…and I woke up and it was all a dream!
Well, it feels like it anyway. The takeover appears to have finally happened, the club saved, I should be delighted.
And I am, for the most part. Beggars can’t be choosers and as beggars I think we’ve been incredibly lucky. I envisioned many scenarios through an increasingly desperate summer, the best of which involved some kind of buy out that left our heads above water and little else. So for they’re to be new owners and a ‘plan’ is more than my wildest imaginings. So why do I keep coming up with questions?
Why Rangers?
For most of us, Rangers are our very lifeblood; we can quote history, style and reputation as perfectly good reasons for taking on the club on. But we view the club with hooped-tinted spectacles, a league cup, a near miss and New Years Day on Manchester is hardly going to attract your average multi-millionaire. The idea that QPR is a ‘great little club’, run well by smashing people is at least twenty years out of date and the last few would have been better run by Barnum and Bailey. They are not fans, so why us.
Premiership Millions are attractive and they have an acknowledged time frame to get back amongst the big boys. Does anyone believe that 10 million is enough to get us back up? It seems to me that this gives us an opportunity to gain parity with about half the championship. There are no guarantees of four years to the Premiership. So why not buy Birmingham or Derby? They are already in the Promised Land; they have bigger infrastructures and bags of potential.
It has to be London…well some of it anyway, obviously Gianni et al must have been doing some sweet-talking, but I can only assume there’s a convenience about the location. This then makes me wonder about the obvious inconvenience about the location.
A ground capacity of 17000…no wait a minute, the capacity now appears to be 15500 if the last game was anything to go by, 17000 isn’t going to be maximising income…unless we’re all paying three times as much and I’m no surveyor but I can’t see where we are going to expand at our current home. As an outsider you’d think I’d look forward to a move to a more convenient location, but walking along the Uxbridge road (…to see ad Queens Park Raaaaaangers) is one of the great joys of my footballing experience. You get it wherever you go, the sense of heightened excitement the moment you spot the first shirt and then it builds and builds before the tribal sensation of being one of many kicks in, but as you go through the familiar side roads and approach the glorious shoe-box that is Loftus Road…well, I can’t see how a walk through a plastic industrial estate off the M25 is going to match it.
I tend to take my lead from the regulars here. If Varc can happily contemplate a move, then who am I to raise objections. I think we should listen very carefully to any plans as they arise mind. New stadia crop up all the time and the reasoning isn’t always as altruistic as it first sounds. Nottingham Forest have recently announced plans to move away from their perfectly adequate stadium to a purpose built arena. Frankly in their current state you’d think a share with Notts County’s tin cowshed would suffice, but that wouldn’t maximise the directors profit and that appears to certainly be a major motive here and with lots of the others I shouldn’t wonder. While a stadium appears to be a big outlay, the peripheral infrastructure, shopping, hotels, road and transport networks appears to offer lots of opportunity for accessing grants and payments from big supermarket and hotel chains. While I’m sure football clubs come out of expansions carrying debt I’m convinced that most directors and other interested parties come out of them smiling.
A future at the B&Q arena out at Heathrow beckons?
Whatever Flavor Flav and Lil’ Bern’s intentions, here we are. Our natural state is one of perpetual annoyance, even though had money to spend, we didn’t spend it on the right person and even though we’ve been taken over it didn’t happen quickly enough and so it goes on. That’s fine; it’s our prerogative as fans. But somewhere along the way we’ve lost perspective.
I think it happened during the long run in the first Division (then Premiership). Somewhere during that time we decided to stop enjoying the dream and start to think it was where we belonged and that one way or another something would happen to make it stay that way. I always find Gerry Francis, Rangers hero that he’ll always be, culpable here. A little unfair maybe, but it was during his tenure that we became a little bit of a laughing stock, a rot that continued to grow unchecked until (hopefully) now. If somebody wasn’t digging up stock footage of his pigeon fancying appearance on Blue Peter they were showing that bloody advert, Gerry and the Honey Monster prancing around the ground. I found it increasingly difficult to take him seriously and even though he left for supposedly better pastures I don’t think he left us in a great position with the team.
There followed a succession of Clowns to take over his crown, Chris Wright, Ned Zelic, Mark Hately, Stewart Huston, Bruce Rioch, Steve Slade, Davies and the incredible missing board, all leading to our current ringmaster Gianni.
I can’t find the thread where it was said, but Ron hit the nail on the head during the most fevered of pre-takeover speculation, hope you allow my paraphrasation here, ‘all I want is a well run club, solvent and professional, anything else is a bonus’. I’m sure there are lots of places on the Internet and beyond where he’d be castigated for such thoughts, but I think it’s bang on. I want to be associated with a club that makes me proud, somewhere that appreciates my support and be surrounded by likeminded individuals who want to see a team try to play decent football. It just doesn’t feel right to talk about Champions League when you can’t get past round one in the League cup.
In some ways it feels unambitious, but a month ago I’d have settled for QPR still being in existence at the start of next season. This is all a bonus, time to start enjoying it…I just hope I can remember how!
Rogue Male
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