Described pre-match as the most midtable Championship game that ever did midtable, QPR v Bristol City then promptly turned into the most nil nil that ever did nil.

Of all the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the third and final was probably where shit got the most real.

The second, which concluded in 201 BC, was pretty tetchy by most standards of the time. General Hannibal Mejbri (Man Utd, Birmingham [loan], Seville [loan], Burnley) tried to cart 37 "war elephants" across the Alps at one point, with predictable results.

In an effort to prevent it from happening again, a treaty was signed which, among other terms, prohibited Carthage from waging further wars without Rome’s permission.

Knowing his near rival was on something of a final warning from bossman, King Masinissa of Numidia (bit of a prick, and coincidentally a close ally of Rome) spent the next 50 years poking the Carthaginians with a big stick – killing people, seizing territory, windmilling his dick around and shouting nerrr… etc.

By 151 BC the locals were getting a bit tired of this sort of thing and so Hannibal's non-union Carthaginian equivalent Hasdrubal got a gang of likeminded chaps together and set off on a counter assault of Masinissa to show them what’s what. This resulted in the Battle of Oroscopa, which was bad for a couple of reasons: one, Hasdrubal lost and surrendered his army (no second leg at this stage of the competition); two, it violated the aforementioned treaty.

In response, a fairly chunky Roman army landed at Utica in North Africa in 149 BC, surrounded and set about laying siege to the city of Carthage for the next three years. It was a campaign so brutal and relentless it reduced the population of the city from around half a million to just 50,000. A famine set in so severe the remaining inhabitants were reduced to eating leather and sand, washed down with their own urine. If you’ve ever wondered where the term ‘punitive punishment’ comes from it’s here, and I don’t think anybody has ever envied those poor people their fate… until now.

On Saturday morning, approximately four hours into the interminable dirge that was QPR 0 Bristol City 0, while the “game” drew to a halt for the 76th time as yet another professional athlete screamed, leapt into the air, collapsed to the ground, and made out like they were mortally wounded, I think I finally slipped into a place where I’d rather have been stuck in northern Tunisia, chewing on my own trainer with a side of sand and necking my own piss, than watching any more of this.

After respective existential crises through early March, both teams had come into April in better nick and the top half of the Championship.

QPR had gone from four defeats in four games in which they’d conceded 12 times and scored none, to three wins and a draw in which they’d netted 12 goals of their own, beaten Portsmouth 6-1, and really should have won the final game against Preston.

Bristol City’s Night of the Long Knives, which claimed manager Gerhard Struber and technical director Brian “all over bar the shouting” Tinnion, had come up with the unlikely solution of exhuming Roy Hodgson (78) for the remainder of the season. With a win on a first ever career visit to Charlton successfully bagged, the Robins then knocked over Sheff Utd on Easter Monday in a game Chris Wilder said his side dominated from start to finish and “battered” City during the second half. I’m not sure you’d need the fingers of one hand to count the fucks Mr Roy gave about that.

In improving form, with respective crippling injury lists subsiding, and facing absolutely no genuine peril of any sort, one might have travelled to Shepherd’s Bush on Saturday morning expecting a carefree, rumbunctious 3-3 draw sort of an afternoon. What, after all, did either team have to lose? Be social out there. You’re well read, have some fun with it.

What transpired was… the farthest thing from fun.

A 12.30 kick off never helps. Atmosphere inside Loftus Road at go time akin to an insurance seminar – and not a good insurance seminar either, no free bar here. With Coventry going for the league title on one side, and Norwich hosting Ipswich in a crucial Old Farm Derby on the other, the only reason our television overlords could ever have chosen this most midtable of midtable irrelevances was to fulfil the agreed quota of showing every team a set number of times (in addition to deliberately fucking people off so much they won’t object to the end of the “3pm blackout”). Their reward was the most nil nil that ever did nil, surely by the end attracting a level of audience the publisher might expect for Nadine Dorries’ latest book. The message board match thread ran to record low four pages. Serves Sky right. If two teams did this as a solidarity act of protest, I’m right with them.

Believe it or not I was quite encouraged by the first five minutes. Jonathan Varane started his morning sweeping one beautiful switch pass wide to the left, one beautiful switch pass wide to the right, and a penetrative forward pass that tried and only narrowly failed to get Richard Kone streaking through on Radek Vitek’s goal. He almost ran into the box and got on the end of one move he’d set in motion himself, but could sadly only chest straight to the goalkeeper. At that point I was sitting there nursing one thinking ‘who the hell is this in the centre of our midfield and can we keep him?’ From that point on… rugby league loose forward. Big bloke in the middle of the pitch who can only pass backwards. His moody Sunday Insta post says “speed my vary, but the direction never changes”. And that direction is… back to Joe Walsh.

