Two new captains at QPR, a storm in a tea cup on the message boards and Ian Holloway seemingly struggling at Leicester despite a big win on Saturday.

The boys are back from Portugal, with two new captains in tow
Alright for some isn’t it. While we’re sitting here twiddling our thumbs over another free weekend our players have been out in Portugal taking penalties and playing golf. This coolness under pressure and ability with a sand wedge will stand us in good stead should any of our players become involved in a four hole play off at this year’s British Open. Piece of mind I’m sure.

It was good to see Fitz Hall in training out on the Algarve, he could well be in contention for a return this weekend and God (and Andy Cole) knows we need him back in there. It’s vital that a settled back four gets a few games to play together – we haven’t had consistent selection there since the end of last season and it’s an area of the pitch where consistent selection yields the best results. The Zesh Rehman debate rumbles on across the message boards, regular readers will know exactly where I stand on it but that’s for another time. Personally I’d have Hall as the first name on my team sheet at centre half with either Connolly or Stewart alongside him and Mancienne or Connolly at right back with Delaney on the left.

Whether De Canio feels the same remains to be seen, but whatever he feels is his first choice back four it would be nice to think they could play together uninterrupted for ten games or more and get that all important understanding and reading of each other’s games going. I feel we’ll see an end to the twos, threes and fours that have been rattling up in our goals against column recently when this happens. By turning Malcolm, Rehman, Stewart and Barker into a reasonable back four before Christmas De Canio has shown he is quite clearly capable of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear if he can get the same back four out there for any length of time.

It was good to see our manager taking training without the translator, although unlike many I don’t see the language barrier as an insurmountable one. Clearly saying something in Italian and then waiting while it’s translated into English is going to cause lengthier stoppages in training than are really ideal but if the message is a good one and it comes through to the players correctly then it’s worth the hassle. De Canio seems to think the break away has done the players good, the proof will be in the pudding on Saturday at 3pm.

He’s also said that he doesn’t anticipate a need for QPR to enter the loan market which is now open for business again and being plundered for high profile names by West Brom (Luke Moore) and Ipswich (David Nugent) already. Just how much say De Canio has over who comes in and when is another debate for another time but he did quite categorically say on QPR World on Tuesday that he doesn’t see a need for a loan at the moment. Good.

Over the past few seasons it’s the loan players that have kept us alive. Imagine where we’d be now without the goals of Jimmy Smith, the defensive performances of Michael Mancienne and Lee Camp being Lee Camp last season. Cheltenham Town away on a Tuesday night that’s where. And even with them we were close, and teetering on the brink until a four game cameo by Inigo Idiakez triggered a handy run of five points from three games. There’s no way in the world we could have afforded Mancienne, Smith or Idiakez permanently so to stay in the league we had to borrow them.

We’re not in that position now – either financially or in the league – so I’d be disappointed to see another temporary player added to the two we have already. The only reason I can see for a loan now is to cover for a monumental injury crisis, or with a view to a future purchase. The idea of trying before you buy is a sound one, after all it saved Port Vale from having Stefan Moore on their books for any longer than six weeks, and one we could well explore in the coming weeks. But a loan for the sake of a loan is not something I see a lot of point in at this time – had we brought Lee Cook back here instead of him going to Charlton it would have been nice to see a quality player play again, but at the back of my mind I would always have been wondering just what the point in buying Hogan Ephraim was. We have a good squad of players we own now, one capable of beating most teams in this league, and I look forward to seeing De Canio work with them for now.

The other big news to come from the warm weather training camp, along with Fitz Hall’s welcome return and Lee Camp’s penalty exploits, was the appointment of Gareth Ainsworth as club captain and Martin Rowlands as captain on the field. I remember Gianni Paladini singing Martin’s praises and tipping him as a future captain of the side on the Italian tour 18 months ago so it’s good to see him with the armband permanently. He’s in the form of his life at the moment and although he missed training on Tuesday he is still expected to be fit for Saturday – with the team collapsing whenever he’s removed from the middle of midfield just lately, and Buzsaky suspended for the Sheff Utd game, we must hope he’s fit and ready to go. The calf injury that has plagued him for the last two seasons has been mercifully quiet up to this point. If it is that injury that forced him off against Burnley then it’s a big concern with us not completely safe from the drop yet, and a period of Saturday Tuesday Saturday Tuesday games upon us again.

