QPR’s escalating injury problems make tomorrow’s trip to in form Stoke look even more unappetizing than normal, but it is tempered by some seriously good news coming out of the club this week.
Sky’s Super Saturday Brunch Spectacular >>> Saturday January 17, 2026 >>> Kick off 15.00 >>> Weather – Wet, windy, brightening later >>> Stanley Matthews Way, Stoke-On-Trent
After so long, there are games and goals and players that just blend into the ether. That you forgot ever took place or ever existed. Others live forever in your mind’s eye, but some just fade away to nothing as if they never happened.
November 2006, 20 years ago now (ye Gods) we beat Crystal Palace 4-2 at home, and if I close my eyes I’m still there. Watching Lee Cook roast Danny Butterfield on such a high heat Palace had to hire a priest to scatter his remains around a garden of remembrance. We played Palace six further times over the next three seasons – can you tell me a single thing about any of them? About the 0-0 home and away double in 2008/09? Sure, in the 2010/11 promotion year, we all remember Edgar David’s horrible back pass, the devastation of the late Palace equaliser, and then Heidar Helguson soaring high above Julien Speroni to head the last kick of the game into the net for a crucial winner as the hosts appealed in vain for handball. The away end dissolved. Can you tell me the score in the home game? Or who scored?
There’s another Helguson goal I still feel like I can reach out and touch. Right in front of us in the away end, behind the goal at The Britannia Stadium in Stoke. The hosts at the height of their unplayable Pulis best, Rangers a newly promoted upstart. Armbands Traore didn’t get much right during a troubled spell at Loftus Road, but when he did wrap his left foot round a cross properly goodness did it fly. And there was Helguson walking onto the ball, not even breaking stride as he planted a header into the top corner harder than most people can kick a ball. A 3-2 away win at one of the Prem’s most notoriously tough places to go, already a third away win of the season at that point in November, and Neil Warnock’s Chelsea-conquering side up to eighth in the top flight.
Within ten games Warnock had been fired, and Mark Hughes was interviewing (us) for the job. A real sliding doors moment for the club. I can’t sit here and be wise after the event because I think at the time, post MK Dons in the FA Cup, I was agitating for change of some sort and praising Tony Fernandes for engaging with supporters on Twitter (lol). My only defence, really, is do you still think and feel the same as you did at 25?
One thing I did repeatedly say at the time though is that the club were too wrapped up in signings and not enough on actually building the club for the future. Every transfer window, always "more blood”, always another half dozen players to fix whatever perceived problem we had at that point and keep the fans happy, ever bigger names on ever bigger salaries and ever redder Air Asia baseball caps. Paddy Kenny (£15k a week) replaced by Robert Green (£50k) a week replaced by Julio Cesar (£120k a week) in the same transfer window.
The debt it accrued, the FFP fine it earned, the eight ball it placed the club behind, to a certain extent we’re still dealing with and trying to escape from now a decade later. And yet we emerged from it the same club we went into it as. Small, cramped, 18,000 stadium in desperate need of improvement, and training at a decrepit facility rented from a college at the end of Heathrow’s north runway. We lost, in the end, something north of £250m and all we had to show for it was the same Championship club hamstrung by its stadium and training in a shit facility it didn’t own as we had in the first place. The only people who benefited were various wanker footballers and their leaching agents.
The biggest plus in Ruben Gnanalingam’s column as owner, and the best legacy of the time we spent with Lee Hoos and Les Ferdinand running the club day to day, is without doubt the training ground. It’s new, it’s well equipped, the pitches are immaculate, it makes us money rather than loses it, other clubs and countries like to use it… and it’s ours. We own it. Footballers come and go, particularly when you sign them at the rate we do. When the team is struggling and results aren’t what we hope it’s very easy to convince yourself the be all and end all is another footballer or two – "sign a fucking striker”, "get the fucking chequebook out”. The future of your club over the medium and long term is much better served by investing in infrastructure.