It took a quarter of an hour for anything much else to happen. The BBC's automated minute-by-minute service registers no action, or any sort, from minutes two to 13. After that Sam Morsy’s shot deflected over for a corner which City played short and worked a nice routine to get Mark Sykes in on an angle and his low shot was saved behind by Walsh. QPR set up in exactly the same way again, City played exactly the same corner again, Sykes ran clean in on goal again, but on this occasion had strayed offside. It didn’t immediately scream concentration.

What chances were created before the break were almost exclusively by players in red. Walsh will be a really difficult player to mark in this game. In poor form and the subject of mounting criticism, he contributed a number of saves to a clean sheet, but each was more terrifying and unorthodox than the last. At one point charging 40 yards out from goal to win a header in centre back country, at the next going to grab at a deflected Scott Twine effort and doing another full Tony Roberts drop over his shoulder. A routine save from a Riis long ranger was conducted in three acts and almost bundled to Max Bird on the rebound when he could have thrown his cap on it (if only he’d wear one). There was, to be fair, no arguing with a sharp, brave double stop from both Riis and Sykes in the final minute of the half to keep the thing deadlocked. QPR’s efforts on Vitek’s goal started and ended with a Kone header from Smyth’s corner nudged straight through to the keeper.

Thrills and spills, surprises and delights around every corner, a cracking fun day out for all the family, an experience you’ll never forget… Thorpe Park is just off junction two of the M3. Half an hour further into town and the kindest thing you could say about Queens Park Rangers and Bristol City’s breakfast time offering was the sides were cancelling each other out. The most excitement you’d get here was deep vein thrombosis.

On Easter Monday at Deepdale, QPR turned a similarly mediocre first half into a second half deficit by conceding to Brad Potts in Preston’s first attack of the half. The R’s have conceded almost a quarter of all their goals this season in the first ten minutes of second halves (16/68 23.53%) and so as we look for improvement, progress and reasons to hope for better next season I was interested to see what happened after the break hoping for some positive, proactive, corrective action.

Bristol City were out minutes before us, lined up in shape, two lads on the ball ready to kick off, focused and ready to go. Rangers came out in dribs and drabs several minutes later. One of the multitude of performance and methodology staff briefly placed three plastic cones in front of the dugout, which were almost universally ignored bar a couple of players having a little skip over them before they were removed almost as quickly as they’d been placed. The second half was then further delayed because Rayan Kolli hadn't made it back out onto the pitch. Kone and Stéphan both quite angrily beckoning him on out of the tunnel. Within two minutes of the game finally getting underway we had to stop and wait again for Rayan to tie his boots up after being tripped. And lo, Walsh had to make another save down to his right from Twine to prevent it happening again. I was... less than impressed.

Kolli, who I’ve said a lot of nice things about recently, and Varane weren’t alone in grinding my gears here. Richard Kone was sadly ineffective against a team with an injury crisis at centre back - a far cry from his all-action displays over Easter. I stuck up for Amadou Mbengue in the Watford game, when his propensity to persistently stick his final ball high into the away end had the visiting fans in stitches, because his defence against Chakvetadze was good. Here it was too much of the former and not enough of the latter. One promising attack after another floundering on the rocks of his concrete first touch and final ball shot out of a wheeled cannon. I like Mbengue, I like him defensively, I like his character and his personality, I think his recovery pace in transition is vital to an otherwise fairly staid defence, but if we’re aiming for the top half of this league we can’t have a full back who keeps crossing the ball into the car park at the old Television Centre. Rhys Norrington Davies goes more unnoticed on the other side, but he’s a left back in a football team in 2026 who has zero goals and zero assists from 35 appearances and was booked here for fouling his opponent in a panic having passed the ball straight to him.

The second half was, implausibly, even duller than the first. Twine’s early effort saved by Walsh was the sum total of the City second stanza threat, and QPR didn’t even muster that in return. Vitek largely untroubled throughout. There was a welcome return for Rumarn Burrell from the bench after three months of injury absence, and his willingness to run about a bit caused momentary flutters for the Czech goalkeeper and those around him, but Daniel Bennie alongside him looked well short of even this level and Paul Smyth’s shot over the bar as was close as Rangers came to anything like an attempt on goal.

After a few performances either side of the international break that had some wondering whether we’re really that far off a team capable of pushing for the six, this was perhaps a timely reminder of the individual and collective limitations of this group – scary goalkeeper, full backs who can’t cross, central midfielders who can’t/won’t pass forwards, wide players with erratic levels of performance and final delivery... As ever, when we’re required to have the ball, set the tempo, dictate the play, impose our game on an opponent, penetrate… we can’t do it. City repeatedly allowed to file back into shape behind the ball while we ponder about what to do next. Now 14 months and counting since QPR won a game with more possession than their opposition.

