QPR embark on their final six matches of the season after a two week international break when they take on London rivals Crystal Palace at Loftus Road on Saturday.

Queens Park Rangers (11th) v Crystal Palace (12th)
Coca Cola Championship
Saturday April 4, Kick Off 3pm
Loftus Road, London, W12

There’s an old saying about being careful what you wish for. It’s one QPR fans would do well to take heed of. For a start when we were battling relegation and then, for 18 glorious months under Ian Holloway, promotion I always envied teams like Aston Villa and Everton whose season’s were over long before the end and they could simply sit back and enjoy the football rather than worry themselves about the results of other teams and what it all means for the league table. Well we’ve got that now, there can be few games taking place this weekend with less riding on them than this one, and in truth it’s quite dull isn’t it? Still I don’t find myself leaping to my feet to launch a torrent of abuse at players and match officials as much as I did before so maybe it will do me some good having nothing to play for. Or maybe I’ve just stopped caring.

It seems though that with QPR supporters in general we moan and demand things, and then when we get them we either don’t like them or we want more. When we were poor we wanted a rich man to save us and now we’re a bit sick of him and his scandalous ticket prices, when we were down the bottom of the league we wanted to be safe in mid table and now we’re there we want to know why we aren’t in the play offs already and now we want the Premiership and should we ever achieve it I have no doubt we’d all moan about the weird kick off times and sky high ticket prices. We like to moan, me especially.

At the moment a large part of me wants this season to be over with as quickly as possible. I think we’ll do alright in the three remaining home games but I forecast nothing other than three defeats at Burnley, Wolves and Preston and whatever happens none of it matters very much. But I know as soon as the football free Saturdays begin I’ll be angling after the start of next season - August 1 I’m told, earliest ever. There is always a weird feeling to these end of season fixtures with nothing at stake - the weather is normally hot, the crowd relaxed and the pace of the game somewhat slower than usual. Occasionally you end up with a 3-3 thriller like we got at Wolves last season, more often than not the games, like the season, peter out rather hopelessly.

Here’s hoping that the visit of Palace on Saturday, like ourselves with nothing to play for, brings the former rather than the latter. The signs were there against Bristol City and it would be nice to think that Routledge, Ephraim and Taarabt will rip into a mediocre visiting side but then it would be nice to think that the club may have realised that extortionate ticket prices at a time of economic crisis is not a way to win friends, or new supporters, and they didn’t. That’s life at QPR I’m afraid, here’s to another nil nil.

Five minutes on Crystal Palace
The Eagles have endured a season that has all been a bit ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ and currently sit one place and some five points behind even our under achieving get your bloody fingers out/consolidating well done lads lot.

When we last met we were not long shot of Iain Dowie, a former Palace striker and man who performed a minor modern day footballing miracle in 2003/04 when appointed the club’s manager. Nineteenth and staring a long and gruesome relegation battle in the face Palace, who had only narrowly survived the drop the year we went down when the won on the last day at Stockport and Huddersfield hilariously lost at home to Birmingham despite celebrating their apparent safety after a last minute winner against us the week before, turned to Dowie who was then manager of Oldham. Sorry, tried to sum five years of history from three or four different clubs up in one sentence there and didn’t quite pull it off.

Anyway, Dowie had done a good job with Oldham Athletic but missed out on promotion in 2002/03 when his side were narrowly beaten 1-0 in an epic play off semi final at Loftus Road. Financial problems and the lack of potential to really do any better than that with Oldham led Dowie away from Boundary Park and his connections, reputation as an intelligent man and sterling work with Oldham brought him a job in the Championship. Dowie famously won 17 of his first 23 games in charge at Palace, lifting them into the play offs and then the Premiership with a play off final win against West Ham.

It was an amazing achievement, never to be repeated we thought. Palace came straight back down, although should really have survived with the league’s top English striker Andy Johnson flopping about for penalties at least three times a month throughout the campaign. They failed to hold onto a lead at Charlton on the last day and West Brom survived instead. Still that amazing 23 game run when he first arrived cemented a reputation that Iain Dowie has failed to build on since but continues to trade off and get jobs on the basis of literally to this day.

Under first Dowie and then Peter Taylor Palace soon slumped back into the lower middle half of the Championship until autumn 2007 when it looked like they might have another little flirt with the bottom three again. Peter Taylor has a very hit and miss record as a manager – excellent spells with Gillingham, Hull and potentially Wycombe although they’re faltering badly at the moment, undermined by lacklustre or downright awful reigns at Leicester, Palace and Stevenage. By the time he was removed from the Selhurst Park hotseat most Palace fans would happily have paid his cab fair for him.

