You don’t win many games while losing midfield, but by God did QPR give that a good go during a season in which they failed to win a single game with more possession than the opponent – still, how about that Nicolas Madsen redemption arc.

If you want to hear the LFW panel of Simmo, Andy, Jack Supple and myself debate the marks for this year’s report you can do so via all three subscription tiers in our Patreon. Part two, midfielders and wingers, is live now.

7 – Karamoko Dembele D/E

Julien Stéphan arrived with a reputation for helping to develop some of the brightest talent and biggest names in the game today during his time in France, and at Rennes in particular. In many cases – Ousmane Dembele, Raphinha, Jérémy Doku etc – these were exciting attacking and wide players. Given QPR had spent the prior transfer windows collecting tiny tens and wingers at a rate you could never possibly select all at once, and then added Kwame Poku and a permanent deal for Koki Saito to that in the summer, the attraction was obvious.

To a certain extent that has been realised: QPR scored 61 league goals this season, up from 53 the year before, and only the top two and Wrexham scored more than Rangers’ 40 home goals. Leicester and Portsmouth were soundly thrashed in W12. West Brom, promoted Hull, Charlton and Sheff Wed all conceded three at Loftus Road. To do that with Ilias Chair only making ten starts would have been unthinkable for one of our teams just a year or two prior.

What is interesting, and will become a repeat theme of this part of our end of terms, is it’s not the players you thought would benefit most from this head coach appointment who are doing in practice. Sweeping generalisations aside I would have expected most QPR fans come September 1 to tell you Kwame Poku and Ilias Chair were the first choices, closely followed by Karamoko Dembele and Saito, when in fact it’s been Paul Smyth and Harvey Vale who have prospered (more on all of these people shortly).

Dembele, unfortunately, has been one of the big losers. Last year we sat on the fence a little bit with a C, pointing out that three goals and four assists was basically a goal contribution every other time he was on the field, while also noting the total absence of a single defensive bone anywhere in his slight frame made him something of a liability who had won just three of the 25 games he featured in all season. More of the former and improvement in the latter was required in 25/26, as well as a clearer run with injuries, and, sadly, everything has got worse.

Dembele started strongly, as he had done in his first year. Preston had few answers on day one, where his forceful attacking play wrought a goal on half time from the visiting side’s Ben Whiteman which, again, makes a mockery of who is and isn’t credited with assists in the Championship – Dembele certainly deserved one there, and we marked him down as a seven. He would reach that level on only one further occasion, scoring brilliantly in the home rout of Leicester on a day when it felt like you could really tell which players had disliked playing for their previous boss Marti Cifuentes.

The good news pretty much stops there. His season was ended early by a nasty ACL injury in the Coventry home game which will deprive him of an acutely needed pre-season, or the chance of a sale back to Europe which we’d heard the club were confident they might get for him as he reaches the end of his second year here, but even before that he’d been pretty lousy. That Leicester strike is his only goal in 31 games, and he has two assists in 34 now – heaven help Paul Smyth if he dared post numbers like that.

The switch out of Cifuentes’ 4-3-3 to Stephan’s 4-4-2 has really not suited Dembele, nor Koki who we’ll come to later. They’ve been horribly exposed physically and defensively out there, unable to offer any protection to their full backs. With the club rightly keen to pick Burrell and Kone together wherever possible in the centre it’s difficult to see where Dembele’s best position is. We’ve kindly described him as a ‘different animal’ at ten to when used out wide, but there is no conventional ‘ten’ role in this system. I would have thought Stéphan’s desire for the wingers to invert and drive in at the inside gap between centre back and full back might suit him, and many more goals like that Preston one would follow, but he’s been hopeless at it. In a ‘fill your boots’ game at home to Sheff Wed, statistically the worst team the Championship has ever seen, he gave a particularly ineffective and surly performance…

”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”.

Bit of a nightmare all round, for club and player. Another we’ve committed good money and a chunky contract to in the hope of developing to sell, but through form and fitness is currently a bit of a liability for us.

In numbers…

Interactive Ratings — 5.05

8 – Sam Field D

Few players split opinions at QPR, or highlight the divide in the club’s online fanbase, more than Sam Field. To some, a rock on which Championship teams are built; to others. a lead weight around this Rangers’ team’s neck. Fans point to his protection of the back four, his interceptions, his tackles as a vital “shield” for a leaky back four. Critics bemoan his negative passing style, decision making in the final third, and that bloody left-foot curled shot he loves which goes a foot wide of the corner he’s aiming for Every. Single. Time. Really does depend where you are on cardigans as a clothing item, I think.

