them wondering how it came to this. Their starting line-up featured eight players under 22, and of the seniors still left Dominic Iorfa somehow accomplished the not insignificant feat of being the worst Dominic Iorfa to play at Loftus Road, Jamal Lowe showed his appreciation of the offside law has not improved greatly since he spent time with Rangers, and our perennial scourge Barry Bannan (who’s lost just three of 19 career appearances against QPR) has played every minute of every game over Christmas at 36-years-old and at one point in the second half collapsed in the centre circle through a mixture of exhaustion and just what’s the fucking point any more?

Beat this lot, and it’s simply what you were meant to do. Well done. Polite applause and Roy Keane “that’s their job” memes all round. Wednesday have lost 16 of their 25 games, only one side has lost to them so far (Portsmouth) and one of the eight draws was a typically charitable donation from Queens Park Rangers (because of course) in the corresponding fixture. One point from five away games leading in. Lose, or even draw, to them and it’s something approaching an existential crisis. This is a team without a win in 18 games coming into this one, although worth pointing out only Coventry (5-0) have scored more than three goals against them, which does seem to be about par – Preston (twice), Ipswich, Southampton, Sheff Utd, Bristol City and Stoke have all done that so far.

It was a situation further complicated for QPR by their own wretched Christmas. Seventh and one point from the play-offs with games against the teams in 24th, 23rd, 21st and 16th to come, the gap has grown to three points and five places as the team and manager have wilted under the pressure of the hectic festive programme. On Christmas Day this was a buzzy club, marked out as a dark-horse, with a confident squad and a support base revelling in its best performance of the season against Leicester and a dramatic last minute win against Birmingham. A fortnight on and it’s a squad losing players almost as quickly as it’s losing belief, in the same physical condition as its playing surface which is fast becoming a bit of an embarrassment, and while the ground remains sold out the atmosphere is more bored silence than anything else.

Julien Stéphan’s pre-match piece was headlined “we need you”, which only prompted a string of replies to the effect of ‘we sold out Portsmouth on Boxing Day with no trains, we took 1,500 up to West Brom two days later, we sold out again against Norwich, how about you give us something?’. I’ve said it before, this support base has been put through a lot by its club over the last few years, and has stuck by it in record numbers home and away. There are great explosions of pent up frustration and joy when things like the Kieran Morgan goal happens, but there is also not a lot of tolerance and patience left for the sort of bullshit served up here against Norwich.

Bill Bailey, one of our brethren of course, tells a story in Part Troll about how Whitney Houston left a crowd of thousands of New Yorkers standing out in the freezing cold and driving snow while she turned up on stage more than an hour late. When she finally emerged in a large fur coat her opening gambit was “I just want to say, I love every single one of you”, to which the large black guy standing next to him responded “Sing, Bitch.”

So that was the recipe, and the mood music it was set to. From there, dinner went exactly as expected. Football’s propensity to surprise and delight is what keeps us coming back. But it couldn’t overcome a thick concoction of these two teams, on this pitch, in front of this crowd, and the respective moods and states they were all in.

QPR did, indeed, win the game. Rumarn Burrell had already missed one sitter over an open goal ,after Pierce Charles parried a Richard Kone shot straight to him on six minutes, when he ran through onto a pretty Nicolas Madsen through ball and banged in a nerve-settling opener on 13. That move started with Jimmy Dunne, who’s the only one to have maintained a level of performance through Christmas and was very decent again here, dealing skilfully with a difficult ball on halfway and then two purposeful, forward passes from him and Rangers’ Danish midfielder. Wednesday were absolutely gaping through the middle all afternoon, but QPR need to learn the value of playing forwards against the better teams as well. Jonathan Varane, sadly, had another one of his days where there was no situation he couldn't transform into a pass back to the goalkeeper.

If I’d been so inclined at the end of a fortnight in which I feel like I’ve done nothing but sit at this laptop I could have just left this one at “needed to win, did”. But, by God, this was a strange watch.

