It’s been a long week of late nights riding the rails round Vienna sampling Austrian cheese sausage, bidding a fond farewell to Zan Celar, lamenting the latest England failure, and occasionally seeing a QPR game break out. Some of this will mean nothing to you.

All three subscription tiers of our Patreon can listen to our various thoughts and musings as we train it around Austria, on everything from Julian Stéphan’s new contract and Thomas Tuchel’s brain explosion, to the ongoing philosophical comparisons of former Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and mid-90s Northern Irish pop and dance group D : Ream and the merits of the infamous Austrian cheese sausage. Part one from First Vienna/England v Norway is available here and the second part from Wiener Neustadt/England v Argentina is here. The lowest sub tier is just £2.50 a month and your contributions enable LFW to continue operating, growing, paying more great guest contributors for their work, and providing you fiercely independent, long read coverage of our great club.

The set up

It’s a little after seven on Saturday morning at London’s always tedious Heathrow Airport and British Airways’ hitherto on time flight 722 to Vienna is stuck at the gate in need of a tug. Not unusual for this time of the morning of course, but extremely inconvenient for the smattering of hooped shirts aboard who’ve all been up since four just to make the plane in the first place and have a day ahead that will stretch a full 24 hours, with QPR playing in the early evening, and then England v Norway through until the wee small hours of Sunday.

There is nothing (nothing) to commend short haul flying around Europe to anybody bar Home Counties’ Man Utd fans, the CEOs of Britain’s major water companies, Alejandro Garnacho, or anybody else in sorely dire need of a morning of light torturing. It is a world of queues, delays, expense, and rude Americans with too much luggage. What time is saved versus a train (or frankly just fucking walking from here to Vienna) is spent in a myriad of unpleasant ways, rank incompetence (no chum, you can’t pass through the metal detector in a suit of armour) or infuriating pedantry. Can we just give up the charade that anybody is hijacking an airliner with a standard issue knife and fork and please let me eat my breakfast with cutlery that doesn’t look like it was manufactured by Fisher Price?

We queue for a boarding card, because British Airways’ online check in exists only in the same way as train wifi exists. We queue (for a good 20 minutes) at security, while they check for treasonous mothers trying to sneak 250ml of pre-pumped breast milk onto their flight. We queue at the entrance to the gate, to have our documents looked at so we can pass into the little holding room where there are no toilets, and then again at the actual gate for the privilege of standing on the air bridge for another ten minutes while some absolute chief in row four holds up the entire aircraft checking (thoroughly) to see whether their hard-shelled suitcase as big a small horse will fit in the overhead bin if he just jiggles it around a bit.

What mitigation you put in place quickly sees you coming and attacks from another angle. I bring no liquids, toiletries, razor blades, water or toothpaste and cram a week’s worth of my jeans and jacket combos into a case suitable for hand luggage so I don’t have to check a bag and then wait at the other side to find out which other airport they’ve sent it to. I spend some £40 stocking up on liquids, toiletries, razor blades, water and toothpaste on the other side of the security check. When I reach the gate, I’m told the flight is very busy, so they take my bag off me and throw it in the hold regardless. It is increasingly hard to shake the feeling this whole liquids obsession isn’t actually just an enormous racket driven by Procter & Gamble. I get to spend 40 minutes pondering this at the baggage carousel in Vienna while the Austrians search for my case.

Unfortunately, though, when you only decide for sure that you’re going on the QPR pre-season tour 48 hours before the thing starts, this is the way.

As is sadly now often the case, and I suspect both regular readers have long since realised, I’d reached the end of last season hating QPR and everything within it. I never wanted to see them, hear from them, speak of them, or write about them again. I have spent the summer reading books in the sun with my phone set permanently to ‘sleep’ while unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes – a plant capable of flourishing between railway sleepers on busy commuter lines having been eaten and passed through the lower colon of the sort of person who thinks it’s acceptable to go for a shit on the train, but apparently not in my south facing back garden. But, with Hull FC downing tools and stinking the place out, and the memory of oh so many delightful supporter group meetings starting to fade, so the addiction has started to itch once more.

In many ways pre-season is now the best bit of following Rangers. Stuck in the same league for more than a decade enduring a steady parade of midweeks in Preston and Birmingham, packing up the Crown & Sceptre regulars and heading out to corners of Europe you’d probably never have thought of going to otherwise for a week on the beer is the fun part.