Nobody, on either side of that argument, could possibly say Field started this season well. He had a dire pre-season – particularly poor in the alarming 6-0 loss to Castellon where the respective nightmares of Sam and Joe Walsh combined to create a comedic own goal, and in Perpignan where his attempts to progress the ball out of midfield as the game model demanded against Toulouse were miles off it – and that bled into August. He started the game at Watford (five) and the debacle at Coventry (two) which was enough for Stéphan to conclude he wasn’t his man and drop him from the side bar a late sub appearance at Wrexham. He was recalled from the start to try and spread the load during a three-game week with a home ‘gimme’ against Oxford and, when paired with Isaac Hayden in the middle, again struggled badly in what was a long, drawn out affair of a game.

Field has been here a long time, though. Peaks and troughs of form and confidence will happen over the course of five years. He’s shown a mental ability to bounce back from setbacks and adversity and, crucially when your ‘performance department’ seem hell bent on rebooting ER for the streaming age, he is always available. He can play several positions as well and - with Larkeche injured, Esquerdinha out of his depth, and Norrington-Davies having his minutes managed - Field belatedly found a role in Stéphan’s set up as an auxiliary left back. He played there for wins, and clean sheets, on the road at Swansea and Blackburn, and another shut out at Sheff Utd, though a subsequent appearance in that slot at Norwich went badly awry in the first half – ironic, really, considering he ended up at Carrow Road on loan for the second half of the season.

The club pitched that loan switch as almost being out of their hands – he wants to go, mate, who are we to stand in his way? – but a lot of us wondered why he was suffering such a lack of minutes given the centre of our midfield was easy to walk through last season and Jonathan Varane regressed badly from year one to two. In a team that went on to leak the best part of 80 goals, and hasn’t won for a year and a half while holding more possession than the opponent, was there really no role here for Sam Field? The move looked especially foolish when a change of scenery initially brought a new lease of life for Sam, and he was the Canaries star man in an away win at Oxford where he registered an assist. As Rangers cratered through the second half of the campaign – six wins in 26 games since Boxing Day – Field’s Norwich went soaring past us on the league table, securing a quickfire double early in Phillippe Clement’s reign.

That was a useful stick for critics to beat the club with, but Field had also slipped out of the Norwich team come May – never really recovering from being subbed at half time in a 2-0 home loss to Ipswich in the Old Farm Derby.

I’ve always had a lot of time for Sam as a person and a footballer. I think he’s been very harshly done to at Loftus Road this season. But his face clearly doesn’t fit with this manager so if Stéphan is staying it’s likely he’ll be on his way. Feels like a very John Eustace pick up waiting to happen to me.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.28

10 – Ilias Chair C/D

There are a couple of players in this round up for whom certain numbers do not fit the narrative. Koki Saito and Jonathan Varane, spoiler alert, are not getting a positive school report this year, and yet the team wins 10% more games with them in the side than without, and Varane’s defensive stats for interceptions and tackles won are top of our charts.

Ilias Chair’s 2025/26 has, on the face of it, been rotten. A lad famed for doing 45 games a year every year came off the first injury-plagued campaign of his career and, sadly, plunged straight into another– starting just ten games. Watching him forlornly chug around Portman Road on the final day, turfing what few interesting dead ball situations Gavin Ward was willing to let us have hopelessly over the bar, was really rather sad. Yesterday’s man. Never mind a bigger move elsewhere, now probably not even good enough to get into the team he already plays for. Originally due back at Christmas, he’s had more aborted comebacks than Michael Barrymore.

And, yet, in just ten starts and one sub appearance, sub-1,000 minutes of football, he has a goal and four assists (only Madsen and Vale assisted more often) and he outperformed Dembele, Smyth, Saito and Poku for chances created – 27. There was a beautiful set up for Smyth’s late headed winner at Blackburn. There was the annual torching of Hull at Loftus Road (one goal and two assists there, five career goals against the Tigers, more than against any other side) to show that if we can improve our injury record overall, and his in particular, there’s still a hell of a player here for us. Given Stéphan likes his wingers to invert, and one of the criticisms of Chair in the past was he inverted too much anyway and narrowed us right up, this should be a marriage made in heaven if we can get him up and about again.

