QPRnet Blogs

Im confused. Those that know me will probably say “that’s not too difficult”, but this time, Im really confused. The team I love is in danger of becoming what I despise “a money orientated, dont give a toss about the fans, marketing machine akin to Chel$ki and Manure.

Now I am prepared to give the new guys a chance and see what happens, rather than lynch them before they’ve even got their feet under the desk (Ill leave that to the Ingham and Finney types of this world). But there has to be a concern that prawn sandwiches will soon be outselling thr Balti Pies and hotdogs, whilst multi-millionaire mercenaries strut their fancy dan stuff over a manicured pitch. Exactly the sort of thing I detest (see my money money money rant for more details).

So I am in a paradox. Do I continue to support the team I have loved for 30 plus years, or stick with my principles. I never expected us to become billionaires, particularly so close to being in administration, and I will continue to applaud GP for his efforts but have we become a “if you cant beat em join em club” chasing the premiership gravy train and once there doing everything possible to stop others joining us?

Time will tell, but if you ever see me eating a prawn sandwich at LR please slap me in the face and call me a sell out (but thats the ONLY circumstance you can do that for).

So we finally have a new manager. Welcome Mr de Canio, even if I had never heard of you until now, Im sure that this is my error, not one on the part of Gianni. I wish you well, like I do with every other manger. I have also learnt from my mistakes and wont praise you in a blog as this will lead to a dreadful run of form and your sacking.

I wonder, however, what you will make of our squad. Its an odd squad, mostly built for free or nearly free. Our forth most expensive player broke his leg and our second most expensive player has just had an op, but at least the top costing bloke looks good and the other one that cost money is a damn good keeper in the making.

So if you have a shed load of Bernie and Flav’s, where should you spend it? Wisely is my advise. Generally speaking I think it would be better to bring in 4 or 5 £1 million players than splash it all on one. But not an entirely new team. That would be a waste of time as new players will need to gel. You could start with a couple of our loanees, Rowan Vine and Craine have changed our team immeasurably, but I suspect you may face a problem with Crainie as Pompey like him. Its not worth breaking the bank for either of them. Of the rest – take em or leave em, if the price is right (i.e. not very much), then fine, otherwise I wonder if there are some Italians you know who want to give the Championship a go.

There are of course a few blokes who need to go. The previous manager got rid of most of them, but there are a couple lingering around. Im sure you will figure out who quickly enough, or failing that just listen to the boos from the Loftus Road faithful for clues.

Anyway have fun.

So the club isnt for sale then… confused? you bet.

So it looks as though GPs reign is coming to an end. I dare say some will say good riddance, but as Rivals has closed, it will be difficult to find out what Smiffy is saying. IF he does go, and I appreciate it is still an if as I write and may even stay an if for ever, then there are some things we should be grateful for. There are also some things we should be glad never to be seen again. So what did GP do well and what did he do badly? Here is my take on things.

The positives.

1. He managed to keep the club afloat, maybe by the skin of his teeth, but it is a feat nonetheless.

2. He attracted more investment to the club. OK so they never turn up to board meetings (unless they are trying to dump chairmen) and showed little other interest in the playing side of things, but the investment also contributed to keeping the club afloat.

3. He pretty much let the manager get on with it and backed them in the market. The main exception was nick Ward, but despite the claims that he would “bring in his mates”, he didn’t.

4. He bought in JG, who has transformed the club.

The negatives.

1. The PR side of the club has been, to put it mildly, appalling. The Court case was embarrassing enough, but the information that come out of the club was often sketchy, damaging and in several cases wrong. The fans were often left in the dark.

2. The way he got rid of Bill was poor. It meant he started with a sour taste in everyone’s mouths.

3. The rumour mongering about the club was also damaging. Ingham’s best attempts to convince all QPR supporters that GP was going to sell Loftus Road were not a good start, but it meant that rumour after rumour followed GP about, most of them inaccurate, but enough to damage relationships with supporters.

As I said in a previous blog, I believe GPs heart was in the right place, if not always his head. If Flav, or any other potential buyer come in then GP should be remembered for being the person who got them here, and well done for insisting that they have to spend money on the team.

Lets hope it is farewell GP as a new money man could take this team far. JG is the right man in charge and the team he has now assembled is the best we’ve had since we got promoted. It shouldn’t take too much to take the team to the next level and challenge for promotion, especially if the supporters actually get behind whoever takes over.

