A week where QPR finally appeared to have cracked the problem of building a new stadium in West London could have ended in few better places than Bolton Wanderers' Reebok Stadium.
Championship >>> Saturday August 23, 2013 >>> Reebok Stadium, Horwich >>> Kick off 12.15 >>> Live on Sky Sports 1
There are undoubted benefits to being a London club when it comes to attracting passing trade, investment and football players but where the capital's clubs struggle is redeveloping stadiums, or moving grounds altogether. London is a desirable place to live and already full so, even if a patch of land could be given over for a football stadium rather than a block of luxury apartments for people from the Middle East to live in for two weeks a year, it would cost the earth to do it and clubs can't afford it.
For QPR to have a development of the scale and ambition of Old Oak Common so close to their current Loftus Road home, and have the council and developers happy to include a 40,000 seat sports stadium within it, is good fortune on an unprecedented scale for what previously seemed like a terminally unlucky club. It would be tempting to say that, if the whole thing goes ahead as planned, Rangers have done the hard work and Tony Fernandes has succeeded where every chairman back to Chris Wright has failed — a new, purpose built, modern home for QPR close to Shepherds Bush that will enable them to compete on an even footing with sides in the Premier League.
But in actual fact, even in London, finding the site is the easy bit. The hard part is getting the design of the stadium right.
If you're one of the 400 warriors/idiots heading to Bolton this weekend for a televised lunchtime kick off — or indeed thinking of heading to Derby, Leicester, Middlesbrough or Reading later this season — then spend some of the journey thinking about this question: why, exactly, do I go to watch QPR play? And I mean really think about it, not just dismiss it with some throwaway "because they're my team" or "because it's what I've always done" line.
Why do I go to QPR? Personally I go to see my favourite people in my favourite pub, and sit in my seat in the South Africa Road stand surrounded by the same people I've always been surrounded by, to give my support to the team various late members of my family cared about and watch competitive football in an old, atmospheric, unique football stadium. I go because my granddad went before he died, and my dad went before he died, and my best mate went before he died — I go for the memories and to feel closer to them and feel part of what they were part of. If I had to sit and write an essay on it I'd talk about people and pubs and atmosphere and history for pages before I even got to "to see QPR win" because, simply put, QPR don't win very often.
If any of that resonates with you, then have a look around the Reebok Stadium on Saturday. Before you even arrive, spend some time running its name over in your head. Loftus Road evokes memories of Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh and beating Chelsea 6-0 on a plastic pitch and drawing 5-5 with Newcastle. It bubbles with history and memory and atmosphere. The Reebok Stadium sounds like somewhere you go to buy trainers.
If you're arriving by train, time how long it takes to get from Bolton — the place Bolton Wanderers represent, the place Bolton Wanderers used to play in, and judging by all the people on the platform the place lots of Bolton Wanderers fans still live — to Horwich, which is where Bolton Wanderers actually play now. Perhaps, if you're of the belief that football clubs represent areas and communities and the people there and the businesses there, it might stir something inside you.
When you arrive, marvel at your pre-match options, which stretch as far as one out-of-town pub serving poor food, and beer in plastic glasses, that's probably too full to go in anyway. People in Shepherds Bush tell their friends to meet them in The Crown, The Adelaide, The Shepherd and Flock, the White Horse or the Springbok — nobody that anybody should ever want to spend any time with whatsoever in their life has ever told their friends to meet them in a pub with a Wacky Warehouse on the side and a salad bar wilting under heat lamps on a retail park by the M6. If you don't want to go there, your options are several variations of Pizza Hut.
Inside the stadium look around at the empty seats. Look over your shoulder during some downtime in the game and notice that the upper tier of the stand you're sitting in is actually closed altogether — for a league game. Turn to the person next to you and whisper something — I bet they hear you. And this is a ground with only 28,000 seats, not the 40,000 QPR are apparently convinced they need. Look at the distance from your seat to the touchline in front of you and compare it to Loftus Road. Remember the look on Juan Mata's face when he came across to take a corner at the Loft End and was so intimidated by what waited for him there he handed the duty on to somebody else and then requested to be substituted with a mystery muscle injury. Wonder if that could ever happen at the Reebok Stadium where corner takers are separated from a block of empty seats by a set of advertising hoardings, a concrete walkway, another set of advertising hoardings, a perimeter track and a stretch of grass.