During the Mark Warburton era at Loftus Road a comment was made off mic while I was at Harlington one afternoon that with Ebere Eze there was a more laid back , what will be will be mentality – it’s all God, baby. With Ilias, he would crawl over his dead grandmother for one game of professional football. His injury situation over two long years now is intimidating, but if that fire still burns bright there’s still potential to go around again with the Moroccan in 26/27. Increasingly feels like a QPR lifer.

In numbers…

Interactive Ratings — 5.82

11 – Paul Smyth B

We have long stuck up for Paul Smyth on this website, and now thankfully have some numbers to justify the faith.

Smyth is important Championship infantry for a club operating on a challenged budget. Can be impactful as a starter or sub, can play either side of the pitch, can play a number of positions, offers pace to a largely slow team, loves the club to bits and will run through walls for it, all on a salary far below most of his teammates.

The abuse he has taken, which escalated into vile threats sent to his partner and into his DMs this year, for a good clubman like this is appalling. Whenever a football fan dares say to you again that “all they want is players who give 100% for the badge” then you can point to some of the things our own fans say about Smyth as evidence to the contrary. Social media of course encourages you to mistake the loudest, most persistent voices as a consensus, but the things I’ve seen said about Smyth, versus the effusive praise afforded to wrong uns like Tyler Roberts and Taylor Richards, or the hype given to development squad prospects with about as much chance of making it at Championship level as Jude the Cat (RIP Rafferty Pedder), is ridiculous.

Even we had to concede last summer, however, that two goals (one against Cambridge United in the cup) and four assists from 45 outings would have been a poor return for a full back, never mind a winger. So, it’s with some delight that we finish the latest campaign with Paul Smyth running hot – six goals, four assists, a goal contribution essentially every other game (207 minutes), and some real peaches in there amongst them. Inverting the wingers seems to have suited him more than most – he’s now making the sort of infield runs and scoring the sort of goals we saw him bagging from the left side at Leyton Orient. Harvey Vale (and at Blackburn Ilias Chair) doing the same on the other side has seen this weird trend of towering Paul Smyth headers at the back post become a thing for goals of his own at Bristol City (of course), Ewood Park and a tap in for Rayan Kolli at home to Watford.

There are still too many poor decisions with the final ball, too many mishit crosses. His diving for penalties and free kicks remains so blatantly obvious even David Webb doesn’t buy what he’s selling. Eight yellow cards (fight, kicking the ball away, dissent (he was right though)) isn’t ideal. But four LFW man of the match awards, six from you guys voting at home, and a very satisfying campaign overall that he can be personally proud of.

A highlight seeing his little lad on the pitch for the toddler race on the final day. It didn’t need Paul Morrissey on the tannoy to point him out either – it was the one moving at nothing less than a sprint and cheating throughout. Well done Jack, and your dad.

In numbers…

Interactive Ratings — 5.75

14 – Koki Saito D

Any criticism at the time that Koki Saito was an unnecessary, expensive, crowd-pleasing panic buy in the wake of the Coventry debacle by a club that already had several players in his position, including big summer capture Kwame Poku, were initially blown away by the returning Japanese favourite’s impact. Running from the halfway line to finish with aplomb at the Loft End and seal a victory against Nathan Jones’ Charlton had us all so, so happy again. Against Stoke in the following home game we named him star man and described him as an “electrifying presence”. We said last year it would be rather a shame to get a year of Championship into him on loan and then not see the benefit ourselves, and now here it was in all its glory. Lovely boy.

Unfortunately, things have gone rapidly downhill from there, even allowing for his weirdly high 41.18% win percentage. Saito only managed three goals and three assists in his first stint here, and hasn’t even reached that mediocre level second time round. He has contributed neither a goal nor an assist away from home all season, scored in just two of his last 34 appearances, has zero assists in his last 19 games. That impact we saw from the bench against the Addicks has not been repeated – ten sub appearances since, zero goals, one assist.

Like Dembele, he looks awfully lightweight and exposed when used out wide in Stéphan’s 4-4-2, and we’re not seeing any of the incisive upside from that we should be getting from the inversion thing. I expect that of Dembele, who I’ve always considered too small and light, but Saito had aggression in his game in year one, occasionally filling in at left wing back in tough times and attacking the task with trademark Japanese work rate and diligence. Now he looks a bit scared and lost, almost getting in the way when used centrally, scared to take a man on out wide and too often muscled from possession.

