Ray Jones
Like many of you I’ve spent much of the weekend reading the boards, trying to come to terms with the death of a young man who represented more than mere investment or promise. Ray Jones symbolised a cherished future for Queens Park Rangers football club, after weeks of worry about the imminent demise of the club we are now asked to comprehend to loss of someone who could have led a new QPR away from these dark days.
Young lives are seemingly lost this way every day, I’m sure with the will to look I could’ve produced statistics about teenage lives lost in road traffic accidents, but the manner of his death seems somehow secondary at the moment. All I know is a couple of weeks ago I very nearly turned into oncoming traffic at a junction, a moment’s aberration that twenty years of driving couldn’t save me from, what chance a boy with a few weeks experience.
I got lucky, hundreds, year in and year out, don’t!
We’re all struggling to articulate how we are feeling, it’s not easy to express what you really feel, twice as hard to make sense with a keyboard. There are some really touching thoughts on the boards and some a little trite, but all are coming from the heart. I think we need to be a little patient with each other. I’m not a father, but I understand how your point of view is fundamentally changed by parenthood. With the death of any child, be it eighteen years or eighteen months, a parent is shown a glimpse of their own child’s mortality and this heartache is doubled by their kids own grief as they always seem to be drawn to younger players like Ray.
In all too short a time we will again be consumed by feverish speculation over the future of our Club, a club which appears to want to exist in the shadow of debt and dishonour, a club that can only seem to earn respect when tragedies like Ray Jones and Kiyan Prince occur.
We will take to the field again too, players will wear the hoops and we, as fans, will take to the terraces.
I don’t want a stand named after Ray; we shouldn’t retire his number or erect a statue. But in everything we do, as a Chairman trying to rescue a club, as a manager trying to make the best of his limited resources, as players striving to make a career or as fans relentlessly supporting our team…remember that we have one more chance to do it better, one more chance to do it right, one more chance to try again and again and again.
Ray Jones will never have one more chance…lets not waste any more.
Rogue Male
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