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Once we’d negotiated flights, baggage belts, and helpful weirdos brandishing Tesco carrier bags as an identifier of kindred spirit claiming to know a short cut to the ground from the tram stop (spoiler – did he fuck) we found ourselves in the Naturarena Hohe Warte, an historic throwback sort of a ground that blends Charlton’s old Valley with Bradford’s still Odsal. Nestled on the side of one of Vienna’s posher districts, this is the sort of place you could get used to watching football. Vast, mostly overgrown, terracing stretches high away from the field and grandstand on three sides of this natural amphitheatre. Four Portaloos open directly into the goal mouth at the northern end of the ground – sorry, Matteo, I’d give that one five minutes chap.

They know their history here. A founding date of 1894 makes them the country’s oldest club. Once considered the biggest and best stadium in continental Europe, it hosted Austrian national games in the 1920s and 30s when 85,000 people packed in to see them take on Italy. There was a famous victory for the home nation’s “Wunderteam” here against Scotland in 1931 launching a golden era of Austrian football, although the longer the night went on, the more people told us the story, and the more substances they poured down their throat/stuffed up their nose, both the scoreline and the attendance continued to escalate until the Austrians had apparently slain the Scots by something in the region of 10-0 in front of roughly 130,000 people.

There was great knowledge, respect and friendship shown by the First Vienna supporters towards us before and after – several remarking they felt it a shame they hadn’t got to see us in blue and white hoops, with the black out third kit preferred instead. There was brisk interest in shirt swaps for anyone wearing a QPR Guinness number. But no Vien-netter, as we crawled to a 0-0 draw.

Outnumbered 45,000 to one by venomous, bloodthirsty thunder flies from the surrounding canopy, we nevertheless wiled away a very pleasant summer’s evening stretched out on a grass bank listening to the home fans run through a repertoire of songs apparently stripped religiously from some bootleg copy of Now 36 That’s What I Call Music one of them had found at a bring and buy. Not often you hear Savage Garden in a football context.

In “Isaac’s International Pub” later on you could tell the Heathrowers a mile off. They were the ones nodding off as England laboured on to eventual victory against Norway somewhere close to three in the morning. The others burst out into spontaneous, raucous, drunken celebrations and topless table dancing with Silver Lining doing brisk business. If it felt like the whole away end was crammed in there, that’s because it basically was. In ‘biggest small club, smallest big club’ news essentially the entire travelling support had found its way to this one spot (nowhere near the ground, really) because “Austrian Dom has told them we’re coming”.

As my dad used to say, “you don’t get that following Man U”. And as I say, when the sheepish admission I’ve booked to go to Austria after all made over Wednesday night’s dinner brings a blank look and “why?”… Well, this is why. Goodnight, Vienna.

The team

We don’t, really, do it for the football. Which is just as well, as these things are often more farce than formality.

We’re only two years on from “The Girona Eight” episode where the club’s tone-deaf call to put the whole thing behind closed doors had the super sleuths among our support narrowing down Spanish golf courses with associated football facilities on Google maps and eventually rocking up under a tree behind the goal and watching it anyway – lesson learned, you’re never going to beat people like Chris Hewitt, Polish Paul, Martin/Chris/Will/Tilly at this sort of thing, so don’t try.

Then there was the 2016 summer everyone trekked over to the Netherlands for a fairly prestigious friendly against some version of PSV Eindhoven only for somebody to forget to mention this at the mayor’s office (or police station) in the small town the game was due to be played at. Several freak outs later the ground remained locked and the QPR fans who’d gone there had to spend the afternoon in Long John’s Bar and Grill in Amersfoort watching the QPR+ feed. To be fair Lee Hoos did turn up and put a card behind the bar by way of apology – biggest small club, smallest big club alert.

For sheer, unadulterated chaos you’d do well to ever beat the 2006 ‘tour’ of the Amalfi Coast, featuring one game on a very occasionally mown patch of grass in a suburb of Naples we did well to escape from alive, and a heavy defeat on an old-style sandy astroturf pitch with Alan McDonald and Tony Roberts stepping up from the coaching staff to play in the 5-1 loss to mighty Sorrento Calcio. Still, we did get to see Adam Czerkas score, and we got an interview with Lee Cook in a small bath towel (him, not us) so it wasn’t a completely wasted journey even if it did provide us with an alarming, close up, first hand experience of a club at that stage on the verge of falling apart.