The nasty shoulder injury suffered at Preston last Easter truncated his summer training and he arrived undercooked. Hopefully a better pre-season this time can bring him back to life. I miss happy Koki.

In numbers…

Interactive Ratings — 5.04

15 – Isaac Hayden D

This was a pretty big disappointment, from a player I’ve always been a big champion of and wanted us to sign.

I thought his influence in his first loan spell in 23/24 went a long way towards keeping that team in the league. He spoke intelligently of the predicament faced and how the challenge would be conquered. He improved a poor midfield on the pitch. And in 24/25 he then did a similar job for newly promoted Portsmouth so when QPR started badly, particularly in midfield, leading to an implosion at Coventry I would have pushed the button and signed him just as the club did. Hayden had apparently been at the training ground much earlier in the summer, long before pre-season even began, so the club knew there was a deal there to do and perhaps it was a bit of a panic – as was shelling the money out for a permanent transfer of Koki Saito which also hasn’t worked out so far – in the wake of a big defeat, but I didn’t mind it because to me the team was devoid of leadership and all three of our opponents to that point had walked through our midfield as if it wasn’t there.

Hayden continues to speak very well of QPR and left a very gracious message on his socials after his departure was announced at the end of the season. We don’t get to see that off-the-pitch influence stuff, for all we know he might be a complete arsehole, but he certainly doesn’t come across as such and that experience and leadership is something we’ve talked about a lot in the end of terms around the departure of Steve Cook and the importance of Jimmy Dunne. On the pitch, though, I think he’s been poor. The games where you really need somebody like this, who isn’t going to play every week, to really step up in are those nasty midweekers, on the road, in a three-game week. At Southampton, where we were beaten 5-0, he was among the worst of an awful bunch and then had a bit of a tiff with a supporter at the front of the away end at full time.

When we talk about standards, not letting a defeat get out of hand once you’re 3-0 down, kicking a few people etc it’s players like Hayden that I expect to do that, and for me he was found wanting this season. Poor, again, when Middlesbrough thrashed us at Loftus Road and dominated his area of the pitch. When we tried to rest players for supposedly ‘winnable’ home games, where again you’d want a player of this experience to do a job for you, we ended up with some absolute dirges against Oxford and Blackburn.

Right decision to release.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.41

17 – Kwame Poku D

From the website that brought you the opinion Clint Hill was a poor signing and we’d have been better off going back permanently for Dusko Tosic, there have been some pretty bad takes across 20 years of LFW but praising Kwame Poku for his durability in his signing piece risks being right up there with “Steven Caulker is so failsafe even QPR can’t mess this up”.

“Poku has played an extraordinary amount of EFL football already for somebody who’s only 23 years old – 61 starts and 14 sub appearances for Colchester in League Two, 121 starts and 26 sub appearances for Peterborough in this division and the one below. Serious minutes, often in tough battles at both ends of all three of those leagues.”

What we hadn’t really clocked is he picked up a serious hamstring injury towards the end of his time at Peterborough (not a place we have a happy shopping record anyway) and, given the way he’s been managed since, it seems neither did QPR. He pulled his hamstring on his debut against Preston, again on the skating rink pitch against Sheff Wed, and then one final time against Swansea in April. The last time we saw him he was in tears, and the lack of update since (when the club were quick to confirm Rumarn Burrell’s injury at the same time was nothing to worry about) does not immediately suggest a player who needs a good pre-season more than most will be getting one of those. He finishes with no goals and no assists, and only really against Birmingham away did we get to see anything like the player we were so excited at capturing under heavy competition a year ago.

Poku has become something of a lightning rod for the way the club now communicates with us about a range of issues, but in his specific case injuries. Torn between ‘competitive advantage’ and keeping people informed, Rangers frequently achieve neither. Injury updates that are issued often seem to downplay the problems and turn out to be inaccurate, and are then later deleted from the official website in any case. I’m sure the other 23 managers are losing hours of sleep over whether Justin Obikwu or Jake Clarke-Salter are fit to play for QPR or not – start sending interns to hide out in the bushes at Heston and you risk being taken out by one of our kick off routines – but the value in them not knowing for sure is, for me anyway, outweighed by the damage it does to the relationship with the support base and the rumours that are allowed to spread about ‘the real reason’ for these absentees. More on that when we get to Obikwu later.

