Stoke and QPR contrived to serve up another Championship cracker on Saturday afternoon – a dire 0-0 draw refereed by an official apparently having some sort of episode.
I’ve always found it useful to go into a trip to Stoke-on-Trent with super low expectations.
This is a grizzly, grimy awayday on the Championship circuit at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Stoke, after seven consecutive seasons of bottom half finishes, have coughed into something approaching life – up to the dizzying heights of eighth and one point from the play-offs prior to kick off, with the best defence in the league and three consecutive wins to nil leading into the fixture. QPR are also having an improved season overall relative to recent years, but had a poor Christmas mired in fitness issues and arrived with one win in five and two in seven with a litany of injuries to first team players.
While Amadou Mbengue and Karamoko Dembele were available following the cup tie at West Ham, top scorer Rumarn Burrell, star boy Ilias Chair, prime asset Jonathan Varane, big summer signing Kwame Poku, everyone’s favourite Koki Saito, fragile centre back duo Liam Morrison and Jake Clarke-Salter, long term Ziyad Larkeche and the scorer from the first meeting Harvey Vale were not. Shiny new toy Ronnie Edwards was fit enough only for the bench after being frozen out in his latter days at Southampton. Michael Frey is no longer involved as rumours swirl on his future. For a club that apparently doesn’t have issues with player fitness, it’s doing a remarkably good impression of one that does.
It's testament to the improved recruitment of last summer that Rangers still had enough to field a competitive starting 11 of senior players – this, of course, the ground where we started last year with no recognised striker and Dembele playing as the world’s smallest ever target man – but after the exertions at West Ham on Sunday this felt very much like that dire mid-January game QPR like to just phone in. The substitutes bench was a game of Guess Who. In the queue for the bar somebody remarked I didn’t seem very optimistic in the match preview when predicting a 2-0 defeat. In truth, that was me being optimistic.
Which means we can start with positives. A point on the road at a difficult place to come with a depleted side. A clean sheet, particularly valuable for young Joe Walsh on his return to league action – he’s come back from injury looking much more calm and confident than he was during a personal horror show in August and made a terrific save in the first half when Stoke’s best player Tomas Rigo got really got hold of a first time volley from a part-cleared cross. A head-it-and-kick-it centre back performance for the ages from Jimmy Dunne, the only one who has maintained his standards and levels through Christmas and now getting better and better with every passing game – clear man of the match here, by a street. Steve Cook showing there’s life in the old dog yet alongside him. Stoke posed next to no threat at all.
Julian Stephan says he’s not sure his team would have been able to see a draw out like this a few months ago. Certainly in previous seasons this would have been a 2-0 defeat all day. QPR didn’t wilt, didn’t collapse, as they have so many, many times before in these situations. They stood up, they did the dirty work, they were pragmatic, and practical, and hard, and difficult to beat. How many times have we criticised them for being soft, mentally weak, easy to play against, easy to win against? I kind of like coming away from grounds with the opposition hating us. Better than people wanting to chew your ear off at the railway station after bumming us in the gob 3-0.
It could, perhaps should, have been so much better and funnier. Imagine the home crowd response had Amadou Mbengue’s delicious first half cross been knocked over the line by Richard Kone when it surely should have been (and most of the away end thought it had). Or if sub Kealey Adamson had shown a modicum of composure and got his head over the ball in an extended period of stoppage time at the end of the game instead of blazing a great chance over the bar when he’d seemingly done all the hard work getting the ball out of the air and under control. Adamson later stood a cross up which Kone just couldn’t generate enough power from to head home. One nil win, smashed and indeed grabbed, laughing like a drain all the way back along the canal afterwards. The spirit of Marc Bircham lives on.
Still, I can’t pretend I enjoyed the game, or our part in it.
As a spectacle overall it was an unwatchable dirge, not helped by a horrible and easily avoidable kit clash, and QPR’s role within that seemed to be about making it worse – making it slower, making it nigglier, stopping the play, wasting the time, booting the ball into touch a lot, surrounding the referee, feigning injuries… Mark Robins is always a bit of a whinge bag, but it was difficult to argue with much of his post-match here when he says QPR didn’t come to play, they came to spoil.