It's why things like the decay of Loftus Road, the lack of any attempt to improve it rather than chase pipe dreams about new stadiums on the Scrubs, the state of our pitch, upset me more than whether we’ll be signing a goalkeeper this January or not. Your priorities are wrong. It’s also why I think the best news this week wasn’t the signing of Ronnie Edwards, but the club’s decision to upgrade our academy set up to category one over the next 18 months.
For a long time, under the Ferdinand and Hoos regime and with Paul Hall running the academy, Rangers have been publicly lukewarm on this idea. They talked up the benefit of a clear path to first team as an attraction for young players over and above categories, badges and facilities. They may well be right. If we’re talking bringing players through from eight to 18 and first team then QPR have only really been able to do that twice (Darnell Furlong, Rayan Kolli) and it may be we’re about to heave a whole load more money into a black hole when we’d be better off picking up drop outs and cast offs in the late teen years like Ebere Eze and Kieran Morgan.
To be honest though, it always felt to me like they were putting a brave face on somebody simply not wanting to spend the money to get us there.
Category one doesn’t stop your players getting poached, but it does make it harder and more lucrative for the club when it does happen. The stance became harder to justify when Les admitted during the Chris Martin years that the club had lost aid 13 players from the academy to category one clubs for total fees received of just £750,000 - £57k per player. Alfie Gilchrist to Chelsea, Bradley Ibrahim to Arsenal, Luca Gunter to Spurs, Harvey Elliott to Fulham and so on. Lyndon Dykes gets injured and we have to loan in Jamal Lowe and get Martin on a short-term deal because we don’t have a boy that can even stand there and do that mediocre target man job for a couple of months.
Category one isn’t a silver bullet cure-all for this. We will still lose players to Arsenal and Chelsea because of who they are and who we are. But it’ll surely help. Help us recruit better players, retain better players, attract better players, from a wider geographical area. Then when they’re here they’ll be playing against better opposition in harder competitions (though the idea of us contributing to the farce of U21 sides in the EFL Cup makes me do a bit of sick in my mouth). Then, if they do leave, we’ll get a bit more money for them – or at least that’s what the announcement this week says, contradicting what Christian Nourry said at the fan forum in July: "Whether we’re one or two doesn’t make any material difference to whether we can keep our best academy players, nor does it impact on how much money we get for them if they move to another club.”
The timing is interesting. Possibly related to the original training ground bond which is due to mature in November this year – existing bond holders received an email earlier this week offering two options to roll that money over on existing terms for three years or improved for five. Nourry also pointed out at the most recent fans forum that one of the factors you’re judged on in this is how much money you’re spending on youth development annually and, owing to the costs of running a football club in West London, he reckoned we were "pretty damn close” already so perhaps that threshold has been met or shortly will be. The piece of infrastructure required, and currently missing, is an indoor training facility or dome – we currently borrow the one at Cranford School over the road – but there is tonnes of space and scope to erect a structure like that at Heston, and planning permission shouldn’t be an issue as it’s always been a sports ground/facility.
As the club said this week, there are no guarantees. There are currently 30 clubs that meet the grading criteria and we’ve got to try get up there with them over the next 18 months. I hope we succeed. I’ve always tempered any criticism of Gnanalingam and Hoos with ‘but, got the training ground built’ and similarly, if he achieves this, then any negative opinion of Christian Nourry will be caveated by him improving our facilities and getting us a Category A academy. It’s really good news.
Which is just as well because, looking at the team we’re going to be able to field, I don’t expect we’ll be bringing a lot of that back from Stoke with us tomorrow.