Unnecessarily antisocial kick off time, freezing bloody cold, two tired teams both of whom pretty much knew the outcome before the game even kicked off, this played out at barely half pace. Take the weather and the crowd away and this had the look and feel of one of those early pre-season games we win something nil at Crawley Town. A lot of going through the motions. A lot of people playing within themselves. QPR’s strategy of walking, very slowly, to take every free kick and corner, rather than try and inject a bit of pace and tempo into the game and get the bloody thing finished off, became infuriating.

What certainly didn’t help was the sudden, rapid deterioration in the physical condition of the team. Liam Morrison pulled out in the warm up, replaced by Steve Cook. He was quickly followed by Rumarn Burrell with what looked like a pretty obvious hamstring pull soon after his goal, and Jonathan Varane who jarred his knee after getting his studs caught in what’s left of the turf. By half time Kwame Poku had been lost as well.

One of the repeat lines from the fans forum in August was "putting the players in the best position to succeed". Well, playing them on a pitch like a ploughed field is killing them. They reckon they're going to play a youth cup game on this thing next week? Abort. ABORT.

Fans of the theory that we’re re-running the Steve McClaren season again will also recall the Hair Island ran several key players into the ground through the winter after a dire start to the year and they all broke down in January as well. That Burrell injury felt like it was coming three weeks ago.

The physical conditioning of our team has been a debate point all year. So far off it in August we had to field the cast of Tots TV in a cup game at Plymouth, now again you’ve got a cup game the club are well aware 9,000 supporters are expecting a performance from, following the debacles at Home Park and Leicester, but what team are we actually going to be physically able to field for it?

From a low starting point, the game started to descend into a bit of a nonsense after half time. Time and time again Rhys Norrington-Davies or Amadou Mbengue would cross the halfway line with the ball, look up, and see a line-up ahead of them where the two wingers, Karamoko Dembele and Koki Saito, were the two most centralised players, standing in a tight line right down the centre of the field, robbing the home side of any width whatsoever. Dembele, on for the stricken Poku, had a nightmarish period in this game where he gave the ball away twice and botched a terrific chance for a second goal when he butchered a shot at the end of a break 4v2 in Rangers’ favour.

Dembele isn't very good at hiding when he's not happy. He was not happy here. When Ben Hamer sat down demanding a stoppage, something referee Sam Allison was happy to acquiesce to all afternoon for reasons best known to himself, there was a conflab on the touchline in which Dembele was visibly angry in conversation with Alou Diarra, tossing his gloves aside and walking off. Captain Jimmy Dunne put an arm around his shoulder.

It felt like a game, a crowd and an atmosphere that could turn. Whitney was well overdue by this point, and the natives were cold and restless. One Sheff Wed equaliser and this could have popped in all kinds of directions. Hamer shinned a low cross from Amass off a pass from the artist formerly known as Nathan Redmond out for a corner. Amass hit another long ranger past the top corner. Charlie MacNeill had a low shot through a crowd scene which Jamal Lowe stepped over when a goal would almost certainly have been scored had he stuck a toe on it. Bannan improvised a bouncing bomb which Hamer watched very carefully fearing the wicket. Having arrived looking completely bereft, the visitors were now playing with a bit of belief. Ooooooh, careful now Rangers. Big moment in the season this one…

What it needed was somebody to just calm down and play the game rather than the situation. Jimmy Dunne certainly did that at the back, I had him as our best player. Sam Field, too, came on from the bench and helped his team enormously. Tackling, organising, passing the ball to people in the same shirt. Witchcraft stuff.

Up front things weren’t clicking, bar one Kone header from a Madsen corner clawed away by Pearce, and I’d been a little bit disappointed with Rayan Kolli’s swing at his long overdue chance after Burrell’s withdrawal. One turn and hit in the penalty box sent the ball skied high over the bar, but at least it was a shot. Kolli wants to be involved, wants to score goals, wants to go forwards and wants to shoot. Yeh he’s a bit wayward, a bit selfish, a bit prone to getting the final ball or decision wrong, but his goals per minute were better than anybody else in the squad last season, and his win percentage was easily the best of any player – QPR laboured to win 30% of their games in 2024/25, and that shot up to nearer 50% when Kolli was involved.