I count myself as super pragmatic when it comes to Rangers. I’ve been doing this a long time, my angry days are largely behind me, I’m pretty resigned to who we are and where we are. To keep harking back to Jago and Sexton and Venables and Francis is to drive yourself mad. Particularly at this time of year I’m very sympathetic to tired footballers in injury hit squads playing out a ridiculous fixture list on bald pitches. They are trying. All of them. You look at Dunne’s performance here and that’s something you can hang your hat on and be proud of. But, honestly, watching us shithouse a 0-0 draw against Stoke City with 27% of the possession was bleak.
Little ambition to win the game or plan of how we might do that, little ambition to even keep the ball for more than three passes at a time or plan of how we might do that. In the first half, on three separate occasions, I was watching Rhys Norrington Davies, sprinting at full tilt with the ball at his feet, purposefully accelerating away from his opponent, in entirely the wrong direction – aggressively running the ball back from a spot high in the field, into his own half and back to the goalkeeper. The home side are not without considerable injury problems of their own, remember.
QPR’s four forward players were poor here. Rayan Kolli, big fan, said some very nice things about him recently, but he needs to be better, and fitter, than this. Richard Kone, likewise, have stuck up for him several times recently given his age and where he’s come from in a short period of time, but his hold up play here was lousy. In a game like this you’ve got to want to get in front of your defender and establish possession for your team to get them up the field. Too often he was running behind Ben Wilmot and co instead (and usually then giving away cheap fouls). It meant we were far too backwards and sideways as a team when we did have the ball, and players like Nicholas Madsen who did actually try to pass it forward saw some really pretty decent and creative efforts just drift away into opposition hands. Smyth and Dembele offered nothing between them, really.
This improved, marginally, for the introduction of Adamson and Esquerdinha to the attacking wide areas late on, and QPR’s goal threat was posed almost exclusively in the ten minutes of time added to the end of the game. But it was only marginally and Stephan’s subs were again left very late, long after it had become clear that Plan A wasn’t working – unless Plan A was to bore us all to death, that is. It is difficult to spend post-match interviews talking about the schedule, and the strenuous efforts at West Ham taking it out of the team, when you’re again only making three subs out of five, two of those in the 86th minute, and people like Sam Field, Kieran Morgan and Ronnie Edwards remain unused. Two shots on target here, none until the 95th minute, to go with three at West Ham, none at West Brom and three at Portsmouth. It doesn’t feel like this system is really working for the players available, particularly the attacking ones, away from home.
To see out a point from a poor performance Rangers, unfortunately, engaged in a whole lot of bullshit that I think is just an absolute scourge on the modern game. The pretend goalkeeper injury after 20 minutes so we can have a bit of a drink and conflab on the touchline while the officials all happily collude in the illusion that Joe Walsh might have broken his ankle standing up. Esquerdinha collapsing to the ground apparently seriously hurt with a "head injury” to try and get the game stopped and a Stoke attack interrupted, only to then leap to his feet and sprint off when he realises the referee isn’t playing ball. The walking off via the longest route when substituted. The mock "oh I didn’t realise you meant there” misplacing of every throw in and free kick. All designed to run a clock down on a 0-0 draw at Stoke City in a midtable Championship game, that does what for us, really? Still 12th, now four points off the play-offs instead of three. Big whoop.
Look, I like a bit of backbone. I hate it when we’re weak and roll over to have our tummy tickled. I’m sick of having dark arts visited on us while we behave like choir boys. And I’m certainly not taking any tips from Stoke City who built the greatest period of their modern history on Tony Pulis tactics exactly like this and still have Ben Pearson The Goblin Boy trolling around their midfield. But I sit here every week and hammer teams that come to Loftus Road and behave like this and it would be hypocritical of me to say anything other than I hated lots of what we did on Saturday. There’s a lot of grey area between a disciplined, organised, tactical, backs-to-the-wall effort when necessary, and just punting the ball away and feigning injury to try and drag a 0-0 draw out of bloody Stoke.
If we do feel the need to engage in all this playacting and gamesmanship nonsense to get a result then can we at least also try and pass the ball to each other a bit as well? Stoke played 549 passes in this game with an accuracy north of 86%. QPR attempted 200 with an accuracy of just 58.5%. Bluntly, Rangers tried to pass the ball to each other less than half as often as Stoke did, and on the occasions the visitors did try and get the ball down and play they gave it away every other time they had it. Successful passes in the final third – Stoke 91, QPR 23. I mean, come on now. Come on.
Was I pleased with the result? Yes. Was I pleased with the performance? Not really.