At Loftus Road it can feel like you're making a difference as a supporter when there's 11,000 of you in the place — Birmingham at home in the snow a famous example — whereas at the Reebok Stadium, and a dozen others like it, you could have twice that many inside and have all the atmosphere of an out of town distribution centre, which of course these stadiums aren't altogether dissimilar to.
More than likely you think that's all terribly old fashioned, woolly, romantic thinking. All you really want to see is QPR play regularly at the highest level possible and you couldn't care less whether the ground is surrounded by pubs and tube stations and crammed with history and atmosphere or is a vast open bowl in the middle of a field near Heathrow. The perceived wisdom is that QPR cannot compete in the Premier League at Loftus Road and the logic and facts on that are impossible to argue with. How on earth can a club like QPR, with a stadium that only holds 18,000 people and is impossible to extend or improve in any way, hope to survive in a league where the best clubs pull in more matchday revenue from one game than Rangers are able to in an entire season?
But that rather ignores a slight problem of there only being 20 places in the Premier League at any one time. Once upon a time having owners as wealthy as Tony Fernandes and Lakshmi Mittal would have almost guaranteed QPR a shot at the Premier League title — see Blackburn Rovers under Jack Walker — but eventually every club got a rich owner so now the playing field is levelled out again. If all 20 Premier League clubs have a billionaire chairman, three of them still get relegated at the end of the season. And it's the same with stadiums. QPR need a new stadium to compete in the Premier League, but having one wouldn't guarantee that they would do that by any means. You'll notice - in the half-full, silent, soulless but terribly futuristic and well equipped Reebok Stadium — that you're still watching a Championship match. Bolton were capable of winning promotion to the Premier League when they played at Burnden Park, a ground far more decrepit and useless than Loftus Road where half the away end was actually a supermarket that obscured the view of one side of the pitch. The Reebok Stadium is vastly superior in every way, so we're told, but Bolton are still, nevertheless, a mediocre Championship team.
Derby County, who used to play at one of the country's most feared and atmospheric city centre venues, now have a shiny new stadium at the end of a 20 minute walk through a retail park next to a Frankie and Bennies. In the past ten years they've managed one single solitary season in the Premier League which ended in abject embarrassment, one win from 38 games, and a financial crisis from which the club is yet to fully recover. QPR have managed better than that in the last decade from their apparently inadequate Loftus Road ground.
So is it better to have a big, new, identikit ground that helps you in the Premier League but is a desolate, empty, soulless place the rest of the time; or a tiny, inadequate, old fashioned ground that can rock at any level of football but means you only get into the Premier League occasionally?
After all, even if the move goes well and you suddenly do become settled in the Premier League, what then? Not only does a club like QPR have no hope of ever winning the Premier League, but they're told by all and sundry that they must immediately sacrifice their place in every other competition at the first possible opportunity lest it provide a distraction from the important business of staying in the competition they can’t possibly win.
So even if you turn up at five to three every Saturday and leave at five to five and focus surely on the football, why exactly is there this desperation to move grounds and 'compete in the Premier League' anyway? You're essentially condemning your team to one season after another that is, as long as the intention of sport is still to win and achieve things, utterly pointless. By the end of their time in the Premier League Bolton found they weren't even selling out when the likes of Man Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea turned up — because what was the point? They probably weren't going to win the game, they definitely weren't going to win the league, and the novelty of watching Robin Van Persie rampage around destroying your team isn't nearly as alluring as Sky Sports would like you to believe. During Bolton 's ten year stay in the Premier League — where they won nothing — QPR got to a play off final and won two promotions, one as champions. Cups and medals.
If architects in this country designed football stadiums for football fans — such as the fabulous new ground at Juventus — then QPR could simply have a bigger version of Loftus Road. But they don't, they design them to make money the rest of the week with hotels and casinos and One Direction concerts. They design them in bowl shapes with supporters miles from the pitch. They design them far, far bigger than the football club could ever possibly need (there are not 40,000 people out there who will come and watch QPR unless the team becomes a dominant force in English football, which it won't as we've already established) and use words like "potential" but more often than not find, like Middlesbrough, that the club ends up playing at the level they always played at before but in a dead atmosphere that's never likely to spur the team on or attract any new support.