I started hoping City might bring Sinclair Armstrong on, just for a bit of fun, but Professor Farnsworth subbed on Delano Zoidberg instead, and he ran down the remainder of the time pumping shambolic first (and second) touches into the stand then angrily questioning why team mates hadn’t made more of an effort to catch up with them.

I guess you’ve got to apply context to this. QPR have a young team, missing key players, at the end of a long season. Dead rubber, nothing on it, early kick off. Tired teams. Long, hard year. Etc etc.

They’re playing a Roy Hodgson Bristol City side that reminded me a lot of the Roy Hodgson England team that used to bore me to tears – shape, shape, shape. Shape and discipline. Not really bothered how (or if) it scores but very determined not to let you score on it. Two clean sheets in two games, and would have been three in three but for a goalkeeping error in the win at Charlton. Given he’s only here for seven games, it’s surely his last job in football, and the Robins have nothing to play for, I wondered why Roy wouldn’t want to be a bit more adventurous with it. After all, what, at all, did anybody, on either side, get out of this? What was the point of any of it? But, perhaps this is his pleasure. Like a meticulous model railway enthusiast adding tiny weathered detail to scale locomotives in his back shed. He genuinely seemed quite enthused by what he’d seen and the “organisation” of it all afterwards. Mind you, even Hodgson became so exasperated at one point that you heard him shout “QUICKER” from the front of F Block. If Roy Hodgson’s telling you you’re going too slow...

Quicker would have been nice. Anything would have been nice really. I started rather wishing City would score just so I could feel something. That was never likely with Ronnie Edwards and Jake Clarke-Salter looking calm and composed together in Jimmy Dunne’s surprise absence. This Clarke Salter’s first 90 minutes since Leicester away in the FA Cup last January. Swede Noah Eile was similarly slick at the other end. Centre backs very much on top, in a game between two sides missing their main centre backs.

It’s not that deep really. An end of season dead rubber between two tired, injury ravaged teams with nothing to play for in the middle of a dog league they’ve been in the middle of for the last ten years. I don’t want to get all existential about it but, given the amount of time this game left up to the crowd’s own thoughts, my mind did start to wonder how on earth we let our sport turn into this.

My recollection of the late 90s and early 00s - when I was growing up and considered football the best thing in the world bar breasts, and the Premier League was the absolute Kelly Brook of the genre - was the best teams were built around pace, power, and directness. Arsenal conquered all with Henry, Viera, Petit, Overmars, Pires, Bergkamp, Campbell, Ljungberg, Cole. It was athletic, it was fast, it was physical, it was exhilarating, and it was unplayable. They followed on from Alex Ferguson’s “unleash hell” Man Utd team of Cole, Yorke, Cantona, Kanchelskis, Giggs, Scholes, Keane. It was superseded by a Chelsea side of Drogba, Essien, Lampard, Cole (again), Terry, Desailly, Gallas… You would hate them, but you would watch them play, because they were unmissable. They played forwards. They played to win. Muscular, relentless stuff. You couldn’t live with those teams.

I just don't get how, over the last decade or two, we've allowed the sport to convince us that completing 25 passes in your own half while going nowhere is a positive. Like that’s a success, to aim for, and aspire to. Both teams did that here, on multiple occasions. There was a Bristol City “move” at the end of the first half that must have included 30+ passes, took four minutes out of the game, and progressed the ball about three feet. Whose idea was this? Why are we (all) like this? Who has decreed the ball is better out of play than in? That every throw in takes a minute? That for every goal kick we go through this monotonous nonsense of lining up with two centre backs in the six yard box, often only to send them away and reset the whole thing at the expense of yet more time? Why so risk averse?

Is this some political thing? From the government nudge unit? Make the national sport completely unwatchable so we’re forced to go and do something more worthwhile with our time and national productivity increases? Six 0-0 draws I've sat through with QPR this season now.

With rookie referee Ed the Duck in situ, the play acting and gamesmanship became farcical, and really quite embarrassing. Several of the players involved in it should be a bit ashamed, really. The atmosphere in the place was so benign you could hear what they were saying down there, and mostly what they were saying was loud, high-pitched screams over nothing very much at all. Varane yellow carded for a first half clash with Twine, who apparently suffered some sort of subgaleal haemorrhage for being nudged in the back but was then straight back up and about once the card had been successfully milked. Second half, Amadou Mbengue fucked up another cross, lost the ball, gave away a free kick, pretended to be injured, and then got booked for dissent. HOUSE.

