For the slick looking third kit, I’ll be bearing the name of Ceryl Guard on my back.

Ceryl joined the QPR Ladies team this season from Team Bath and has around 13 caps for Wales U19 under her belt too. She was the first ever ladies player to be sponsored by QPR1st who have traditionally only sponsored someone from the senior mens team in the past, until now.

Ceryl’s got a terrific attitude. not just to training or football in general, but life too and is a real worthy recipient of the QPR1st accolade. 

Just one more shirt to go…

Over the years, I haven’t really found one particular player that I’ve really admired or liked enough to get his name on the back of my shirt. It’s not that I’m being miserable, but there has been something strangely different with supporting QPR in the last 10-15 years.

I think it was due to the amount we struggled in that time in terms of our financial collapse after relegation from the Premiership. When we pretty much released a whole squad of players and replaced them with new ones, practically three seasons in a row… I sort of found it hard to identify with the players because it takes time to build up that love and loyalty. It takes time to get to know their personality.

But we needed to do what we needed to do in order to survive. So yes, it’s been a while, and Ray Jones’ death was the occasion that prompted me to get his name on the back of my shirts last season. In fact, he was the first name I ever got on my shirt, because as a kid, I couldn’t afford to do it when naming first came out, and I seriously felt spoilt for choice back then too.

This season I had planned to start supporting players and getting names on my back. Rowan Vine was a serious candidate, but his injury meant that it was hard for me to consider. Last season I pondered about whether to get Michael Mancienne’s too, but seeing as he was a loanee, that deterred me, and it’s also why I didn’t get Emanuel Ledesma this season either.

But of course, I had a random moment of inspiration. I realised I didn’t need to restrict myself to the mens team when we’ve got the ladies too, so from this season, I’m wearing their names on my back, starting with club captain Simone Dwyer.

Simone has been a great servant to the QPR Ladies team in the last few years and is the perfect captain to have. She leads by example on and off the pitch as well as on the training ground and is a fitting choice to start with. I shall be getting the home and third kit with other names on too.

Sometimes things just don’t go to plan or as well as you would have liked. To be honest, Paolo Sousa has had it pretty good up until now. Even he may be surprised at how well the players have adapted to his new system in such a short space of time. I certainly have been.

The last two games however have seen some teething issues. Sometimes it’s the players who are responsible but sometimes, it’s just a lack of understanding and responsibility when it comes to certain scenarios with the system.

I don’t really think the players were too much at fault in this match, it seemed to be more their lack of knowhow on what to do with the system as the diamond midfield wasn’t really working against Watford.

I wondered before the match whether it would, because a month ago when we lost 3:0 at their place, they did a great job of operating down the flanks and overloading and they were no different here. They exploited the wide space well where we looked a bit too narrow and congested. We were on top of one another again as we were against Charlton a couple of days ago, which didn’t help.

So, we suffocated our own play at times and too many players were taking far too many touches of the ball as they pondered about where their options were supposed to be or what to do with it. We didn’t get wide quick enough when we had the ball and were a little bit disjointed. That can happen too of course when there are so many changes to the line-up and everybody re-adjusts.

The congestion hasn’t helped us in front of goal either. Like on Friday against Charlton, there was a reluctance to pull the trigger with many players, particularly Martin Rowlands, shaping to shoot but then feinting and running into more trouble, but we still came awfully close once or twice, as did Watford, to scoring. 

The movement of our strikers was not too clever at some points either. After Dexter Blackstock came on and Heidar Helguson moved to the tip of the diamond, I visibly saw him telling them to move apart and get wider to give him space on more than one occasion. They did it when they were told, but as play materialised, both Patrick Agyemang and Dexter wondered back in to the space and a chance to shoot broke down because of it as they both stood in the same area with nobody to Helguson’s right, where he wanted to pass and lay somebody in.

At the back, we were also guilty of some poor decision making on the ball again, where the players skipped A to B and when from A to C or even A to D with their choices when B could have done that job for them with much more safety. An example of this would be perhaps Damion Stewart being on the ball, who could have passed to Peter Ramage to then pass to Hogan Ephraim who’d finally come out wide which would release a midfielder inside or a striker into a wide position and generate movement at a good angle. Instead, they didn’t see the pass or that this particular play could materialise and often switched the ball to the other flank, isolating whoever was over there in a 40-60 heading challenge.

One other point of note while I’m at it, was the lack of balls being played out to the defence by Radek Cerny this time, particularly from goal-kicks. I thought to myself that this was tactical and we were trying to match Watford’s physical direct style like-fo-like, or maybe it’s because we were so congested that he never felt safe enough to do it… we kept lots of possession against Charlton with this approach, but here we gave away too much possession by kicking long and playing the probability game.