Walking to that game in Sorrento we’d actually happened upon then chairman Gianni Paladini outside the stadium in a fairly typical flap about the state of the pitch and manager Gary Waddock pulling his senior players out for fear of injury (one might have assumed things like where we’re playing the game would have been checked on in advance, but then this was Paladini’s QPR we’re talking about). Taking one look at my brother – bigger, handsomer, better at football – he enquired about his present contract status (then a 16-year-old in Scunthorpe’s academy) and whether he fancied a game. Oh, Gianni. Such a cad. You do tell the best jokes. And off we went to the bar behind the goal, only to realise as the team emerged that we’d probably just turned down a legitimate offer for a Whittingham to make a genuine appearance for the club. I mean, one of the Sorrento players lined up for us in midfield as a trialist for God’s sake. Ah well, get em next time bro.

Long (long) story slightly shortened – don’t read too much into the games.

The two in Austria this week are QPR’s first of the summer, we’re still a month away from the big sunshiney start at Fratton Park and two from the end of the transfer window. Even by the standards of pre-season games the two matches here were played at pedestrian pace, in four quarters, with a total change of the team at half time. Glorified, exaggerated training exercises and little more. I suspect the club would quite like to keep them as that but for weirdoes like us demanding to turn up and watch because please see previous 1,900 words.

Some rough thoughts… Rumarn Burrell looked fit, interested, and sharp. Encouraging after the way his 2025/26 ended. He got a goal for himself in the second game, a 3-1 win against Wiener Neustadt, and was probably the pick of the QPR players for me. Kwame Poku, whose third hamstring injury of 2025/26 we feared derailing a much needed pre-season, also got a quarter hour in game two which was encouraging. Harvey Vale, one of several prospects/projects we now have going into the crucial second/third year of contract and football at this level, looks trim, sharp and ready to fly.

We also got a sighting of Justin Obikwu to confirm he exists against First Vienna, though that did not extend to another against Second Vienna. Marge Simpson grumbly noise. Ilias Chair also looked rusty, cutting infield for that three-point jump shot he loves so much and skying both shots and crosses each time.

Much work to do for some of these after all that went on last year, and the biggest improvement we can make to the team’s chances is by getting it fitter and more available than it has been. This much-vaunted “slow burn” approach to fitness which was credited for the excellent injury record in 2023/24 but has proved disastrous in the last two campaigns probably isn’t the way to go in a season that starts a week later than usual and sees QPR facing two newly promoted sides and the teams that finished 21st, 20th, 19th, 18th and 14th last year before getting three weeks off to prepare for West Ham away. If we’re to do anything at all this season, you’d think we should probably be kicking around the top six/eight to set up a big following and crunch test over at The BrewDog DJ Booth on October 10. On paper you couldn’t have asked for a kinder start, and it would be great to see us really get after that opportunity.

Disappointing not to get a look at either Calum Ward or Pierce Charles (paperwork still being processed, although both travelled). Matteo Salamon’s error for the Neustadt goal was unfortunate for him, but did rather typify a fairly slapdash approach to the second half of that game all round – the second team didn’t seem to approach their task with the same intensity as the first half crew had, flying out the blocks and bagging two early goals as opposed to labouring through 45 minutes and scoring one Richard Kone penalty. Conceding a goal straight after half time? Quelle surprise. The opposition were only Austrian fourth division as well, basically Brigg Town standard, and too many QPR attacks against them floundered on the rocks of inverse wingers inverting too much, holding the ball for too long, looking for their own shots, and crowding the space for Kone (and in the first game Burrell) to operate in. Those are your prime assets, concentrate on servicing them.

This summer’s Alfie Tuck appears to be Isak Alemayehu who started both games in midfield. Turning 20 in October, with Swedish caps up to U21 level, he really does need to start being known for more than scoring against Chelsea in the Europa Conference League at his previous club and did his chances no harm at all here – potentially even to the extent of jumping ahead of Kieran Morgan in the reckoning. With the keepers sorted and Boy Kemper looking vocal and aggressive in the first game at least down the left, it’s that midfield area most in need of surgery now. Nicolas Madsen became visibly and audibly frustrated in game two at balls being knocked back to the defence and goalkeeper, or high over his head, that he rightly felt could and should have been played through him with a modicum more ambition and skill. Once in each game the straight pass out from the keeper, which Charles and Ward have absolutely been recruited because of their ability to play, got us into trouble for want of a midfielder who could receive it on the turn. Lots of transfer window left yet though, and as we always say – it’s QPR, there will be signings.