A worthy leader on the pitch then, and likewise off it. Rowlands and Ainsworth are the beating heart of our club and it’s so good to see them still around in these exciting new times. Many expected the takeover and appointment of Luigi De Canio to herald the arrival of over paid, over the hill, big name Italian players looking for a final pay day. Not only has that not been the case but we still have Camp, Mancienne, Stewart, Rowlands, Ainsworth and Blackstock in and around the first team who were here at the start of the season proving that if you’re good enough you’re in. That’s the way it should be, and it’s fantastic to see Ainsworth and Rowlands playing an integral role in it all.

You can’t take your eyes off the internet for a second
We have a saying in the newsroom at my day job that it’s the stories you least expect that cause you the most trouble. Point the finger at a doctor or a council official or a police officer and you hear nothing, spell the name of the speaker at the last WI meeting wrong and the phone rings off the hook for days. It’s been the same with this website over the past week.

We have, in the site’s various guises, had threads in the three years since I took over here about football players allegedly being homosexual, players with alleged drug habits, players having affairs, board members pointing guns at each others and players beating up Chinese people. We’ve had people trying to arrange meets outside pubs, former Australian international players libelled and after all of that I’ve had only a handful of phone calls or e-mails complaining or demanding a right of reply.

While I sit and worry about what thread is going to land us in the witness box it’s the Loft for Words equivalent of the WI Report that has caused us the most hassle over the last seven days. Who would have thought a month ago when somebody innocently pointed out that Pat Kanyuka was Big Pat and we’d need a nickname for Pat Agyemang that things would develop in quite the way they did? Somebody suggested Dave and that seemed like a laugh. It all depends on your sense of humour I suppose, it struck me at the time as one of those things that would be funny in a random way and die out soon enough. I underestimated the power of the internet. Even I was surprised at just how quickly this Dave nickname spread, to the point where everybody in the away end at Southampton seemed to be calling him it without even thinking about it.

It was amusing for a while, there was talk of us sponsoring his kit for next season to mark the spoof nickname, all in all a bit of light hearted nonsense to pass the time between games. Problem was while we weren’t thinking twice about it people were addressing Agyemang as Dave to his face and he, quite understandably, wasn’t “feeling” this and didn’t like it very much.

Even when I heard this I didn’t think very much of it. If he doesn’t like it we’ll stop calling him it, simple as that. With eight goals in six games I’ll happily quit my day job and spend my Thursday mornings cleaning the Agyemang family bathroom to be honest. Whatever he says goes.

Some of the explanations for how the nickname came about were quite frankly stunning - racist connotations were mentioned, black characters from old sitcoms were brought up with mythical tales from the Preston dressing room. All of it a million miles away from the truth. Like I say you can’t turn your back on the internet for a second because as soon as you do somebody who knows sod all is pretending to know something and it doesn’t always reflect well on you.

You can turn round and insult another posters’ parentage on QPR websites but you cannot, and must not, ever, ever, ever admit to not knowing something. You will be cast out from the QPR community forever if you don’t have a source, or a mate, who’s told you all about the latest bit of gossip. You must never turn round and say “No actually, I don’t know how that started/why that is/who we’re meant to be signing.” If you don’t know why Patrick Agyemang is being called Dave for instance, then make it up. Make something up about Preston or a character from a sitcom. To hell with the consequences for other QPR fans, the most important thing is you didn’t look stupid.

As the ever sensible and reasonable MyGeneration posted on the QPRdot.org site last week, you must be so careful when throwing around such a dirty accusation as racism. Even the lesser accusation of our posters being too illiterate and lazy to type Patrick Agyemang’s full name out seemed needlessly, well, needless in the face of the truth that was out there on numerous message boards, websites and the player’s Wikipedia profile for anybody who wanted to read it. Still, why let facts get in the way?

