With seven games to go and the mood among the fanbase lurching as violently as the results on the pitch, message board regular Dorse tries to work out where he lands with QPR’s Class of 25/26.
Countdown has been on UK television for what seems like an ice age, providing an alternative to hanging around the public library for people who wear chunky-knit cardigans and soup-stained ties. The nature of this letters and numbers game is subtly enhanced by the inclusion of thinking man’s tug-fodder / tugging man’s think-fodder Rachel Riley.
Her role is to be simultaneously brilliant at maths whilst also performing the sort of role usually reserved for bikini-clad, be-feathered types who, ahem, ‘assist’ magicians. She is easily the cleverest mathematician in the room, an Oxford graduate, but her job is to pick up cardboard letters and put them on a grid. She might as well be one of Bruce’s ‘dolly dealers’: is she eye candy or intellectual colossus? I feel the same sort of cognitive dissonance when watching morbidly obese 80’s darts players drinking themselves insensible whilst producing feats of outstanding mental arithmetic and hitting doubles despite seeing quadruple.
That’s pretty much where I find myself with QPR of late. We have seen QPR play outstanding football and be absolute dog toffee, often in the same game. We won games we should have lost; lost games we should have won. We are, at once, bloody awful and utterly brilliant. The most obvious examples of this have got to be the games against Coventry. A gob-bumming for the ages followed by us delivering a footballing lesson to the runaway leaders of the division. With more or less the same side. Paging Dr Schroedinger: sir, your cat is on line two.
QPR exists in a state of ontic uncertainty. We are both crap and uncrap in the same space. The only way to discover which is by collapsing the wave-form through observation. Our simple act of observation, however, decides the state in which QPR exists. In short, QPR are neither crap nor uncrap until we observe them.
Don’t say you don’t learn anything from LFW, even if it’s only graphic sexual imagery.
Online (wotcher Elon), we adopt extremes: just take a look at the message board. ‘Worst player since Quentin Bumjoy’ competes with ‘Man of the match performance’ and it’s the same player, in the same game. The result is neither here nor there: the observer decides the crapness or otherwise of the performance. The match thread for Hull away is a pretty solid example. We went in at half-time 1-1. I reflected at the time, we were no better or worse off than we started but the general feeling was that we were buggering this one up. By the end, the world’s worst player from the previous week, Daniel Bennie, had fans queuing round the block for him to father their children, whilst Richard Kone was being both lambasted and praised for scoring / not scoring. We won. Scoring three. Away from home. At a top five side. North of Watford Gap. With a 1230 kick off. And made them look ordinary doing it.
Are you not entertained? Hello? Is this thing on?
It is not news to say that some people are never happy. ‘Free beer for life, you say? Fantastic, does it come with pretzels…? You fcking what..?! No, I will not calm down..!’ By the same token, there are plenty of people who are very easily pleased. After all, Michael McIntyre still gets work. Trouble is, when it comes to QPR at least, and football in general, fans tend to default to ‘blind rage’ when ‘mild annoyance’ might suffice. When I step back from it, I actually find my own mood swings quite funny. The idea that a bunch of blokes, who are better at football than I ever was, can ruin my weekend just because they lost a game against another group of blokes, who are actually paid to beat them, is ridiculous. The opposition gets a vote too and, sometimes, they execute the plan better than we did or simply their plan limits what we can achieve. Doesn’t mean I don’t reserve the right to walk around with a face like a scalded bollock, though.
Certainly, some weeks we are the footballing equivalent of Rachel Riley bending down to collect a dropped vowel (an incident that hospitalised 285 viewers). Kieran Morgan against Birmingham; Dan Bennie away at Hull; Leicester at home; a quick six over the boundary against Portsmouth. Eat that and tell me you’re still hungry. Trouble is, we always have a Blackburn or a Wrexham added-time sickener in us. Or, more recently, a televised 5-0 defeat away at Southampton that left the team with an arse like a broken cat flap. Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Sometimes, two things can be objectively true at the same time: Rachel Riley is both a dolly dealer and the cleverest person in the room; that shower from SW6 are simultaneously utter bellends and complete arseholes. The prosecution rests, Your Honour. As far as QPR are concerned, I like to think that we are never as good as we’d hoped but never as bad as we feared. I really wish that wasn’t the case but, sadly, this is where we find ourselves. With a squad that could be generously described as ‘part-worn’, we’re safe with games to spare and never really looked in trouble. We have, for the first time in a while, prospects like Nico Madsen, Richard Kone and Rumarn Burrell who have improved and may well end up having big moves. Compare that to the waifs and strays of previous seasons and it’s a big difference. By the same token, we aren’t substantially better off in terms of league position, still under the pump cash-wise and can’t keep players out of the Matthew Rose Memorial Treatment Wing and Glue Factory. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid Julien. Kaddy’s leg hasn’t grown back yet and we’ve just discovered the Dev Squad have all got leprosy.’ ‘Zut alors!’
At the start of the season, most observers would have expected a mid-table finish. Not great but, equally, not bad. Weirdly enough, mid-table would be an improvement of sorts for us. So, if we achieve this (say 11th / 12th place) would we be happy? Is mid-table the least we could expect or the best we could hope for?
It might be both. I’ll have a vowel, please.
More by this author >>> The death of Pep-ball – are QPR finally on trend?
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