Links >>> Helguson masterclass – History >>> Donohue in charge – Referee >>> Stoke City official website >>> Stoke Sentinel — Local press >>> The Oatcake — Message Board >>> The Wizards of Drivel — Podcast >>> Every Step Along The Way — Podcast >>> Stoke City official website >>> Stoke Sentinel — Local press >>> The Oatcake — Message Board >>> The Wizards of Drivel — Podcast >>> Every Step Along The Way — Podcast
Team News: QPR are doing a very good impression of a club with fitness issues. The hectic Christmas schedule has left the squad nursing injuries to ten first teamers. Koki Saito lasted 19 minutes of the West Ham cup tie before leaving the field holding his hamstring and he won’t return to training until February. Amadou Mbengue and Karamoko Dembele have also both emerged from that cup tie with unspecified issues which make them a doubt for this weekend. That trio sits alongside the four different players who all pulled up lame in the first half of the previous league game against Sheff Wed – Kwame Poku (hamstring), Rumarn Burrell (hamstring) and Jonathan Varane (knee) are all definitely out while Liam Morrison (unspecified) may be involved. Jake Clarke-Salter (ankle), Harvey Vale (back) and Ilias Chair (unspecified) were all sidelined in any case.
Joe Walsh’s impressive display at West Ham may bring him back into the intriguing goalkeeper rotation we’re currently running, with Stéphan clearly less than impressed with his other options. Murphy Cooper, however, will not be making that a chaotic foursome despite his abrupt return from Barnsley as he’s immediately gone back out again to pick the ball out the back of the net at Sheff Wed – lots and lots to do at a Championship level, a good acid test for where he is in his development/career.
Ronnie Edwards is available for his second QPR debut after making a permanent move from Southampton , although he hasn’t played at all since a three-minute outing against Birmingham on December 6 and hasn’t started since a 45-minute outing against Preston on November 1. He had been training alone at Southampton for the last fortnight of his time there so Stéphan is cautioning against expecting too much too soon from him.
Stoke’s own promising start to the season was derailed pre-Christmas by their own catalogue of injuries, headlined by star goalkeeper Viktor Johansson who always seems to have a great game against QPR but is now out for much of the rest of the season after shoulder surgery. The Swedish stopper has been replaced by the temporary loan of Southampton’s Gavin Bazunu.
Junior Tchamadeu was due back for this match following AFCON action with Cameroon but injured his knee in their last game against Morocco and is now facing a spell on the sidelines. That leaves Mark Robins with problems in both full back positions with left backs Aaron Cresswell (calf) and Eric Bocat (knee) back in training but struggling to be ready for this game. Striker Robert Bozenik also has a shoulder complaint and is out along with goalscoring midfielder Lewis Baker who is a couple of weeks away.
Elsewhere: Friday night means, naturally, West Brom on your tellybox, this time hosting high flying Middlesbrough. Ryan Mason has fallen on his sword at The Hawthorns since we last spoke and the Baggies have gone for youth over experience again in his replacement – former Man Utd coach Eric Ramsay who was last seen leading Minnesota United to back-to-back Conference play-off semi-finals in the MLS. Only one of the last six West Brom managers won their first game in charge.
The three lunchtime games on Saturday are led by leaders Coventry at home to struggling Leicester. The Sky Blues have emerged from the Christmas period relatively unscathed – still six points clear at the top and eight points clear in the automatic promotion places as they seek a first Premier League return since relegation in 2001. However, Frank Lampard’s side have just one point from three league games and have won only two of the last eight, taking nine points from 24 available. They are 17th in the form table since the start of December. A chink of light for Marti Cifuentes then perhaps? The Foxes are 28 points worse off than at this stage of their last Championship campaign, have won seven of the last 22 games, and are without a clean sheet in 20 league outings.
Probably the most likely to catch the leaders if they do get the Covvy wobbles are Ipswich, who should be winning again in the second of the 1230 starts at home to lowly Blackburn (although Rovers are 22nd in home table and 8th in away table). Unbeaten in five, winning four, Town have won nine of the last 15 league games. More play-off action down at Vicarage Road too where Watford (unbeaten in seven, winning five) v Millwall is the battle between fifth and sixth. The Hornets have 23 points from losing positions – ten more than any other Championship side. Alex Neil’s 50th game in charge is next week and since his first only Coventry City (93) have picked up more points than the Lions (80).