Julien Stéphan’s dig at Amadou Mbengue on the club video (“we’re having a meeting about crossing, do you want to come”) raised a good laugh. On the plus side, it was Mbengue’s assist for Burrell’s goal in game two. On the other hand, he remains at large from a man with a large butterfly net, and the second goal was another one of his wild attempts that this time sailed Leicester-style over the keeper and into the far top corner and will only encourage him. Mbengue seemed typically pleased with himself, running around crossing his arms in the air. From our distance it was difficult to tell whether his sleeves fastened at the front or the back. Stéphan stood hands on hips.

Adrenalin now pumping, Amadou’s mad two minutes concluded with a lung busting charge half the length of the pitch ending with a wild challenge and an airborne trip into the canvas-covered seats behind the goal. Aerodynamic only within pitilessly narrow parameters, this predictably resulted in an injury, and an early substitution. I think I detected a sigh from the touchline. Do we need to add a right back to that shopping list?

I’m still a fan, to be honest. He’s good value. Must we live so relentlessly in the real world?

It’s three years since we were last in Austria at one of these. Standing in the centre circle of the Rohrbach council pitch after watching a QPR side led from the front by Hamzad Kargbo comprehensively demolished by Slavia Prague’s reserves while the locals watched through the fence from the municipal swimming pool and coming to terms with just how much trouble we were in while the players (bar Charlie Kelman) ignored us completely from the balcony above. We’ve progressed considerably from that point on the pitch. This is a better QPR team, with better players and particularly better strikers. Their behaviour and attitude to the fans all week has been first class and night and day difference from that trip here under the increasingly bewildered and bedraggled Gareth Ainsworth – hanging around, mingling and chatting with the fans, recording videos, selfies and autographs long into the night after both games.

It has, so far, only translated into a move from the remarkable 18th position Marti Cifuentes was able to extract from even that group, into the 15th we finished in last season despite considerable spend and better forwards. How much further we can/will go we’ll begin finding out against Millwall on August 7, not in warm ups in Austria in mid-July.

The train home

The venue for the second game couldn’t have been more different to the first. A new-build in the centre of a hot, dusty and deserted trading estate at the end of a provincial airport’s runway, with the local children taking it in turns to beast each other off the high board in the adjacent pool (apparently wouldn’t be a QPR pre-season without us attacking the death slide end in the first half).

There’s been some money spent on the place, and a gentleman who seemed to at least be acting like the club’s owner made an ostentatious point of parking a needlessly loud Aston Martin at an angle strategically right in the middle of the QPR fans drinking outside beforehand, presumably because we might not have spotted it or him had he left it on the road. Or in the car park.

It was all a far cry from our fantastic night out at Rapid Vienna v Panathinaikos the evening before – a friendliest of friendly games between two clubs with a long-standing supporter union, played in a brilliant atmosphere, that we nearly missed the start of by trying to use Google Maps to get us out of the hedge maze at the Schönbrunn Palace, and did miss the end of because nobody thought to tell us it was three thirds of 45 minutes each.

Ways back to town from here numbered two – taxi, or walk. So began an attempt by everybody present to wrestle Ubers and local minicabs into the back of beyond that at one point threatened to turn quite aggy (the Wiener takes it all?) and saw some, frankly, ludicrous prices being offered in cash just get the hell out of Dodge. Such are the weird and wonderful circumstances and places we find ourselves in on these things.

This was, of course, all played out in the shadow of another, less successful, night watching England back at Isaac’s (a good, slightly surprising, sign they were willing to have us back, I thought).

Not particularly original thoughts but that was precisely the situation Thomas Tuchel was brought here for, and he botched it.

Having chosen to leave out in form players like Adam Wharton and Morgan Gibbs-White who are comfortable in possession of the ball, in difficult situations for two of the Premier League’s smaller clubs, I’m not particularly interested in hearing him talk about the player’s mentality and DNA when it comes to taking care of the football, Nick. Other confident, ball-playing technicians like Ebere Eze and Kobi Mainoo have been mostly or totally ignored – the latter not even able to beg a role in the third placed play off (officially listed as injured, for the record).