QPR: Hello God.  Got a bit of a crisis, can you help?
God: yeah sure, I’m God; should be no problem, what can I do for you?
QPR: We have this loan… its costing us an arm and a leg, but we don’t know how we can pay it off.
God: Hokey dokey, who’s it with?
QPR: ABC
God: Good luck with that – see you later…

I should point out I made up this conversation.  I also know that no similar conversations involving any other sporting team are also made up.  How do I know?  Because God doesn’t like sports.  FACT.

It never ceases to amaze me how many sportsmen and women thank god for their abilities by crossing themselves before then enter their chosen arena.  How many times do you see team mates looking to the skies as a penalty shootout takes place as if the big guy is gonna help them.  Have they not notices that the other folk are doing it as well?  If it worked, Italy would be world champions at everything (including snooker which they don’t play).

God obviously hates cricket, otherwise he would have waited 5 minutes before letting it rain at the end of the first test match and he would have let England win the toss for the second (he surely supports England out of the two teams, after all the other lot don’t believe he exists).

I say this because I’m beginning to fear that we will need some sort of divine intervention at Loftus Road.  Just when the optimism was rising, more and more rumours of more and more crises get published in the media.  Since God doesn’t care, who should we turn to?  Can we make a pact with the bad boy downstairs?  If so does anyone have a spare soul hanging about the place.  We might attract an American Evangelicalist or a Russian Orthodox representative, but these are still on earth spokespersons for the one we know doesn’t give a rat’s arse.

All I want is a sign…

I post on two boards – this one and Rivals.  I post on this one because you usually get some considered opinion (yes even with Gripper) on more serious issues and the vast majority of posts relate to QPR (with the obvious exception of the film thread, which I bloody started!)

You can but help laugh at some of the actions over on Rivals.  Yesterday was a classic case in point.  The Beeb says Cook is on his way for £1.5M.  Immediately there are posts calling for GP’s head, preferably on a plate with a side salad.  This morning, GP states on the radio that he rejected the bid for Cook (in fact he laughed at it).  So that’s OK then – GP isn’t an idiot after all, and yet no apologies over on Rivals.  I would hate to see what was written on IndyR’s or the LSA sites, but I suspect that the Rivals threads were tame in comparison.

There is no doubt that GP gets a bloody hard time form most fans.  The reasons are unclear to me.  At the beginning there were rumours he was going to sell the ground, that he was only interested in sell off our prize assets and that he was going to run the club into the ground.  All of these have been unproven to date, and his actions of yesterday suggest that this will continue whilst he is at the helm.  I wonder where the continued venom comes from?  I have asked some folk to explain it to me, and the best they can come up with is “he’s just dodgy isn’t he”.

I have spoken to GP twice.  Once at the players sponsor’s do (where he was more interested in my female companion!) and once when he phoned me – yes he phoned me!  I had sent him an e-mail about my thoughts on the Sponsor’s do and how I thought it could be improved.  Within half an hour he had phoned me back and thanked me for my constructive comments and he said he would take them on board.  He then went into lots of stuff about the club and proved to me one thing – he DOES care about the club.  I don’t agree with everything he’s ever done, and I don’t expect to in the future, but I genuinely believe he has the clubs best interests at heart.

One thing that is for sure is that he has divided opinion amongst QPR supporters more than any other person associated with the club (even George Santos!).  That’s not a good thing, because the best way forward is for everyone to pull together.  I think that’s what Gallen was trying to say last week, but he’s a footballer, therefore, wont be very eloquent, plus I suspect the journos twisted things a bit.  In these troubled times, working together for a change might make the club more attractive to a richer chairman, to whom £20M is nothing and our debts can be written off.  But this is one reason why I stick to only two message boards.  The more I see and hear about what is happening on the other ones the more I realise how far we are from working together.

I’m on holiday next week (visiting the in-laws if that counts as a holiday?), so you can get next weeks tribulations a bit early…

I learnt two things this week.  The first is that you cant just cut and paste your blog from word into the blog section without getting all you punctuation screwed up.  I blame Ron (hmmm – a recurring theme to my blogs… That’s interesting).  The second (although I probably knew this for a while, but didn’t want to admit it) is that I was wrong.

