YOU'RE TORTURING R'S
Thursday 16th August 2007
by Ron Norris

It’s on, it’s off, it might be on again. And so the soap opera that is Queens Park Rangers rambled on this week with the much discussed Briatore take over the hot topic. Honestly supporting a football club shouldn’t be this hard.  

At the start of the week we were all just starting to dream of the potential Flavio Briatore could bring to this corner of West London but now, as we approach the end of it, we’ve got directors seemingly at war. One of whom tells us the club is going to go bust if it’s not sold whilst the other tells us it’s not for sale at all.  

Stuck in the middle of it all is us lot, worrying about the future and feeling powerless to do anything about it.  

I’m a great believer that the bad times are there to test you and they only make the good times all the more sweeter when they arrive. Even I’m starting to wonder just what Queens Park Rangers fans have done to deserve this sort of torment.  

Sometimes it seems like it only ever happens to us. Half the Premiership is made up of clubs that have fallen on hard times, had someone waltz in, take over and now they are in the top flight.  

Derby, Fulham, Portsmouth, Reading, Wigan and Sunderland have all been in that boat and that’s not counting the likes of Villa, Manchester City, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea who have seen the mega bucks roll through the door in recent years and months.  

If I’m really honest I don’t really need the glamour and multi millions that some of these clubs now enjoy, I just want a stable, sensibly run club that doesn’t keep me awake at night. 

I want to worry about who we’re going to play at left back on Saturday, I don’t want to worry about how we’re going to pay the next tax bill. I want to dream of promotion, not worry about extinction. Is that really too much to ask? 

I doubt that either Paladini and Caliendo have stopped for a second to think about how they are putting us through the mill this week. Instead they seem to be far too busy fighting their own corners that they have forgotten who they are actually meant to be fighting for in the first place.