Thankfully this storm in a tea cup seems to have blown over. Most seemed to accept there were no racist connotations whatsoever, the nonsense some people made up was accepted as just that, Agyemang doesn’t like being called Dave and from now on we won’t be doing it. Long may the awesome start Patrick has made to life at QPR continue. Job’s a good un.

So with that PR disaster, that stemmed from such innocent beginnings, seemingly averted I settled back into my comfy chair with a beer in hand and breathed out again. Like I say, never turn your back - by the start of this week the rewarding news that LoftforWords has been nominated for three awards in the national fanzine competition had landed in our inbox. We’re up for best Championship fanzine, best editor, and we have three nominations for best writer.

We’re only nominated at this stage of course, and with competition from all over the country and clubs with substantially more support than us now able to vote this is likely to be as far as it goes. But it’s nice to be thought of all the same as I’m sure the other nominees will testify to – particularly Peter Davies, Ron Norris and Dave Thomas whose hard work on their various mediums is a credit to them and the club. All three have built their own sites/magazines themselves, something my limited technical ability hinders me from doing here, and each brings something different to QPR fans week in week out. Thank you to anybody and everybody who nominated us - if you fancy voting to try and push LFW under the judging panel’s nose then you can do so by clicking the following links.

Best Championship Fanzine
Best Editor
Best Writer

Tony Gibson, who does a huge amount of work for this site, has also received a nomination for his blog Lofty Heights. You can vote for Tony's site at the following link.
Best Blog

The nominations come just six weeks after we started on this new network, moving away from the BSkyB owned Rivals to ClubFanzine – a network owned by the editors who write for it. We are now a truly independent site, run by a life long, died in the wool QPR fan with contributions from other similar individuals.

That transition from being owned by big business to being completely independent should be completed shortly with the dropping of the LoftforWords brand from the Rivals platform. It’s been eating away at me to see Sky copy appearing on the news wires under a LoftforWords banner over the last week. Thankfully negotiations with Sky seem to have gone well so far and I’d anticipate the QPR Rivals site being returned to its original name, and our site name being exclusively returned to us, by the end of the week. A small insignificant thing it may be, but that was a name created by Ted and the other regulars on our message board and it means something, to us at least. We’re looking forward to having it back exclusively.

Olly’s King Lear is in danger of turning into a Brookside omnibus
He who laughs last laughs loudest. A thumping 4-0 win for Leicester against in form Norwich on Saturday resulted in a hasty re-write of this column. But then we may be allowed a chuckle after all because no sooner had the Foxes finished their Canary appetiser than Scott Sinclair's proposed move to the Walkers Stadium had fallen through essentially because Leicester aren't good enough.

Sinclair is a regular project of Leicester manager Ian Holloway's - he took him to Plymouth last season on loan to great success for both player and club, and tried to sign him again at Home Park this season before the player joined our good selves instead. This prompted a Violet Elizabeth style attack from Olly who claimed we were paying him £20,000 a week, a claim we denied, that Sinclair was in fact rubbish until Holloway got hold of him and basically life was very unfair.

Sinclair's snubbing of Plymouth and move to QPR, one of Olly's old clubs, was the beginning of the end for Ian at Plymouth and when he left a few weeks later he gleefully told anybody that would listen that he was walking from Home Park to go to a club that could compete in the transfer market. King Lear after years of Eastenders as he put it. How galling for him then to see a player he admits himself to promising to the Leicester fans isn't coming on loan after all because they're too low in the league.

Of course Sinclair hardly covered himself in glory in our team, essentially using the matches as a fitness exercise ahead of his big night against Liverpool in the League Cup and pulling out of all physical contact accordingly. Chelsea's desire to see him involved in the end of season play offs may be scuppered by the lack of teams any better than Leicester wishing to take him. They could well end up cutting their losses and letting him spend the rest of the season with Olly after all - a move that he would no doubt trumpet from the rooftops as an example of why he's so much better off there than at Plymouth. Can't wait.