Faced with a similar task to the one Dowie was presented with in 2003 was everybody’s favourite hate figure Neil Warnock. He had, like Dowie, relegated a newly promoted side straight back out of the Premiership when he really should have kept it there. Sheffield United looked home and hosed when they beat West Ham 3-0 at Bramall Lane six weeks out from the end of their first Premiership season in a decade but a slump in form followed and as we all know a final day defeat by Wigan relegated them back from whence they came. They have spent the ensuing months and years blaming West Ham and demanding money but really Warnock’s negative tactics had far more to do with it. In the penultimate match against an Aston Villa side in poor form and with nothing to play for Warnock’s defensive orientated side was beaten 3-0.

Although he didn’t say so in as many words (“I look forward to getting back into the Premiership again very soon”) it seemed that the man who thought Christian Nade was a forward capable of playing in the English top flight fancied himself as a Premiership manager. He got his name linked with Man City, but they went for Sven Goran Eriksson instead. In the end he was left unemployed at the start of the following football season and only got back into work when his friend Simon Jordan asked him to help dig Palace out of their Peter Taylor sized hole in the Championship.

You would struggle to find two people who irritate football supporters more than Neil Warnock and Simon Jordan but I have to say that the majority of the time I find them both refreshing. Warnock talks a lot of shit, especially when his side have lost, and Jordan is a perma tanned arrogant big gob but the pair of them make such an entertaining change when interviewed because they will actually give their opinion. There is certainly not a lot of fence sitting to be done when those two are around and many thought that despite their friendship this would be a marriage made in hell and struggle to last more than a few weeks.

That underestimated Warnock who is a good manager in the Championship, and the Palace team that had grossly underperformed for Taylor. Warnock also found a batch of talented players ready and waiting to make first team debuts courtesy of the club’s excellent academy – where most managers taking over in October would have to twiddle their thumbs for a frustrating ten or eleven games waiting for the transfer window to open Warnock was immediately able to add Scannell, Bostock, Hills, Moses, Clyne and others to his squad providing a youthful enthusiasm and skill level sadly lacking under his predecessor.

Those that thought the play off charge under Iain Dowie was a one off were left stunned as Palace soared from second bottom in the table with fourteen points after a 1-1 home draw with QPR on November 10 to fifth with 71 on the final day of the season. Sixteen wins, one less than Dowie managed but still good enough. I remember writing in the match report for that draw, a match Rangers had enough chances to win several times over, that there was no doubt that these were two teams heading in opposite directions. How right I was, though not in the way I initially intended to be.

Warnock just couldn’t emulate Dowie’s play off success, despite being the better team against Bristol City in both legs of the semi final – ultimately Ben Watson’s missed penalty at Ashton Gate proved crucial. This season key players have been sold or left – Watson, John Bostock, Clinton Morrison, Tom Soares, Mark Kennedy and skipper Mark Hudson have all left. The result has been a lacklustre campaign that looks all set to peter out into a midtable finish.

Jordan continually insists that he wants out of football while Warnock is starting to murmer about retirement again. With finances the way they are at Palace and in football in general any genuine success in the near future is likely to rely heavily on Palace bringing more promising youngsters’ through and holding onto the ones already there. It remains to be seen if Warnock still has the drive and passion to oversee that much beyond the next 18 months.

Men to watch
At Sheffield United Warnock was famed for rotating his strikers at a frightening rate and he seems to be continuing that at Selhurst Park. After losing Clinton Morrison to Coventry in the summer he moved to sign Alan Lee from Ipswich but has now allowed him to join Norwich less than six months after signing him in the first place. In Lee’s place has come Anthony Stokes, a hot property when at Arsenal but somebody who has struggled to make an impact in the Premiership with Sunderland and is now seeking career reignition in the Championship. Stokes has one goal, against Preston, in six appearances since moving back down south a month ago.

Likely to line up alongside Stokes in attack is veteran target man Shefki Kuqi, fresh from a goal for Finland against Wales in Cardiff last week. Kuqi is well known to Engl;ish football fans after spells with Sheff Wed, Ipswich, Blackburn and Stockport and is attempting to make the most of a second chance under warnock at Palace - he was initially booted out on loan after making a lewd gesture at a section of the Palace support. Despite always looking about four stone overweight Kuqi remains a real handful in this league and has scored four goals in his last five games. Damion Stewart failed miserably to cope with him when we were beaten 3-0 at palace a couple of season’s back but has improved since.