Watford were good value as well. They played well in the first-half and Tommy Smith was at the centre of a lot of good work for them. They should have scored in that period, but we did come back strongly in the second-half and the response from the players is a positive sign. We may not have played that well, but the point is, we were not being dominated and looked far less vulnerable and that’s a positive sign in my eyes.

The only real criticism I have is it was one of those days when a lot of our players never really seemed to be in control of the ball. As soon as they ran with it, a lot of them looked like they would lose it or not get enough quality on their pass, which was the case a lot of the time. It affected practically the whole team.

Still, two points may not have been what we wanted, but we’ve not lost any of the games and hopefully haven’t picked up any serious injuries so far. These are teething issues that show there is still work to be done on the system and we have the January transfer window to look forward to as well. 

I expect there will be some movement and it will be interesting to see where Paolo Sousa feels we need to be strengthened, because for all his words about being relatively happy if nothing happens, he won’t be if that’s not the case. We’ve got too many loanees and not enough of our own players, so that needs to be addressed and I’d rather we start bedding in our players in sooner rather than later and I’m not even thinking about this season when I say that, but the one after too.

I suspect the club may be unsure about blowing money on targets when they are not sure which division we will be in next season, which does make sense to a degree and may alter the type of player you want to go for. They may not want to buy players who aren’t good enough for the Premiership and will have to be let go if we get there, but by the same token, we are a Championship club and that means we need to look at our immediate needs.

For some reason I am a bit like QPR this season. I don’t seem to learn quick enough from my mistakes. I turned up at The Valley with just a t-shirt underneath my jacket and without gloves again. Why oh why do I do it?? It was bloody freezing and I spent most of the time hopping up and down and looking like I had some freakish twitch because I couldn’t stop moving in a bid to keep myself warm! I’ve done the same many times this season, including on my birthday which fell on the night of a freak snow-storm in that memorable win over Birmingham at home…

I said after the Preston game that the one thing that worries me is our inability to soak up pressure or realise danger and we got caught cold, in the cold, and conceded two soft goals against a pretty weak Charlton team, both of which came relatively out of nowhere and not during the period where they actually had a go and built up some pressure on our goal, which really only came once they got it back to 2-2.

From the outset, despite Charlton not really doing very much in the first-half, we seemed hemmed into our own defensive zone and our own players appeared to be on top of one another at times. Charlton didn’t particularly press us very hard, but sometimes it can happen like that and I wondered if it was because there were so many changes in personnel that it took a little bit of time before the players adjusted to one another.

Still, Matteo Alberti had a great first-half I thought. I wondered if his selection had anything to do with how he performed in the open training session for the Family Day that the club held. It was a bold move by Paolo Sousa to freshen the side up in such a manner in what will no doubt be an action packed Christmas schedule for all teams. Alberti made several good defensive interceptions and also broke forward well, eventually winning the free-kick that led to Lee Cook’s goal that gave us the lead after taking a high boot near his head from a Charlton player.

We lacked genuine quality though in terms of our final ball and decision making, particularly from the defensive players today and although it wasn’t shambolic by any means, we just needed that bit of class or guile to really take control of the match to finish Charlton off, but it never came. Instead, in both halves actually, we seemed to be reluctant to shoot. It was one of those matches that having a crack at goal may have yielded something in terms of rebounds or deflections. I think if we gambled a bit more we’d have caused them so many more problems.

But when you’ve not won from home for so long and haven’t scored that many, two goals on the road seems like good enough progress to me, especially as we could have lost the game towards the end as much as we could have won it. It’s actually a decent point and we’re still in contention with a strong and able squad ready for Sunday.

One of the main issues of the performance though was the amount of 50-50 tackles we seemed to lose. It always happened in the midfield areas, just when we were looking to build some momentum on the ball, and usually was Lee Cook, Mikele Leigertwood or one of the strikers. I didn’t think Dexter Blackstock did much all game apart from his goal, but I was still delighted because he’s starting to get that knack back of popping up when he’s needed to put the ball home. His goal was really well taken too. In contrast, I thought Samuel Di Carmine had his worst performance for us, not that he did much wrong, but he couldn’t keep himself on his feet and sometimes went to ground too easily for my liking. There’s a time to win free-kicks intelligently, which he does really well actually, but there’s also a time to not pussyfoot about and realise that if you use your quality you can also beat your man and open up new passages of play that can change a game. He just didn’t get that balance correct today but nevertheless, he’s still just a boy and I’m nit picking somewhat.

I don’t usually mention it in my notes, but the officiating was of a pretty dire standard today as well, and for both teams. The amount of times the linesman and the referee looked at one another cluelessly when it came to deciding whose throw it was, was pretty comical really… it’s frustrating when some of them cannot apply common sense, and what I mean by that is understanding the context and mentality of the players in any particular game. They just seem to get the context way off sometimes and to be honest, it’s because they probably have not played the game enough… okay, maybe I’m pulling that out of thin air, but it seems like that from watching them make such decisions.