That 4-0 victory over Norwich was much needed. Leicester had lost their previous three games, including a 1-0 defeat against Plymouth at the Walkers in front of a live television audience. That game was preceded by a detailed statement from the Plymouth Chairman blaming Holloway for the numerous departures from Argyle in recent weeks - Olly was happy for Buzsaky to move to QPR because he wasn't universally liked in the dressing room, didn't want to remove a clause from Sylvain Ebanks Blake's contract allowing him to be sold for £1.5m because his attitude was poor, promised David Norris a move in January without telling the board and so it went on. Rather than reply to any of these accusations Holloway simply said "apparently it's my fault the Titanic sank as well." Funny as always, but neatly skirting round any potential facts in there.

Suddenly Gianni Paladini's claim that Holloway decided to sell Gareth Ainsworth to Millwall in January 2006 while Wild Thing was in the goal scoring form of his career and keeping a poor QPR team afloat, an accusation dismissed at the time in some quarters as "more Paladini lies", looked to be carrying somewhat more water than it ever had done before. Doubt we’ll ever know the real truth on that now.

Leicester fans besieged national radio phone ins criticising our former manager after a 1-0 defeat at Watford - a game the home side played with ten men for more than an hour. Olly's response was to say he was happy with the way his team had played, and claim that Stephen Clemence would have scored had he been allowed to run onto a through ball when he was pulled back for the sending off. Unless Clemence has acquired eight extra yards of pace since I last saw him, or it’s now legal to ride high spec motor cycles down the middle of the pitch, I doubt that very much.

The home fans were again in disgruntled voice at the long ball football played in the Plymouth match - Holloway responded by saying he doesn't tell his team to play long balls and wants them to play proper football. So why are they hoofing it? And why did we hoof it when he was our manager? This seems to be too much of a coincidence to me.

Players out of position has been another accusation levelled at him by fans of his new club. After saying how much he was looking forward to having the money to spend that would allow him to compete and make the Premiership the first thing he did was sign Barry Hayles - a player he has signed at two of his previous three skint clubs and one he tried to bring to Loftus Road. Within two games Hayles was playing on the right wing. That's vintage Holloway stuff right there. Suddenly presented with a budget to compete in this league he does what he's always done - signs a past his best old striker on a free and play him out of position.

Believe it or not I do actually like Ian Holloway. The football was dire at times and the fortnightly blowing of leads in away games against vastly inferior opposition wore thin after a while but he got us up and kept us up and no QPR manager has managed a higher league position in the Championship since. De Canio will have to get a move on if he's to be the first. Every player we’ve loved over the past few years was a Holloway signing – Shittu, Cook, Bircham, Padula, Day, Rowlands, Ainsworth. He did a fantastic job at Loftus Road whatever anybody says.

However I do believe he's started to believe his own hype. The comedy post match interviews are all well and good, but fans want answers when you've just lost 1-0 against ten men. I lost a fair amount of respect for the man that essentially gave a broken QPR back to the fans with success that a generation of fans had never experienced when he said anybody that thought he’d leave Plymouth for Leicester was an idiot and then left just two days later.

I keep coming back to the King Lear comment because I think this could be his downfall. Ian Holloway has always been well suited to the "Eastenders" roles. Trying to cobble together a squad of players capable of competing in the Championship with little or no money to spend - he relied on loyalty and hard work from his players, and an 'us against the world' togetherness amongst the supporters. Hoofing the ball up to a big striker who's actually a centre back and blaming the referee when it doesn't work was acceptable at Plymouth and QPR when Holloway was there because really, we didn't expect to beat Wolves or Palace or Coventry anyway.

He had a job for life at Plymouth and although he's probably being very handsomely paid by Mandaric I don't know how much longer his little King Lear dream will last. Leicester are playing terrible football, their victory against Crystal Palace three Mondays ago was so terrible it drove me to drink. Easily the worst game of football I've ever seen - celebrated at the end like a World Cup final victory, as Mandaric looked on stony faced.

Mandaric has shown once already this season, sacking Martin Allen after a 4-0 victory against Watford, that style of play and doing what Mandaric says are more important than results. Neither of these things strike me as strong points in Holloway. He can joke, and has done in his BBC column this week, about his job being under threat all he likes but with each passing week it looks like he'd have been better off staying in the Queen Vic than living it up with the Earl of Gloucester.

Photo: Action Images

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