QPR are not like other clubs. We’ve got three Premier League clubs within walking distance, we’ve got very recent history of a chairman/CEO outright lying to us and driving the club into the ground while splitting the fanbase, you’ve got to take people with you on the journey. We’re a suspicious bunch. In Poku’s case it’s felt like the severity of his injuries, and even what the injuries are themselves, has been downplayed throughout. This only sustains as long as it takes what is plainly obvious at the time to become fact. Press reports that he ‘might be fine for Wrexham at the start of September’ are only any good if he is. In fact, he’d done his hamstring, as we all knew at the time, which is three months out, and sure enough there he was on November (not September) 1 against Ipswich. Just be honest with us, we find out anyway. Set expectations.

Still, that’s a secondary problem to how these injuries have been treated. To have your big summer signing pull his hamstring three times in his first year here is appalling really. What on earth are we doing starting him at Millwall (out of position up top) on the Saturday then asking him to back up again midweek against Swansea, in games that were of no significance to us at all? Leave him out, rest him up, let him have a big summer. That’s wrecked now. It felt almost like we were doing it to performatively prove to everyone he was fine, to try and put some meat on the bones of this “90% availability” nonsense, in the same way we’re constantly desperate to distinguish between “contact” and “soft tissue” injuries. Again, this defensiveness, this protecting of individual positions and reputations, only sustains as long as it takes Poku to hit the ground in tears again.

Of all the things we can do to improve next season, sorting out this absolute mess is right up there.

In numbers…

Interactive Ratings — 5.57

20 – Harvey Vale B

Harvey Vale, in a first full season at QPR, and a first full season of playing regular first team football anywhere, clocked up more than 2,000 minutes in our colours and was the seventh most used player in the Rangers squad. I know, I know, not exactly party streamers and light the barbecue but let’s just consider how significant that is for two reasons.

The first is that when he signed in January 2025 he had a literal broken back. That’s some going, even for a club that once paraded Mark Hateley on the pitch as Les Ferdinand’s replacement waving crutches at the Loft End. There was no guarantee he’d come back strongly from that at all, and to do 27 starts and five sub appearances is very encouraging given the fitness problems elsewhere. The second is that initially Julien Stephan, like Marti Cifuentes before him, didn’t fancy Vale much. He impressed supporters, and scored a lovely goal, in a pre-season win at the training ground against league One play-off contenders Stevenage, but wasn’t seen much more in the summer and the thinking around the club early in August was that he might be heading out on loan for the first half of the campaign.

Of course, the people Stephan preferred instead did not start at all well and one of the big beneficiaries of that was Vale who’d already assisted a goal in the Plymouth farce and then start 7-8-7 in consecutive wins against Charlton, Wrexham and Stoke – the latter game he won late with a lovely goal. Having started the season believing Karamoko Dembele and Koki Saito would be the main wingers, we end it with Paul Smyth and Harvey Vale, both of whom suit the Frenchman’s inverse winger fetish a lot more. Credit to Vale for playing his way into that, and to Stephan for not being closed off to a change of heart.

He’s been done a considerable dirty by the league’s insanely harsh definition of an ‘assist’. We’ve got him on 11, officially he’s on five. To give you an indication of why we do this differently, Richard Kone is credited with an assist for one of Rumarn Burrell’s goals against West Brom because the ball hit him and rebounded into the Jamaican’s path, Vale however does not get one for the devilish corner he took away at Hull which took the whole home team out of the picture and resulted in the opening goal because it was a City player who nudged it over the line and not Jimmy Dunne right behind him. In my opinion this is bollocks, and it’s damaged Vale’s numbers considerably this year because QPR were the beneficiaries of a club record six own goals this year and three of them came off Vale deliveries – Hull A, Leicester A, Preston A.

His technique is such that he won goal of the season for a fabulous strike at home to Wrexham despite us going on to lose the game. Notable that most of the players voted for that one as well, over Kieran Morgan’s narrative and vibes favourite at home to Birmingham. When you look at that goal, the assist at Hull, the performance against Leicester, the assists against Portsmouth, there’s great potential there, but we do need to see more of that in year two.