Anyway… perhaps we should have won this match and maybe if we’d been a little bit more ambitious, we would have. But with a second-string line up and still managing to score two goals on the road, I’m content for now. I just hope that we can maintain our focus and concentration in matches, because there are much better teams out there who are capable of doing damage and it’s slightly irritating that any team, regardless of their quality or form, can simply muster a few crosses or long balls into the box and then suddenly we’re all at sea. I know we’ve done well in many games this season, so it may not be overly fair, but the important point is they’ve got to be ready for when it really matters as otherwise they will cost themselves points as we’ve done here.

I recently wrote an article for the brilliant A Kick Up The Rs fanzine, which can be purchased on match days from the kind folks who shout “A Kick Up The Rs, latest issue!” or from their cool new website at www.akutrs.co.uk. 

It’s the second article I’ve done for them this season and goes on to speak about some of my experiences this season since I got involved with the QPR Ladies team back in the summer. 

It’s in issue 227 and was available at the game away to Charlton earlier today and should be available at the Watford game this weekend.

The past few weeks have seen several matches postponed due to bad weather which has somewhat stalled the momentum the QPR Ladies have generated this season.

It was important therefore last Sunday to try and get some minutes under our belts ahead of the Christmas period as we’re back to league action against Bournemouth on the 4th of January and we need to be ready for it.

Denham, who top their league in the division below provided an ideal opportunity and test for our players in a friendly match at theirs on a sticky pitch with windy conditions.

Due to the personnel available, we experimented a little with our formation but it didn’t quite work and in fact, we were poor overall for the first 45 minutes and lacked intelligence with our play as we struggeld to deal with the conditions.

Both teams missed a glorious chance apiece before Denham finally took the lead from a wide free-kick that sailed into the net after a bit of a mix-up between Nikki Crump and Jess Devoti at the back, resulting in Nikki unfortunately heading into her own net.

Despite this, we managed to equalise through Amy Murhpy whose terrific drive after being teed up by Allana Ashmeil went in off both posts. Allana had not long been on the pitch having come on for Caroline Barker who picked up a calf strain early on and it was a deserved opportunity for her having hit the net 18 times already this season for the Reserves.

But that was about as good as it got for us in the first-half. We were somewhat ragged and prone to hitting long aimless balls forward which surprised us a little bit. We also suffered from dallying on the ball too much and over playing, with many of our players spending too long in possession of the ball or dribbling with it unnecessarily against the wind.

At half-time we spoke to them at some length about the quality of their play and the intelligence required to pass and move it more quickly and with purpose. We expected them to go out and put on a much better showing in the second period and we also switched the formation back to a more traditional 4-4-2 and the response in the second 45 was much more positive.

I thought Seun Odeniyi controlled the game from the middle of the park and put in a performance that was a cut above the rest of the players on the day. Her swiftness on the ball and the manner she dictated the tempo and the play was the springboard for us to push on and gain control the match in important areas of the pitch. It was a top performance and gave us a platform to go on and win convincingly and we added four more quality goals in addition to Amy’s strike in the first-half.

Danielle Clare Richards scored with a crisp low drive from outside of the box to make it 2-1, then Cherelle Albert finished tidily for 3-1 before Seun made it 4-1 with a cool and deserved strike before finally, Susannah Abbott saved the best till last with a rasping 30 yard drive to make it 5-1.

We got there in the end and came away very pleased with the way we performed in the second-half. It wasn’t our best, but we got progressively better as the game wore on and our quality increased with each passing minute. It was an important 90 minutes, make no mistake about it and I feel much more content having seen them play in this friendly than not, even had we not put in a strong performance in the second-half.

You learn in situations like these just how important friendly matches are and can be for the cause. I was also delighted for Chloe Julien, who this season, has had to cover in goal for the reserves due to injuries. She’s not had as much outfield playing time for them as she probably would have liked, but constantly shows a great attitude and wanted to come and watch the first-team play in this match. Her reward was was getting plenty of time on the pitch with the first-team and she’s very much deserved that.

Team: Jess Devoti, Simone Dwyer, Caroline Barker, Nikki Crump, Tammy, Seun Odeniyi, Amy Murphy, Susannah Abott, Danielle Clare Richards, Carla Williams, Cherelle Albert

Subs: Chloe Julien and Allana Ashmeil

I popped along to the QPR Family Day at Loftus Road today to check out the open training session on show. I bought a new lens yesterday too, so gave that a whirl and took a few photos, although you’ll have to forgive me if some of them look a little odd, but I was playing with various settings as I got used to it.

Photos
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