Neither team was helped by a refereeing performance from Matt Donohue which allowed all of this nonsense to fester and spread like a disease and, for me, is among the worst I’ve seen since Rob Styles was finally put out of our misery. In the first half in particular Donohue accomplished the not insignificant feat of essentially getting every decision wrong. That’s a pretty thing tough to do. My mum, who hates football and hates QPR in particular, could have taken a swing at officiating this first half and got more stuff right than he did through accident and guesswork.
Donohue decided very early on that Karamoko Dembele was a diver and would not be awarded a free kick in any circumstance. This prejudice gave Stoke free rein to kick him up in the air on five separate occasions culminating in an incident before half time when Sorba Thomas tried to detach his kneecap from the front of his leg and not only was no card of either colour shown but a throw in was awarded rather than a free kick. Amadou Mbengue was shown a yellow card for the crime of being mauled by Pearson before a corner was taken. Mbengue later, in first half stoppage time, went in all arms flailing at the back post for a Stoke cross so when the ball was nodded back and struck his hand in an unnatural position a penalty should have been awarded. Jimmy Dunne clattered through the back of Divin Mubama and cracked either his leg or his ankle. While the Stoke man was carted straight away to an ambulance after a lengthy delay Dunne was shown… a yellow card. Nicolas Madsen breaking away, deliberately pulled back by Lamine Cisse with a professional foul to prevent the counter attack… no booking. Sorba Thomas deliberately smashes into the back of Dunne in retribution for the Mubama challenge… no booking. That shit is mandatory. That’s stuff you should be able to referee in your sleep. Very hot on the placement of every throw in and free kick though, further damaging an already horrific spectacle. I don’t know, when you’ve got players being wheeled away to waiting ambulances I’d be tempted not to sweat the small stuff so much mate.
It's usually at this point that I engage in some creative swearing and graphic sexual imagery, accuse the officials of committing war crimes triable in the Hague in some hyperbolic rage, say it’s the worst thing I’ve seen since my dad’s funeral. I’m not sure I have the energy, or the need. The performance and the decisions spoke for themselves – both sets of fans united in howls of protest and songs about him long before the half time whistle. I passed all the way through anger and incredulity to actually finding it quite funny for a while, and then just profoundly sad.
Sad that this is the state of officiating in this country now, in a sport awash with so much money they have literally a limitless pot that could be spent on wages, recruitment and training to absolutely flood the talent pool and raise standards, but instead we pay peanuts and get monkeys like this. And sad for Matt Donohue personally, who is a human being and will have fluctuations in mood and form like any of us in our jobs but unfortunately has to go through his meltdowns publicly. This is a referee that’s been tried in the Premier League a couple of times – in 2022/23 and again more recently – but has mostly been left to job around in games like this, which tells you what the assessors are saying about his performances.
I’d love to see the form on this one. A game so out of control and a performance so inept that, as proved by what happened to Mubama and Dembele either side of half time, the players weren’t even safe.
I guess it did at least make the game memorable. Without the officiating I’d be struggling to remember this one ever happened by the end of the week.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
Stoke: Bazunu 6; Talovierov 5, Phillips 6, Wilmot 7, Lawal 6 (Bocat 76, 6); Rigo 7, Pearson 5 (Seko 87, -); Cisse 5, Jun-Ho 6, Thomas 6; Mubama 4 (Manhoef 56, 6)
Subs not used: Curley, Dixon, Fawunmi, Simkin, Smith
Yellow Cards: Pearson 29 (being a twat), Mubama 37 (kicking out off the ball), Cisse 45+4 (dissent)
QPR: Walsh 7, Mbengue 6, Dunne 8, Cook 7, Norrington-Davies 6; Dembele 5 (Bennie 71, 6), Madsen 6, Hayden 6, Smyth 5 (Esquerdinha 86, -); Kolli 5 (Adamson 87, -), Kone 4
Subs not used: Alemayehu, Edwards, Field, Hamer, Morgan, Smith
Yellow Cards: Mbengue 29 (fuck all), Dunne 50 (foul), Kone 78 (foul), Bennie 90+10 (obstructing keeper clearance)
QPR Star Man – Jimmy Dunne 8 Has been playing well anyway, but stepped it up again here into a full-on ‘thou shalt not pass’ mountainous centre half performance.
Referee – Matt Donohue (Manchester) 2 Still prefer this to VAR.
Attendance – 22,045 (850 QPR) Thoughts and prayers.
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