This year 386 of the 1,438 goals scored in the Championship were from set-pieces (64 penalties and 27 direct free-kicks among them) - 26.84% of all goals the highest at this level for six years. The top three sides in the division this year for goals from set pieces were Coventry, Millwall and Southampton who finished 1st, 3rd and 4th. That’s illustrative of how important this is in the latest form of the modern game where Arsenal have a Premier League trophy in the cabinet. QPR and Stoke, with nine each, were the worst in the league – albeit joint with stats busting Hull City who will play Premier League football next season. Christian Nourry admitted at the recent fan sites meeting set pieces was an area of big disappointment for him this year. Vale’s deliveries seem to be either twos or eights, with little in between. For every one of those at Hull, there’s the free kick at Birmingham over by the dugouts that he skewed off at a right angle for a throw in on the other side of the pitch. You often don’t know who’s imperilled more by his corners – opposition goalkeepers, or Mick’s greenhouse on Ellerslie Road.

It’s like watching me play golf, we both need more consistency there. Vale also needs to vary it up – full backs too often know that he wants to come back inside rather than take them to the byline. That’s probably because he’s, very clearly, not very quick. This will be why the Premier League let him slide away despite being named Chelsea’s academy player of the year. Given we’re referencing Birmingham away again it’s quite possible he was carrying an injury that night, but he ran around at St Andrew’s like a pantomime horse where the unionised rear end has downed tools. Slow to arrive on the scene early doors at Charlton, he was perhaps lucky not to be sent off for studding Conor Coady in the head and drawing blood. VAR would have had its say there at the higher level.

But this has been a promising season overall, backed by good numbers, so I’m interested to see how he goes next year.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.53

21 – Kieran Morgan C

We called it a ‘Morgasm’, which given he ended up stripped to his little black pants in the aftermath was perhaps ill-considered, but Kieran Morgan’s last second winner in the Birmingham home game was the moment, if not the goal, of the season. The despair of an injury time Birmingham equaliser, heightened by just how undeserved it was for the visitors and harsh on Rangers who’d been excellent for the majority of that game, turning to elation as a young player making his way in the game lets go from 20 yards to win it for us after all. From bath toaster to dick roaster in two- and a-bit minutes. Clean up in aisle me.

The seat-cracking, hug-a-stranger outpouring, this sport and our silly club’s ability to turn really quite sensible, educated adults, people with decent jobs and normal lives, into a screaming, gibbering, hot mess. That’s why we go to football, right there. It gets increasingly lost in a world of stats and politics and x-bloody-G, it happens less and less frequently now some data nonce has decided shots from outside the box are a bad thing (into the sea), but good God almighty that felt amazing. This was LFW the day after…

”It’s the noise.

“This room is about to flashover. Every single molecule here is about to turn to fire. A Birmingham City fan trapped in here has maybe two seconds to run. Everybody else is about to die the death we always dreamed of. Somebody always realises first and lets out a little “oh” as the boot goes through the ball. And then there it is. A raw, animalistic, explosive fury.”

Morgan had already shown a penchant, and the technique, for a goal from range with a fabulous strike which deserved more than the 2-1 defeat it got at Watford in August. There he was playing out of position at right back, and midst the chaos and disrobing against Brum it is worth remembering that he’d been responsible for the equaliser in the first place – replacing the excellent Amadou Mbengue for the final few seconds and losing control of Demarai Gray almost immediately. His part in the 7-1 loss at Coventry, when again picked at full back, included a cross into his own box from which Brandon Thomas-Asante scored, and was a tough one to sit through watching a young lad go through an experience like that.

That rather summed up a bitty first half to the season in which he didn’t seem to make any progress at all from the previous year. In and out of the team, messed around positionally, struggling for consistency – as you’d expect of a teenager to be fair. It contributed, quietly, to Morgan having by far and away the worst win percentage in the team – just 15.38%. It took Morgan seven appearances to be part of a win anywhere this season, and QPR won just one of his first 17 outings in which he was on the field long enough to receive a mark. Now, that stat is skewed slightly by us not grading players who play for ten minutes or fewer, which means the Birmingham game which he won for us doesn’t count, so let’s not get too hung up on it but… when Morgan played, QPR tended to lose.

We tend to give him a pass at the moment because he does at least want to get on the ball, and pass it forwards. That, inevitably, doesn’t always work, but I’d rather that than die wondering. He’s a brave player, in a way a lot of our other central midfielders are not. When you look at the beautiful, outside-of-the-boot pass he played towards the away end at Leicester, controlling the ball as if on a length of string, and cutting the home defence to ribbons in the process there’s enormous potential there as he fills out, gets more experienced, clocks up more Championship minutes. I would have loaned him out in January when Luton came calling, 20 games at that level in Jack Wilshere’s set up would have been incredibly useful, and kept Sam Field. Having not done that things then fell in Morgan’s favour with injuries to Varane and Madsen meaning he subsequently got 19 Championship appearances from New Year’s Day onwards which one might not have expected to happen. That’s a good result, which will hopefully pay dividends next year.