Palace have a lively looking midfield backing that strike force up. Nick Carle arrived in this country with Bristol City last january and was their most impressive player in the run in that culminated with a play off win against Crystal Palace. It was a surprise to everybody when City then allowed the fiery Australian to move to Selhurst Park in the summer for £1m. The good and bad sides of Carle’s game are there for all to see - a classy passer and attacking threat, but also a bit of a head case at times and he has just come back from a ban after a sending off against Birmingham City in February.

Wide of him on either side Palace have John Oster and Victor Moses. I’ve always said about Oster that if he was half as good a player as he thinks he is he’d be Wales' new Ryan Giggs. I remember watching him break through at Grimsby a decade or more ago but he made the wrong move too early - joining Everton pre-David Moyes - and that set him back years. He has never really fulfilled his potential at any of his clubs and has even spent time on loan back at Grimsby. Leeds, Burnley, Sunderland and Reading have all tried and failed to find that spark that made him one of the hottest properties in the country in the 1990s and he is now steadily playing out time on the flank for Palace. Classy at times, but lazy and arrogant with it. Moses is at the other end of the career scale and is himself attracting interest from higher up - a lightening quick, tricky winger in the mould of Andy Impey, he will provide our weak full back area with a stiff test on Saturday.

As well as Carle the midfield steel is often provided by Shaun Derry - that slow, limited and dirty midfield player that Warnock has always found a place for in his team. One of those that makes you feel you should be playing professional football somewhere. Neil danns provides cover in the centre - he first caught the eye in Colchester’s League One promotion campaign and subsequently joined Birmingham where he found first team opportunities limited. Yet to really prove himself in the top two divisions.

At the back Clint Hill provides an uncompromising, experienced presence after years in this league with Tranmere and Stoke. Warnock signed him to replace Leon Cort who went the other way - a move I could never really understand. Full back Nathaniel Clyne is a youth team product while Palace can also call on two Fonte’s at the back - Jose who they signed from Benfica, Rui who is on loan from Arsenal. Matt Lawrence, once of Millwall, is famed more for his lively programme notes than his playing ability.

In goal expect to find Julian Speroni - a long haired, eccentric and unorthodox player who keeps promising youngster Scott Flinders and star of Southend’s team for many years Daryl Flahaven out of the team.

Previous Meetings
QPR have been involved in nine nil nil draws this season, including the corresponding fixture between these two at Selhurst Park in November. The game was just the second of Paulo Sousa’s reign in charge and took Rangers’ run of away games without a goal to six. That wasn’t for the want of trying though, and for the second consecutive visit to this part of the world the travelling faithful were left to rue missed chances. Heidar Helguson was the most guilty party, he rolled a ball wide of an open net from 30 yards with one of his first touches after coming on as a second half substitute.

Crystal Palace: Speroni 6, Clyne 7, Fonte 6, Hill 7, McCarthy 6, Carle 8 (Derry 63, 6), Watson 7, Oster 7, Scannell 7 (Griffit 87, -), Ifill 6 (Kuqi 63, 7), Beattie 6
Subs Not Used: Lawrence, Moses
Booked: Carle (foul)

QPR: Cerny 7, Ramage 5, Stewart 7, Gorkss 8, Delaney 6, Agyemang 7 (Di Carmine 90, -), Leigertwood 7, Mahon 6, Parejo 4 (Helguson 46, 6), Ephraim 7, Blackstock 6 (Rowlands 56, 6)
Subs Not Used: Cole, Borrowdale
Booked: Ephraim (foul), Delaney (foul)

Match Report

Palace, and Clinton Morrison in particular, always seem to enjoy visiting Loftus Road and it proved to be the case again last seasonas Luigi De Canio’s QPR team were beaten 2-1. It started so well when Damion Stewart continued his hot run of form in front of goal at the time with the opener after ten minutes – as you would expect he headed in a corner. However Palace came roaring back after the break with two goals in three minutes to turn the game on its head. First Clint Hill came up from the back to head in Ben Watson’s delivery, then Morrison got his obligatory goal against Rangers from another Watson cross.