If you ask the QPR supporters what sort of a new ground they'd like they'd probably describe something along the lines of https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=boavista+stadium&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei= If you ask the decision makers at the club, and at most other clubs, for an example of new ground best practise they'd say Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, which has all the atmosphere of Whetstone Library but does have massive hospitality facilities and the ability to stage a nice Muse concert. Of course it's that, rather than the matchday experience of QPR fans, that will concern the designers of the Air Asia Stadium at Old Oak Common more.
So look around the Reebok Stadium, and the surrounding area, this Saturday and ask yourself why, other than blind loyalty to the club, would you keep you going back to a place like that every week to watch QPR? If Rangers, like Bolton, ended up in a half full ground like that, surrounded by a retail park and a lone pub and a train station, in the middle of the Championship, would it draw you back week after week in the same way Loftus Road and Shepherds Bush does?
If you're doing this QPR, do it right.
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Peter Crouch opens the scoring for QPR at the Reebok Stadium in 2001. The R’s, destined for relegation, went on to lose 3-1.
Team News: QPR still have a doubt over the fitness or Ale Faurlin and Junior Hoilett is definitely out after injuring his hamstring in last weekend's win against Ipswich. With new signing Matt Phillips confirmed on Friday but still unable to play because of a broken arm it's left Harry Redknapp with a midfield creativity problem, but the form of Joey Barton from the start last week, and Gary O'Neil from the bench, will give him hope. O'Neil must be pushing for a start this week. Andy Johnson may also return, almost certainly for Bobby Zamora, after recovering from his muscle injury. Armand Traore is said to be fit to return at left back but Redknapp isn't a fan and will either keep Clint Hill there or recall Yun Suk-Young in all likelihood.
Bolton are yet to win in the league this season but midfielder Darren Pratley has been impressive, which makes his three match suspension for a sending off in last week's defeat at Nottingham Forest very damaging. With Stuart Holden and Mark Davies on the long term casualty list, manager Dougie Freedman has a midfield headache but that could be eased by the return to fitness of influential Chris Eagles. Striker David Ngog may miss out with a virus.
Elsewhere: Bolton v QPR is one of two Championship games moved for television coverage this weekend, with Watford and Nottingham Forest meeting in a battle of the early pace setters at Vicarage Road on Sunday lunchtime. Later that day Wigan's jam-packed fixture list sees them hosting Middlesbrough at the DW Stadium — a match moved to enable the whole town to decamp down to London on Saturday for the Wigan v Hull FC Rugby League Challenge Cup Final.
Millwall are still without a point or a goal in the league and pressure is starting to mount on manager Steve Lomas, who wasn't a popular appointment in the first place given his West Ham connections. They're at Sheffield Wednesday, who only have a point themselves, on Saturday so something surely has to give there? What price a draw?
Four other teams, including QPR's opponents Bolton , are still hunting their first win of the season. Charlton have one point from three games and host Doncaster this weekend, who ran Wigan mighty close in a 2-2 draw during the week and have already beaten Blackburn . That result means Rovers only have a point themselves and they meet the other winless side Barnsley at Ewood Park this weekend.
Brighton haven't started too cleverly (one win, two defeats) themselves under new manager Oscar Garcia and they host Burnley this weekend — the Clarets were many people's tip for the drop with money tight and top scorer Charlie Austin moving on but they've started with two wins and a draw and currently sit fourth in the fledgling league table. All credit to manager Sean Dyche so far.
Another team with a strong start, Blackpool, host one of the promotion favourites Reading while Leicester host Birmingham in a clash of the financial haves and have nots.
Sweeping up the rest of the list we have Huddersfield v Bournemouth, Ipswich v Leeds and Yeovil v Derby .
Referee: probably the shortest http://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/news/32611/adcock-in-cha file we've ever had to publish on a referee, but for what it's worth young James Adcock is in the middle this weekend at the Reebok Stadium. He's been on the league list for two full seasons so far and is yet to referee a QPR fixture. He took charge of Bolton's 2-1 defeat at Watford last season, awarding the Trotters a second half penalty for their goal.