For all that, two goals, and just one assist. We need more. It’s year three coming up for the now 20-year-old Kieran Morgan, and it’s a big one.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.02

24 – Nicolas Madsen A

There is one stat above all the others in this end of year number crunch which sums up the scale of Nicolas Madsen’s turnaround more than any other, even over above his chances created (56) total which was the best in the team. No, Nicolas Madsen recovered possession for QPR more than anybody else this season – 155 times.

This is a player in 24/25 who would go weeks of Championship football at a time, playing in midfield, without making a single tackle – in the whole of 24/25 he attempted just 17 tackles and won 11 of them. Koki Saito made 72. We talked about a lack of heart, a lack of desire, this time last year. We compared him to Jermaine ‘Friendly Ghost’ Jenas for his desperation not to be involved, his ability to always place himself ten yards away from anything that was happening. There were times he withdrew from the midfield theatre of conflict to such an extent he was deeper and further left than the left back. Hell, at times he was deeper and further left than most people in the West Paddock.

There has been an almost total reversal. Everything that was bad, is now good. A team for which he was a total liability now cannot function without him. The difference he made in April when stepping off the bench half fit at Millwall, into a beaten team with a midfield that was getting totally dominated by Casper De Norre and Derek Mazou-Sacko, was stark. Just completely took the game back over for his team. We gave him a seven mark there, one of eight across the season with an eight on top of that – last year he made it over a six just once, on the final day at Sunderland.

The value of a good media team, thinking outside the box, willing to do something a bit different to the usual Pravda-style articles and TikTok clips, was shown clearly in the summer. The interview Matt Webb did with Madsen on the pre-season tour is not the usual sort of thing a football club puts out, but it immediately humanised a young man trapped in his own head. He knew he’d been terrible last season, and it was eating him up most of all. That transformed him, overnight, from the standing joke of a 6ft 4ins bloke who can’t head a ball, into a cause to get behind. We said he was lazy, that he was hiding, when, if anything, he was trying too hard, so desperate to succeed but so acutely aware of how badly it was going. One wonders whether similar treatment might help the Jake Clarke-Salter situation. Big credit to Webby, and retail manager Francis, who both had big hands in this recovery. I love it when QPR do QPR things like that and it works – sports psychologist? Nah mate, just get the bloke from the club shop to have a chat with him. Smallest big club, biggest small club.

Notes of caution start with under-hype, over-deliver. QPR too often do it the other way around. Madsen came into this season with expectations as low as it was possible to go. Most, I think, assumed he’d be loaned back to Europe, not become a key figure in our team. That will be the opposite next year. Having swept the board at the player of the year awards optimism about what he might be in year three features pretty close to the top of reasons to be cheerful in 26/27, but we must be careful not to turn that into pressure. He also hasn’t been perfect. Those low expectations have morphed into surprise at just how brilliant he’s been, but three goals (two of them penalties) is a total to improve upon and I want to see him dominate some more away games in the way he did Coventry and others at Loftus Road – that performance at The Den hopefully speaks to this.

A club that afforded not one, but two returns to a player called Mark Lazarus is clearly not afraid of a good comeback story. Nor one that tries to recover from 4-0 down at half time quite as often as we do. I remember hurdling rows of seats in the away end at Notts County after a 3-0 defeat to get to Paul Furlong and offer him my opinions on his ‘performance’. Five months later he had me in floods of tears with a goal against Oldham Athletic that I still rate as pound for pound my best moment following this club. A year later he scored in a game that won us promotion and a year further still he was top scoring in the Championship approaching 40-years-old, cementing him as one of my all-time favourite players. From the worst kind of ‘Chelsea wanker’ mercenary - never fit, picking up a wage at the end of his career - to a QPR club hero. It was quite a ride. There hasn’t really been a story like it since here. Not on that scale. Nicolas Madsen, however, might end up running it close.