Not a lot to get excited about among the other 15.00 kick offs if truth be told.
Oxford were so impressed with the rescue job Matt Bloomfield did at Luton when appointed midway through last season they’ve given him the keys to do it all over again, replacing Gary Rowett. Second bottom, three points adrift, with four defeats from five games, he needs to get motoring quickly starting at home to Bristol City who have scored five times in two of their last three games. A win for the U’s here would complete a first double over Bristol City since 1995/96 when Dennis Smith was their manager. Norwich, for all their improvements under Philippe Clement, are also still ensconced in the bottom three but could climb out this weekend with a positive result away at Wrexham (the only side to win all four of their Christmas fixtures) if Portsmouth don’t pick up their gimme away at Sheff Wed. Henrik Pedersen’s side are 32 points from safety with 63 left on the table but Pompey are the only side they have beaten so far.
Charlton are now three places and five points above the dotted line. Nathan Jones’ side have won one of 11 and two of 14 Championship games (only Sheff Wed have fewer points since the start of November) and have responded to this slump by reteaming Charlie Kelman with fellow free-scoring QPR alum Lyndon Dykes this week ahead of this weekend’s homer with Sheffield Red Stripe. I’ll keep the jokes in reserve for now, we’re only three weeks away from a televised Friday night at The Valley and the QPR in me is giving me bad vibes about how that one might go. Chris Wilder’s Blades have won more points (22) and scored more goals (25) than any other side since the end of November, scoring seven more goals than any other side in that time.
Southampton v Hull and Preston v Derby are both ties affecting the play-off picture, but probably not as you might have expected back in August. The Saints’ brief cough into life under Tonder Eckert while he was caretaker has subsided back to no wins in six and 15th in the table more recently. Hull, meanwhile, have won four and lost one of the last six and sit seventh. Preston, meanwhile, remarkably, still sit fourth and have won their last two league games – Paul Heckingbottom’s side can go second (second) with a win here and favourable other results.
For reasons best known to the television companies, Swansea (17th) v Birmingham (14th) is the live evening game.
Referee: Occasional Premier League referee Matt Donohue for this one - QPR have a decent record of 7-4-3 from 14 appointments with this referee. By contrast Stoke are 4-3-8 from 15. Details.
- Stoke come into this game eighth in the table, one point off the play-offs, with QPR two points further back in 11th. The Potters have finished in the bottom half of the division for seven consecutive seasons since returning to this level in 2018/19 (16th, 15th, 14th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th) while Rangers have been below halfway in seven of the last nine Championship campaigns (18th, 16th, 19th, 13th, 9th, 11th, 20th, 18th, 15th).
- QPR arrested a poor Christmas run of a draw and two defeats with a 3-0 home win against struggling Sheff Wed. It means the R’s have won five of the last six games at Loftus Road, scoring 16 goals. That victory was a seventh home league win already, equalling or bettering the club’s totals in each of the last three seasons (seven in 24/25 and 23/24, six in 22/23).
- Stoke have won their last three league and cup games without conceding a goal. That arrested an ominous pre-Christmas decline of two wins from ten Championship games, including seven defeats, in which they took just seven points from a possible 30.
- Stoke have won their first two league games in 2026, beating Hull and Norwich. The Potters last started a calendar year with three wins back in 2004.
- QPR have one point from their last four away games and have won only one of seven matches on their travels (Blackburn A). Prior to that run the R’s had the best away record in the league with seven wins and only two defeats from 12 games going back to April.
- Stoke have already won as many games this season as they did in the whole of last (12).
- Stoke have the Championship’s best defence. They have conceded just 23 goals in 26 games (Ipswich are next best with 24) and have the most clean sheets in the league (ten).