Why am I spending so much of my Saturday watching gym fit young lads pretend they're seriously hurt when they're not? Why are professional footballers spending so much of their Saturday trying to get the football game stopped? What exactly are you all so desperate to rush off and talk about down there on the touchline? Cos the game don’t look much different to me once you’re back from each bloody conflab. How many “injuries” here didn’t even require the nominal, performative visit of the physio? At one point Mbengue was ordered off even though the doctor hadn’t come onto the field, presumably because the referee was just so sick to death of him and it.

You spend all week at work waiting for a weekend where you can spend the money you earned on this, and then it looks like this. Like waiting five hours in the queue for a blow job and ending up with a great white shark.

It was a nonsense summed up by five minutes cruelly added to the end of the game. This began with Joe Walsh coming through a crowd for a cross and bashing into the back of teammate Jonathan Varane, who then laid down in the penalty area saying he was hurt. Duckworth, now completely out of control of a game that didn’t need controlling in the first place, decided he’d had enough and played on, which Sam Morsy did and tried to score with the opportunity. Fair play to him, and the referee, because, shock horror, Varane was absolutely fine.

With Jake Clarke-Salter’s scream in the official’s face for not stopping the game concluded and the ball back in play, now it was Bristol City’s turn to hit the deck pretending they’d been mortally wounded and demand a game stoppage. Again, to his credit, the referee said no, and invited QPR to play on. Typically, Rangers then spent 30 seconds shitting the bed about what to do, pissing the remaining time away and infuriating their own fans. When play did eventually stop, the “injured” party got up and did a comedy flex in the direction of the home end. Morsy, meanwhile, charged around at full time trying to hit anybody who’d dared to play on through this apparent medical emergency, exactly as he’d done not two minutes prior. Bristol City the team that went to the trouble of writing to the rest of the league when Lee Johnson was their manager informing them formally they wouldn’t be kicking the ball out for injuries and would leave it to the referee.

I just… I can’t speak. I’ve said enough. I’m boring myself. And what’s more depressing is Bristol City fans sliding into my mentions with “it was a head injury, it was a head injury”. My arse. Thoughts and prayers. Do let us know he’s okay, won’t you? It’s a crock of shit. You know it, I know it, it was when Twine went down in the first half, it was when Mbengue collapsed in the second. And the more we all collude in the faux outrage of ‘how dare you play on while our player’s face is falling off?’ the worse it gets.

Afterwards Stéphan described it as "tight game". One of those we’ll always remember where we were. An instantly forgettable 90+ minutes from two of the Championship’s most forgettable clubs of the last ten years. Work to do for both to make sure we’re not sitting here this time next year in exactly the same positions saying exactly the same things after exactly the same sort of game.

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

QPR: Walsh 7; Mbengue 5, Edwards 7, Clarke-Salter 7, Norrington-Davies 6; Vale 6, Morgan 5 (Poku 75, 5), Varane 6, Smyth 6; Kone 5 (Bennie 68, 5), Kolli 5 (Burrell 68, 6)

Subs not used: Adamson, Cook, Hamer, Hayden, Esquerdinha, Scarlett

Yellow Cards: Varane 27 (foul), Mbengue 55 (dissent), Bennie 75 (foul) Norrington-Davies 85 (foul)

Bristol City: Vitek N/A; Knight 6, Eile 7, Borges 6, Pring 6; Morsy 6, Randell 5; Sykes 6 (McCrorie 76, 6), Twine 5 (Horvat 88, -), Bird 6 (Earthy 83, -); Riis 6 (Burgzorg 76, 4)

Subs not used: Armstrong, Bell, Naylor, Tanner, Thomas

Yellow Cards: Eile 66 (foul), Burgzorg 89 (foul)

QPR Star Man – Ronnie Edwards 7 Interesting, perhaps pointed, choice for captain. Starting to look like the player we had last season, immaculate defensive positioning and creative drive and passing from the back. Credit Clarke-Salter alongside him too for a very solid display across a rare full 90 minutes for him.

Referee – Edward Duckworth (Lancashire) 5 I said similar when he gave an almost identical performance on his Championship debut at Ashton Gate in the first meeting – whatever you think of Championship referees, or this one in particular, the sheer amount of play acting, injury feigning, bitching, moaning and needless histrionics from players on both sides make it a thankless task and much more difficult job than it need be. Still, I’m not going to pretend this was a good refereeing performance, and frankly if you’re unable to keep control of this game then you’re probably not at this level.

Attendance – 16,745 (1,254 Bristol City) Always a highlight of the year to see the Tiger Cubs at the end of the annual sponsored walk from the training ground. Great to hear from a legend like Marc Bircham at half time as well. Please do donate if you can by clicking here.

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Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

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