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Reply | Christian Pullella
at 13:13 28 Jan 2026
This Australian thing is very strange to me.
The A League is a terrible product.
The Australian national team is not great.
The players we've brought in so far are yet to make any impact.
We're in talks to buy a whole club down there.
It just feels a bit odd.
This post has been edited by an administrator |
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Reply | Christian Pullella
at 10:13 28 Jan 2026
Apparently we're even redacting the ages now  |
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Reply | Raheem Sterling
at 09:53 28 Jan 2026
It actually is yeh. Not sure what it's doing back! |
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 09:23 28 Jan 2026
"Your argument is that injuries and fitness are a particular problem for us and we should be doing better. I say there are always a lot of injuries in football, giving some evidence from the Premier League. What hard evidence have you got other than anecdote and a feeling in the water?"
I absolutely agree there are always injuries in football. You're never going to have a perfect season - although notice that when we did have a really good run in 2023/24 and even JCS graced us with his presence for a whopping 30 games they were happy for Ben Williams to appear on 'R Insights' to explain how we'd done it. Now we're back to this situation and it's "well it's nobody's fault really, we're 12th best in the league for non contact injuries, hamstrings are up 36% across the league but only 24% here" etc etc.
I don't care what injuries everybody else has got, we're meant to be trying to beat everybody else so it's no use sitting back and saying "well, it's okay, Portsmouth are missing nine players too". I want the attitude to be "how can QPR be better than that, how can we be the best in this field".
Now anecdotally, I can't ever remember losing four players to muscle injuries in the first half a of a game before. If you want me to up that actual evidence then I'll happily spend Friday going through Soccerbase for the last time we'd lost four players before half time, but I think we both know that's unnecessary - that was abnormal, and concerning. Koki Saito sat down within 15 minutes of the following game too.
But my point is this. Injuries are particularly lethal to our chances in particular because a) we've got a limited budget and therefore a limited squad, and b) our whole reason for being under Nourry is these players are being fattened for market and, as we saw with Willock, nobody wants to buy your winger/striker who's had three hamstring injuries in 18 months.
So it's not we "should" be doing better. It's we "must" do better. Otherwise we're screwed.
So, rather than sit at the fans forum and say "are you ready for some science?" followed by a load of numbers that basically show what a terrific job you're doing and then we get to January and 10 players are missing again I want to know things like...
- Why does our pitch look like this and what are we doing to make sure it doesn't next year? Because that can't be helping. I personally think that was a big part of the reason that Sheff Wed game went as it did.
- What does our pre-season look like and what are we doing about that? Because in each of the last three seasons we've had poor pre-season friendlies have made terrible starts - 2 wins in 17 in each of the last two seasons, a dreadful August including a 7-1 defeat this. Some of our absolute worst performances and results (Watford 4-0, Blackburn 4-0, Coventry 7-1) are coming right at the start of the season when we're supposed to be at our fittest and freshest. We know, because they've told us, that their tactic is to basically ditch the traditional pre-season and instead go for a "slow burn" approach to make sure we're fit for the run in. That worked in 23/24, it definitely didn't work last year, and we'll see this but the signs aren't great. So, is that really the right approach?
- Are we approaching Christmas in the right way? It might not be popular, but would it be worth literally sacking one or two of those games off entirely? Play a complete youth team for West Brom A and Sheff Wed H? Super League used to make the teams play Friday and Monday over Easter, Ian Millward at St Helens said it wasn't safe so for the Easter Monday game would pick the youth team. It caused all sorts of controversy because people were betting on it and they were losing games 80-0, but he thought that was best for his team in the long run and the Saints fans bought into it (probably because they won everything every year). Did we do Christmas right this year? We'll get the same set of fixtures next season so how do we improve?
- Is our injury treatment good enough? Kwame Poku came with a hamstring problem, repeated that on the first day (we denied that happened and said he'd probably be back by Wrexham away), relapsed immediately after his first come back, relapsed immediately after his second come back. He's meant to be one of our biggest sellable assets and investment. That's not good enough, is it? So, what are we doing about that? If it were any other club bringing a player back from a hamstring injury and having him relapse three times in six months you'd be saying 'what the fck are they doing?'.
- Where's our development squad in all of this? There was all sorts of hype in May when they won that cup final, how many of them have graduated to first team? Kieran Morgan - who was already there. The rest are either still where they were, or out on some pretty mediocre non league loans (Emmerson Sutton has done best, he's on loan at the bottom team in the EFL). It would help if four or five of them were good enough to do minutes to take pressure off, as it stands they're still not. Why not? Can we improve here? We say we're improving, Nourry's very happy with it, but to this point we don't see that on a Saturday.
Long post summed up - I want us to improve. Every time I criticise QPR it's because I love them and I want them to improve. I don't want to go to Stoke and lose with Dembele as a lone striker. I don't want to go to West Brom and lose with Smyth as a lone striker. And I don't want the club to be happy and satisfied with that.
At the fans forum when these issues were raised we were told that, actually, they weren't issues at all if you look at the data and include the U13s etc. And then here we are again, losing games we shouldn't, and slipping down the table because too many first teamers are injured. It felt defensive, designed to protect individuals against criticism, rather than progressive, and interested in how we can improve.
I don't want to hear what a fantastic job you're doing, I want to hear what an even more fantastic job you're going to be doing next season.
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 21:04 27 Jan 2026
And yet in our least challenging, least competitive game of the season, the worst team that’s going to play in this league for years - 4 first team players off injured by half time including the top scorer and most sellable asset out until March. |
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Reply | Frey
at 20:15 27 Jan 2026
Until you watch him play over the last 6 months. |
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 19:51 27 Jan 2026
So just throw our hands up and say that this time every year we’ll be missing half our squad? |
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Reply | Driving
at 17:01 27 Jan 2026
Yeh everybody basically having open access to dig it up whenever they like and the lack of joined up thinking doesn't help.
They spent months pedestrianizing and cobbling the road outside our office in EC2A and actually did a nice job of it. Literally one week later Virgin Media came and dug trenches through it and covered them with tarmac. |
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 16:39 27 Jan 2026
It's irrelevant.
If Ipswich get nine or ten players injured they'll cope with that a lot better than Oxford will do. Likewise Southampton v Sheff Wed.
If you run your finger down the list of the division and say "well everybody is missing nine players this week" it might make you feel better, but it doesn't solve our problem.
When you're a) operating on a budget like ours and b) hanging your whole reason for being on developing players to sell, you can't afford them sitting in the stand.
We were a win or two off the play-offs this time last year after we beat Blackburn, and fell apart from there because of player availability.
Once again this year we've played our way to within three points of the play-offs, and are now risking falling away because of player availability.
Rumarn Burrell was already on ten goals, if he'd stayed fit it's reasonable to assume he'd have got to 15-16 minimum, at which point you could probably have flipped him straight away this summer for quite good money to a Middlesbrough/Birmingham type. Instead he's now injured, at the end of a period when his form had declined and he was obviously tiring.
The key to being better next year is coping better with this period of games. What shall we do differently to make sure it doesn't happen? And if it's happening to everybody, rather than use that as an excuse let's ask what do we do differently to give ourselves a competitive advantage? |
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 09:24 27 Jan 2026
We've got more double aways than most this season, and more long distance double aways as well, but it's not new. We've had Plymouth-Hull Saturday-Tuesday weeks in each of the last two seasons, now we've got Hull-Southampton.
And it's not going to change either. Nor is the Christmas period. So, what are you doing about it...?
I swear if they sit at the next fans forum and talk about "the narrative" around our fitness and injuries when "actually the data shows..." I'm going to burst into tears. |
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