Sure enough, out of nothing, with the crowd very firmly on the turn, after a high win by Mbengue he cleverly worked an angle round McGhee which unsighted the keeper and created a gap in the bottom corner just big enough to beat Pearce if he could get enough power on the shot which, well, bears, shit, woods etc. Wallop, 2-0, game won, crowd back to life, and a good news story this Christmas at last. And I will always love you. Even got the same hair.

Soon sub Kieran Morgan was winning a header off a wild Wednesday clearance which allowed Kolli clear blue water in the penalty box and he belted another one over Pearce and into the far corner for 3-0. Pulled over at the side of the track and said ‘what were you worried about?’. It really can be that simple. Could have done with a couple of shots like that when we were labouring to two efforts on target in 100 minutes against the worst goalkeeper we’re likely to play this season a couple of days ago. Have a shot, you never know.

Kolli was gassed at the end, which isn’t a great sign off 70 minutes of football against easily the worst opposition we’ve faced in many years at this level, but he’s not alone in that and for a club that has about 158 different members of staff with the word “performance” in their job title there have to be serious questions about why our stadium and our squad is in this condition with half a season still to go. The good news is he got his chance, and took it. If Burrell’s injury is as looked then this is a huge opportunity for Rayan to put the noise and the politics and the rumours and the gossip aside and actually be allowed to do some talking and express himself on the pitch. Is he good enough? We’ll only find out with time, and appearances. I’m excited to find out. He’s got loads to work on, but he’s got something. When he gets in the team, he tends to score goals (plural). Don’t knock that, we can work on the rest.

He put his hand up for the club here. Thank God somebody did.

Links >>> Photo Gallery >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread

QPR: Hamer 6; Mbengue 6, Dunne 7, Cook 6, Norrington-Davies 6 (Morgan 87, -); Poku 5 (Dembele 46, 4), Madsen 6, Varane 5 (Field 45+2, 7), Saito 5; Burrell 6 (Kolli 21, 7), Kone 5 (Hayden 87, -)

Subs not used: Bennie, Nardi, Smyth, Vale

Goals: Burrell 14 (assisted Madsen), Kolli 81 (assisted Kone), 88 (assisted Morgan)

Sheff Wed: Charles 5; Iorfa 4 (Palmer 56, 4) Otegbayo 4, McGhee 3; Fusire 4 (Shipston 89, -), Thornton 4 (Redmond 57, 3), Bannan 5, Amass 6; Cadamarteri 3 (Onukwuli 90+6, -), Lowe 3, McNeill 3 (Moses 89, -)

Subs not used: Alao, Emery, Johnson, Stretch

QPR Star Man – Rayan Kolli 7 I think it’s got to be, with two beautifully taken goals winning a game that felt in the balance with the crowd right on the edge, hasn’t it? But his performance prior to that had not been great and I actually thought our best player, as he has been all through this difficult Christmas period, was Jimmy Dunne again.

Referee – Sam Allison (Trowbridge) 6 Nothing at all to referee here in what looked and felt for long periods like one of those early pre-season games we play at Crawley Town. However his tolerance for people demanding the game be stopped was incredibly high. Barry Bannan moans at everybody about everything, but he was right to get stuck into the referee about first Burrell and then Hamer just being allowed to sit down, demand a stoppage, and get one. It’s a bit of a plague in our sport in general, and it tipped an already excruciating watch over into outright boredom here.

Attendance 16,327 (1,670 Sheff Wed) I still hold a petty, personal grudge with Sheff Wed over their treatment of Dave Thomas at the Hillsborough promotion game all those years ago, and of course the little stunt they pulled with the Bristol City latest score in that game, but no set of fans deserves an owner like Derek Chansiri inflicted on them and what’s he’s done to their club is a scandal. To sell the away out regardless, for a midday kick off on the Sunday after New Year, to watch this team, is remarkable. Most stayed to the end too.

If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.

Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

Recent Stories