Tonto wrong? Never! I hear you cry  Perhaps not, but I do admit I was wrong about JG.  When Waddo was being let go and JG’s name first came up I was more than a bit worried.  He’d been out of the game for a couple of years, there had been all those shenanigans at Derby and he was GP’s mate.  That added up to disaster to me.

But its not time to say that I was wrong – very wrong.  JG I salute you, you have performed minor miracles since you arrived.  A+ for effort and B+ for results too, there’s very little I could argue against you other than the daft Christmas Tree formation, but even then I’ll give you credit for trying something a little different.

In the transfer market, I don’t think I can fault you.  Cullip and Bolder were the difference between us staying up and going down.  The two youngsters from Chel$ki were handy and this summer Barker and Nardiello look like good signings and both were free.  In the meantime, I think its very difficult to argue against anyone you let go.  We had far too many duds clogging up the training ground or being Billy Big Bowlegs about the place.  Its noticeable that since they went how much happier the place is.

Off the filed, with the exception of the Chinese Brawl, things have improved markedly as well.  Harford and Neil mean we have a proper looking coaching team for the first time in years (probably since Jackett left).  The wages saved now that the big earners have gone will surely help the financial stability of the club, yet the quality of the players hasn’t dipped.

For the first time in a while, there is optimism on the message boards (with the obvious exceptions of Smiffy, Chairman of the Board and MatthewRanger on Rivals, but they are not easily pleased!).  My only hope is that that optimism doesn’t translate into over ambition and they don’t expect play-offs as a minimum.  Comfortably mid-table would be an achievement in my opinion.

Well done John, with you in charge, I’m actually a happy Rangers fan

If Ron is silly enough to allow me to have a blog, he’s gonna have to put up with my rant first and foremost. It’s about money in football.  Once I start on this subject it’s often difficult to shut me up - ask my colleagues in the office, ask the FA (yes I have written to them about this), ask my wife (actually she is the one person who does get me to shut up, usually by putting her I-pod on…). But since you are reading this you can either just stop or carry on “listening”.  At the end of the day its Ron’s site, so he gets the blame in my opinion.

When I was a lad (god I must be getting old if I start things with expressions like that), football was about players.  You bought some, you sold some, managers made some better players and failed with others.  It was an expensive game but effectively the game was run by double glazing salesmen made good in sheepskin coats and it was a hobby.  A hobby that millions of us were all involved in and cared about of course, but you always felt you had a chance.  Get promoted - who knows, with a bit of luck you could win a cup, or challenge for the league - Wimbledon were the prime example of that.

Football changed for good back in 1992 and in my opinion it didn’t change for the better.  One of my favourite questions is “Who were London’s top team the first year of the Premier league”.  Of course we know the answer - most other people don’t - Arsenal is the most popular answer, followed by Chelsea.  For the record Spuds were the second highest.

Three teams from the first premier League aren’t even in the Championship next season - Leeds, Forest and Oldham and Wimbledon doesn’t exist anymore  Ten clubs have had serious financial difficulties since that date, which is almost 50%.  In addition since the premiership started numerous little clubs have fallen on desperate times, culminating in Scarborough going out of business last week (I still remember the days when beefy Botham played for them).

I have nothing against the concept of the top teams getting the best prizes.  I understand that the team that wins should get the most prize money - fair enough, but the FA seem smitten with the idea put forward by Manure, Arsenil, the Red Scousers and of course Chle$ki that winning the European Cup is more important than the state of British clubs.  Michael Ballack’s wages for a week would have saved Scarborough and his monthly ages would also save Wrexham and York, the next most likely clubs to go to the wall.

The obscene amount of money the premiership makes and keeps to itself will be the death of football in time.  Next season we all know which three teams will finish in the top three, only the order of the top two is up for debate.  The most interesting thing will be how Arsenil react to losing Henry.  Whoppydo.

In the Championship we very nearly had the case that the three that came down went back up again.  Interest in the sport will dwindle. It’s happened in the US with NHL and to a lesser extent Baseball and Basketball.  In these days of multi-sport satellite telly people will find something else to watch.  I’m not talking about those of us on this board, we have football in our veins but the kids will get bored and the kids are our future.

There was a banner at a Brighton games recently (during the will they wont they saga of their planning permission).  It said “Roses are red, BHA are blue, the FA only care about 20, but we care about 92.  Well said sir.