- QPR have the division’s worst defence once you discount whipping boys Sheff Wed. Only the Owls (51) have conceded more than Rangers’ 39 goals in 26 games.
- QPR are looking to record their first league double over Stoke since beating them twice in the 2019-20 campaign.
- Stoke is one of those new stadiums that QPR traditionally do quite well at. Between 2018/19 and 2023/24 the R’s lost one of five visits, winning three. Since the Potters moved here in 1997/98 Rangers have won seven and drawn one of 15 visits here. However, they have lost the last two games here, going down 3-1 here in March last year on their last trip.
- Sorba Thomas is the top Stoke scorer with nine league goals. No player has been involved in more Championship goals this season than Thomas (nine goals, six assists), although he only has one assist (and no goals) in seven appearances against QPR (always seems to play well against us though).
- Injured Rumarn Burrell is one better off at the top of the QPR scoring charts. He’s our first player to reach double figures for goals since Andre Gray in 2020/21. Burrell needs only one more to match his total of 11 at Burton last season but is now sidelined until March.
- Rayan Kolli is the first ever QPR player to score two goals as a substitute in two different games – Norwich H 24/25, Sheff Wed H 25/26. @JTSupple
In our Prediction League for 2025/26 we’ll once again be handing out prizes for being top at Christmas and overall winner from The Art of Football - sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. JB007007 made a strong start and held off the competition to win our first prizegiving for being top at Christmas. QPR_Hibs won last season’s Prediction League at a canter and is lending his thoughts to this year’s previews…
"Until it closed a couple of months ago, there was a shop in Leith Walk, Edinburgh called Borlands. It was one of my favourite shops, despite the fact I had never even set foot in it. My parents are both from Edinburgh, so I’ve been visiting the city regularly for more than 50 years. As you walk up the slope from Leith towards Princes Street, you can see the shop’s welcoming sign. ‘BORLANDS’ is written in big letters across the top and then, in smaller words above one window is ‘DARTS’ and above the other ‘TELEVISION.’ From what I can remember, the main attraction of the place was selling darts equipment (I think his TV work dried up years ago) but the sign made me smile every time I walked past.
"A lot has happened at Loftus (Road) since my last piece almost two weeks ago. We’ve won a league game 3-0, lost half of the starting XI to injury and signed handsome Ronnie Edwards from Southampton. We’ve also been knocked out of the FA Cup at the third round stage again, but we did at least play our strongest available team and give a decent account of ourselves against a Premier League side.
"Julien has hinted that Joe Walsh may start away against Stoke City on Saturday in this week’s goalkeeper tombola (three tickets for a tenner.) At time of writing, Mbengue’s fitness is being assessed, and the chances are that Jimmy Dunne may have to play at right back. Handsome Ronnie should start in the centre of defence with Steve Cook. RND is at left back. Expect Liam Morrison to come off the bench for whoever pulls their hamstring first.
"The midfield is Madsen (always Madsen) and Hayden, who had a really good game against Wham. The unavailability of tiny wingers means that we may play a 4-3-3 this week with Sam Field or Kieran Morgan getting a chance. Richard Kone, Rayan Kolli and Paul Smyth are in attack. The bench will mainly be selected from the development squad.
"Stoke have had a mixed set of home results this season, winning six and losing four of their 12 games. They have, however, won all three of their games in 2026 including a 1-0 FA Cup triumph over Coventry City last weekend. Sorba Thomas is the Potters’ top marksman with nine goals and six assists in 26 appearances so far. Amazingly, according to BBC Sport, he is yet to score in any of his seven games against QPR. Checks odds – currently available at around 7/2 to score anytime.
"A tough fixture for an R’s squad (consults LFW glossary) already down to the bare bones. I’d definitely take a point but I fear a narrow defeat."
QPR_Hibs Prediction: Stoke 1-0 QPR. No scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: Stoke 2-0 QPR. No scorer.
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