WBA 5:1 QPR
Oh dear.
I had the luxury of being able to watch this one from the comfort of my own home, but I wasn’t looking forward to it being against West Brom and live on Sky.
I didn’t take any notes for this game (how sad would that have been, eh?), so this will be a lot shorter than the previous entry for Watford. 
I thought we were doing fine up until the first-goal, but from then on it, it was a bit of a horror show. Zesh Rehman actually played well up until Ismael Miller skinned him for the opening goal, and there was just so many things that were wrong defensively that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
When I saw Miller up against Rehman in a one-on-one situation, I thought that we were asking for trouble. You wouldn’t want to leave a guy like that in a one-on-one scenario for any player in those positions, so after the first and second instance, I kept thinking, where are the wingers to double up and cover? Miller has been destroying full-backs all season with his pace and power, so it was like we hadn’t been watching what he was capable of and that disappointed me.
It was painful to watch. As soon as the first goal went in, we fell apart and you could sense it was going to be a bit of a thrashing. The good performance against Watford was long in the distant memory and when we were 3-1 down, I looked at the clock and thought “Oh my God”, because it was all one-way traffic and we didn’t really have anybody on the bench who could stop the rot out on the pitch, so to speak.
What was noticeable between this match and the Watford game was the defence were once again very deep but this time the midfield were not dropping with them. West Brom had acres of space and as soon as Kevin Phillips moved into the hole, all hell broke loose and nobody, neither the defence or midfield, seemed to take any sort of responsibility.
Phillips was allowed all the time and space to pick up the ball, turn, look up around him and orchestrate any number of attacks at will. When he got the ball, we just backed off and backed off, giving more time and more space. It was very painful to watch.
For a short period in the second-half, we started to contain Jonathan Greening as Adam Bolder pressed him high up the pitch, and we almost created something out of nothing by doing this. The shame was, had we done this earlier, they’d have had much less of an opportunity to play football and spread the ball wide. Greening was often coming deep and given the time to pick a pass. The problem with giving him time was the entire defence either stayed deep or dropped very deep, giving the Albion full-backs or even the wingers (as our defence tried to tuck in to stay narrow) the freedom to be picked out. When they were found it was all far far too easy to cross the ball into the box and it’s no wonder panic, mayhem and chaos broke out at the back. We were so naive.
The boys have got to stop feeling sorry for themselves. Whether they are going to be here in a season’s time or not, they’ve got to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in for the club, for themselves and for their careers, because at this rate, some of them won’t play professional football again after they do leave QPR.
I’m thrilled on the other hand that Gareth Ainsworth got himself on the score sheet. That’s going to be an important goal for him and us in the coming weeks. His drive and determination is an asset we’re going to need to use, so it was important he got a goal to keep his confidence high and to help him along as he regains match sharpness.
It’s hard to see where our next win is going to come from. The more I’ve seen of Ben Sahar, the more I realise that he is just still a boy and has quite a long way to go before filling that potential. We’re pinning too much hope on him at this stage. He has definitely got a terrific first-touch and enough flair to cause problems for defenders, but he’s also prone to making wrong decisions when on the ball or sometimes just holding onto it for too long before releasing to someone else. I like him though and like so many of our other players, he just needs a goal to get him going.
Overall John Gregory chose the wrong team on the day or maybe should have gone for a different approach to the game. It was always going to be tough against a team as good as West Brom, but he’s got to somehow galvanise these players and instil the belief in them that they can get results or at least make it very frustrating for the opposition on the day.
They let themselves and him down though, no doubt about that, and his job is under serious threat now. At 5-1, and seeing him on the sideline, you can’t help but feel he is under serious threat of getting the axe now and had the players put in the effort and we’d lost, which would have been expected, maybe that wouldn’t be the case.
I’m still not sure why he has chosen some players over others, but maybe there is a reason. I am not sure why Marcus Bignot is not in the side and in a game like this, when you need character and experience away from home, he surely would have been a good choice. Zesh Rehman is a tall defender, so perhaps Gregory and co thought he’d do well in the air against the tall and powerful Miller? That seems logical, but what isn’t logical, is West Brom don’t pump the ball up the pitch wide like that – the open play was always going to be into fit and passing it around, so with that in mind, Bignot would have been a more sensible choice to me. But hey, what do I know?
We are quite desperate now to bring in some much needed quality to the club through the loan system. The quicker this happens and the quicker we get some fresh faces in there, the better because at the moment the confidence is so fragile that we’re collapsing whenever we concede, regardless of whether we are playing well or not. It’s a habit we need to erase from our game real fast.
I couldn’t help sit there and think about how many times Michael Mancienne has saved us this season, and perhaps had he played, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but similarly, what if he hadn’t played in some of the matches before, maybe those would have been as bad as this today.