Tuchel made a conscious choice to prioritise old school English attributes like physicality, strength and pace in wide areas instead to the point where even Noni Madueke managed to fluke a call up. When it mattered most, when he had Argentina right where he wanted them and ripe to be picked off on counter attacks which Egypt showed previously they’re frightened to death of, he chose to remove even that, leaving Harry Kane isolated and England without outlet of any sort. In short, he did everything he’d criticised England for previously when working as a television pundit. In a way it’s lucky Argentina got a second when they did – what on earth did he envision extra time looking like in that set up?

People have rushed to compare with Gareth Southgate, upon whose fine foundation this ‘serial winner’ was supposed to build and ‘finish the job’, but this was a tactical meltdown more worthy of Steve McClaren.

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After an elongated, engorged and at times outright corrupt six-week tournament across three countries, the two teams in the final are once more managed by international football specialists, which Southgate was and Tuchel is so far not. Too often England look to clubland, and once more the quick fix seems to be Pep Guardiola, when international football is a different specialism.

Spain and Argentina are also the teams with the two best midfields. Something for England, and QPR, to ponder. As we prepare to mark 18 months since Rangers last won a competitive game with more possession than the opponent, it remains true that you don’t win many games of football while losing midfield. This tournament has proven it once more.

Bar an unpleasant change in Mannheim (think Crewe, with more curried sausage) a weekend spent meandering home by rail with stops in Salzburg and Paris was a very pleasant way to spend the final two days of the trip.

I passed Zann Celar going the other way as he heads for Switzerland (Basel, not Dignitas) bringing to an end an unhappy spell for player and club. For a while I wondered whether the Slovenian suffered from the sort of sliding doors Shaun Wright-Phillips syndrome that blighted his career at Loftus Road. Bar one memorable night in The Swamp, Wright-Phillips is universally seen as a disastrous signing, player and personality in QPR history, but he was electric when he first arrived and over the first three months of the season hit the woodwork three times and had a goal incorrectly disallowed at home to West Brom. We could potentially have been pushing European places early in 2011/12 under Neil Warnock, with the diminutive winger sitting on four goals in eight starts and talk of an England recall circling, but for a couple of coats of paint and a linesman’s flag. Celar missed several chances to win a home game with Plymouth, put a penalty wide against Stoke, hit the inside of the post when trying to win a game at Watford, and then blew his hamstring out just after he’d finally got off the mark with a skilful double at Cardiff. A terrible loan spell in a dire Dusseldorf team last year leads to me to believe he’s probably just not very good, and was entirely unsuited to the way Marti Cifuentes wanted to set up and play in any case, but still… what might have been.

You’re never going to get every one right, but the Celar transfer overall is a damaging failure for the club’s PSR/FFP situation and development model and shouldn’t ever be pitched as anything else. Spending £Xm on a striker you then have to dump two years into a 4/5 year contract is lethal to an amortisation approach. Still, finding a taker, getting even a nominal fee and shifting his wage off the books, given how the last two years have gone for him, is no mean feat.

It continues a positive recent trend of QPR doing good outward business – getting paid money for old rope in the forms of Sinclair Armstrong, Lyndon Dykes and Charlie Kelman. One of the more irritating bits of QPR internet at the moment, however, is the apparent need to overhype these deals. People would seemingly rather listen to an ITK account telling them what they want to hear than look at the black and white figures published in the legally binding club accounts each year. These are good deals, steady bits of business, they don’t need hyping or exaggerating.

Let’s see how this, and the supposed £500k we got for Michi Frey (an “undisclosed free” as one commentator described it to me), shake down in the accounts come February 2027 and 2028. My bet is “a deal worth” is doing some heavy lifting and the numbers are substantially/entirely made up of wages these players were still owed by us. Not much surprises me in football after all these years, but if somebody has paid a €1.5m transfer fee for Zan Celar then that would definitely qualify.

London via Salzburg and Paris (not you, Mannheim) on a collection of Austrian, German and French trains was a much more agreeable way to return home than the journey out – although whoever looked at a map and thought there needed to be a train service from Graz in the south of Austria to Munster in the far north of Germany, taking the best part of 13 hours, is the sort of lunatic best avoided. Fortunately I was only in for a manageable five hour portion of that.

Flying along at 300kmph while you sit in the upstairs bar with a glass of white wine and watch the world whizz by on those double deck TGVs is a very fine way to spend an evening, even allowing for the breaking news that “Burnley are keen on Ronnie Edwards”. Yeh, we’re all keen on him , that’s kind of his vibe. Back of the line.

Hopefully, this time, I’m still this happy and content come May.

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Photo: Action Images via Reuters

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