QPR: Camp 6, Rehman 5, Stewart 5, Malcolm 4, Barker 4, Rowlands 5 (Nygaard 72, 5), Buzsaky 5 (Bolder 86, -), Leigertwood 4, Sinclair 4, Sahar 4 (Balanta 83, -), Vine 5
Subs Not Used: Cole, Ainsworth
Booked: Rowlands (foul), Rehman (foul), Camp (off the ball incident)
Goals: Stewart 10 (assisted Buzsaky)

Crystal Palace: Speroni 8, Butterfield 7, Hudson 6, Fonte 5 (Hills 52, 7), Hill 7, Soares 7 (Fletcher 73, 6), Watson 8, Derry 7, Songo'o 6 (Scannell 60, 7), Scowcroft 7, Morrison 7
Subs Not Used: Freedman, Martin
Booked: Butterfield (foul)
Goals: Hill 65 (assisted Watson), Morrison 68 (assisted Watson)

Match Report

Head to Head:
QPR wins – 35
Draws – 27
Palace wins – 29

Past QPR v Palace scores:
2008/09 Palace 0 QPR 0
2007/08 QPR 1 Palace 2 (Stewart)
2007/08 Palace 1 QPR 1 (Sinclair)
2006/07 Palace 3 QPR 0
2006/07 QPR 4 Palace 2 (Smith 2, Gallen, Lomas)
2005/06 Palace 2 QPR 1 (Furlong)
2005/06 QPR 1 Palace 3 (Ainsworth)
2000/01 QPR 1 Palace 1 (Crouch)
2000/01 Palace 1 QPR 1 (Carlisle)
1999/00 QPR 0 Palace 1
1999/00 Palace 3 QPR 0
1998/99 QPR 6 Palace 0 (Kiwomya 3, Kulscar, Scully, Breaker)
1998/99 Palace 1 QPR 1 (Steiner)
1996/97 QPR 0 Palace 1
1996/97 Palace 3 QPR 0
1994/95 QPR 0 Palace 1
1994/95 Palace 0 QPR 0
1992/93 Palace 1 QPR 1 (Allen)
1992/93 QPR 1 Palace 3 (Penrice)

Team News
Paulo Sousa must decide how much time, if any, to give Rowan Vine as his rehabilitation from a broken leg continues. This could be his first action in more than a year. Mystery surrounds Heidar helguson who was said at the start of the week to be injured for the rest of the season only to then be named on many of the team sheets for Scotland v Iceland on Wednesday night. Further investigation has shown that he did not play in that game after all, the wire copy confused Helguson with Hreiderson, and so it is unlikely that he will be available leaving only Di Carmine and Balanta as fully fit striking options. We await news of Damion Stewart, Fitz Hall is out with a groin problem. Buzsaky and Rowlands are long term absentees, Agyemang is still three weeks away from a return.

Palace news to follow.
Injury List

Referee
Experienced referee Scott Mathieson is in charge of his first QPR game since 2004 this Saturday. Mathieson seemed to be winding down his career when he had no Championship games in 2005 but he has stepped things up again recently and this will be his fourteenth game in this division this season. He is normally a sensible referee who allows the game to flow so could be a good appointment for this game.
Details

Elsewhere
The final international break of the season leaves the Championship with just six weeks to go and it’s mostly all still to play for although Charlton look doomed and Wolves look Premiership bound. The pick of the Saturday games are at the bottom of the table where Charlton and crisis club Southampton meet at St Mary’s while Forest with new signing Dexter Blackstock in tow go to Barnsley. The evening match is between play off chasers Bristol City and Preston. There are two further Sky games on Sunday and Monday and they are crackers – Cardiff v Swansea is the Sunday lunch time game, Wolves v Birmingham the headline Monday nighter. Don’t miss either.
Tony’s Championship Preview

Form
QPR have recently emerged from a worrying nine game slump by going three unbeaten. Rangers have won their last two home games, against Swansea and Bristol City, after going from December 20 without a win on their own patch - some seven matches. Still, a good number of those games were drawn and with a home record of eleven wins and just four defeats Rangers are on a par with fifth placed Burnley when it comes to home results.

Palace’s last six results rather sum up their season - three defeats, two wins and a draw. The Eagles are wildly inconsistent and hard to call this year and followed an impressive 3-1 win at Swansea up with a tonking by the same scoreline at Barnsley and then a draw against promotion chasing Reading. They have won six times away from home this season, a record bettered by nobody lower then tenth in the league, and have taken some notable scalps on their travels. As well as Swansea Warnock’s men have won at Forest, Coventry, Norwich, Derby and Plymouth. They have lost just two of their last nine visits to this ground.
Form Guide

Prediction
Despite winning the last two games QPR will do well not to let this season simply peter out altogether with three seriously difficult away games to come between now and May. It’s hard to imagine us taking anything from any of them but I do think we may take two wins and a draw from the three home matches, this being the draw.
QPR 1 Crystal Palace 1

Prediction League >>> League Calculator >>> Connections and Memories

Photo: Action Images

Rochdale Polls