Bolton: It's three league games and just one point so far for Bolton who were soundly beaten by early table toppers Nottingham Forest 3-0 last time out. That's a far cry from the end of last season when a run of ten wins and four draws from their last 17 fixtures threatened to lift them from their turn of the year position of fourteenth into the play offs, where they would of course have been the form team and therefore fancied by many. Ultimately the season finished a week too early, or the run started a week too late. The return of influential loan defender Craig Dawson to his parent club West Brom over the summer has been influential so far with David Wheater struggling badly alongside the ever unpredictable Zat Knight. All that said, Wanderers are unbeaten in 13 matches at the Reebok Stadium and have scored a goal in every home match in 2013
QPR: Rangers were infamously poor last season, taking 17 Premier League games to get their first win and ultimately managing just two successes away and two at home in the entire campaign. That's a stark contrast to this season which has seen them win two and draw one of the first three league matches which means the possibility of beating the club record run of 19 matches unbeaten at the start of a season — set last time they were at this level in 2010/11 — is still on. Since that title winning season Rangers' away form has been utterly lousy with just five league wins on the road in two Premier League seasons, and none at all in the entire calendar year of 2012. That will have to improve if they're to challenge in the Championship this season and so far they've managed a draw at Huddersfield Town . QPR have a lousy record against Bolton through the years — they've only ever beaten them away from home twice (1980, 1995) and both of those games were at Burnden Park . They are yet to win in four visits to the Reebok Stadium and haven't beaten Bolton anywhere in eight attempts.
Betting: Professional odds compiler Owen Goulding tells us…
"QPR travel to the Reebok in good spirits to take on a stuttering Bolton side in Saturday’s early game. We all know what happened last time QPR visited Bolton - I for one remember it all too well as I backed Clint Hill to score that day and was refused a pay-out by what will remain an unnamed bookie - not that I’m still bitter or anything...
"Bolton 's squad on first glance, looks decent for this level. However, if you analyse it a bit further, it is made up of a number of players who have always promised big things but never actually delivered with any level of consistency. Zat Knight, Jermaine Beckford, David Ngog, Jay Spearing, David Wheater, Chris Eagles ... the list is seemingly endless. The task for QPR is made even easier as Bolton 's player of this (very short) season so far, Darren Pratley, misses this game through suspension. Bolton have yet to win in the league this season, and the way QPR seem to be creating chances, I think they may have to wait a bit longer for their first victory.
"We all know QPR's record in front of the Sky Cameras is appalling but everything points to them gaining at least a point here. Charlie Austin - despite his poor miss on Saturday - looks a 20 goal a season forward all over. With the leaden footed defence of Knight and Wheater as his opposition on Saturday, this looks the game in which he can open his league account for the R's. It looks a matter of time before QPR give someone a good hiding - they have come up against some excellent goalkeeping displays so far this year. In truth, I don't think it will be here but I can see Austin having some success in this game. Therefore my bet for the match is Charlie Austin first goal scorer with Ladbrokes. Each Way at 6/1 - big profit if scores first, small profit if he scores one of the first five goals."
Prediction: Reigning champion of the LFW Prediction league Mase tells us…
"Having seen the team in the flesh for the first time this season on Saturday I came away relieved with the win, but underwhelmed by our performance. For all our possession we struggled to create many good openings and I have a feeling Charlie Austin didn't mean to scuff it across the six-yard box in the last minute, either. Fine margins I guess.
"I doubt we'll get as long on the ball this week as we had last, so expect we might create even fewer chances than we managed against Ipswich . That said, playing away may suit us this season as we are, apparently (and laughably) something of a 'scalp' in this league and are likely to encounter massed ranks of defence when at home.
"Bolton are without Darren Pratley who has been an important player for them so let's hope that is keenly felt in their midfield. I expect Barton and whoever he's partnered with to gain a decent foothold. But for our profligacy I would be quite confident of a positive result; as it is, I think a low scoring draw is most likely particularly if we're missing Hoilett who looked a bright spark on Saturday."
Mase's Prediction: Bolton 1 QPR 1, Scorer - Gary O'Neil, but I'll be doing my tactical 'no scorer' prediction for the Predication League (as much as that makes sense).
LFW Prediction:
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