A very obvious, very well deserved LFW player of the year for 25/26. It’s an old fashioned redemption arc, by gar it’s been a while.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.95

40 – Jonathan Varane D

Both regular readers know exactly what I’m going to say here (turn around Jonathan, turn around. Turn. Around. Turn around. Turn around now. Turn around bright eyes. Turn around for the love of fucking God) so let’s start with a curve ball – QPR are a far better team with him in it. Overall, this year the team had a win percentage of 33.33%, with Varane in the midfield that goes up to 42.86% which is easily the best of all the regular starters. Kieran Morgan, who attracts plaudits in almost the same weight Varane has critics, wins barely 15% of his matches. Varane’s 37 interceptions was the team’s highest total, and his 42 tackles won placed him second behind Rhys Norrington-Davies in that metric.

Now, let’s get to the eye test, where Varane has been a horribly frustrating watch. Clearly earmarked as the ‘development model’s’ first cab on the rank and apparently the subject of Twitter-pleasing/fairly fanciful £5m+ interest last summer (Lira? – ed) he finished 24/25 with a terrific display at Sunderland. In the FA Cup game at Leicester, where the team rather embarrassed itself, he was the only one who looked like he belonged and could hold a candle to even the worst team in the top flight. We said in this column last year that if he could produce 15-20 performances like that then we’d have a serious £10m+ player on our hands. Ultimately, I struggle to remember one remotely close in 25/26. He didn’t register more than a seven from us all season, and only picked up three of those. His average rating of 5.00 was our lowest of the regular starters, and if you think I’m biased then his interactive rating voted for by you guys was only 5.05, which is again the lowest of the regular starters bar Kieran Morgan and Koki Saito.

Instead, he’s gone the other way. Won one of his last nine starts and was subbed off in nine of his last 13. He’s not winning you games, dominating midfields. In a three he can stand there and do the blocking and the intercepting without the need to contribute as much with the ball, but with Stephan preferring a two it really highlights his shortcomings. Nasty injury against Sheff Wed which hampered his second half of the season must be taken into account, but a very rare LFW mark of two in the away game at Birmingham, where he’d have needed a sat nav to locate his own nipples, stood out. His nadir came at Millwall, and the picture of him sitting flat on his arse as Camiel Neghli helped himself to a simple second goal rather sums up his season to me. I initially called him a chicken in that match report and took it out because I thought it would cause me a problem, but he’s not a brave footballer, is he? There is nothing this guy cannot turn into a pass back to the goalkeeper. I’m starting to think if we let him take a penalty it might end up back at Joe Walsh.

One of my biggest frustrations is he can do it. All the raw materials are there. Big boy, slick technique, great pedigree, physically exactly where you want him. You look at the goal he scored at Leicester and think, fuck me, can we have four or five of those a season? Instead, that was the first goal of his professional career, and he only added a header at home to West Brom to that this year – again, a goal you look at and wonder why that can’t happen four or five times a year. His ball through the heart of Southampton for Rumarn Burrell’s goal at Loftus Road was immaculate, and then he never did it again – two assists for the season from central midfield, even under our more generous definition is pathetic for a player of his ability. It’s all there physically, is it there mentally?

The good news is his tendency to pass backwards and sideways (everywhere he goes) means his pass completion hovers around 80%. A horrible cynic might suggest that’s why he does it – stats padding. His name, his physique, his apparently unlocked potential, and numbers like that might tempt another Laptop Larry from continental Europe, whose scouting consists of eight parts FotMob to two parts going to watch games, might take a swing on him this summer. If that opportunity arises then I’d be snatching a few hands off.

You look at how Ipswich’s central midfield of Matusiwa and Taylor played against Morgan and Varane on the last day, and the gap is scarily big. Fine, Matusiwa cost them £7.8m, but that’s the sort of value I see mentioned next to Varane’s name. Taylor was a £1.5m buy from Peterborough. That’s the level, and unfortunately Varane is currently a long way shy of it. Central midfield is the area I would rip up, start again and focus the majority of our budget on this summer, and with Hayden gone and Field seemingly set to follow he’d be next on the block.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.05

Others >>> Teddy Tarbotton and Ashley Trujillo were part of the performative creche team selectin at Plymouth in August which turned a 2-0 lead into a 3-2 cup defeat at Home Park but haven’t been seen since. Jaylan Pearman likewise, although even our more cynical watchers of the club’s development squad reckon he’s the one at that level that really has something. Leon Scarlett impressed the seniors in first team training so much that he started making the late season benches, culminating in a debut at Ipswich aged just 16. Isak Alemayehu also made a bow at Portman Road after repeated unused sub appearances.

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Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

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