archive for February, 2010

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

QPR 2:1 Doncaster Rovers

I was surprised at how poorly Sean O’Driscoll felt his team played, because I thought they played some lovely football and with great discipline and intelligence.

They did miss some sitters though and were weak defensively, so you have to give us some credit for taking advantage and punishing them for not being clinical.

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Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Proceed with caution

Flavio Briatore may have stepped aside, but I don’t think our problems have been solved just yet and we should proceed with caution.

The Mittal family may have upped their stake in the club, but they have also worked with Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone for many years. They know each other well and as businessmen, they’ve shared great success together.

Despite Briatore being a stubborn man, he won’t have made all of the decisions without consulting with some of the big names in that boardroom. A lot of the things he did would have been done with their approval.

Something inside me feels that Amit Bhatia and the Mittal family have been playing the devil’s advocate and a game of ‘good cop, bad cop’, just to keep the fans onside. The reality is, they along with Ishan Saksena, could make just as many unpopular decisions and changes as Briatore did.

People will say that Saksena has made a positive start with his statement, but how many of us know what he looks like? A lot of fans will have missed the fact that earlier in the season, he replaced Alejandro Agag as Managing Director. The official website barely gave this brief statement much air time on the front page.

Can Saksena really have fallen in love with our club in such a short space of time? Because lets face it, there’s not been a lot to love about QPR over these past couple of months.

So while there has been a reshuffle, what exactly has changed? What influence does Flavio Briatore have considering he is still a shareholder? How much have the Mittal family increased their shareholding by and whose shares did they purchase? What is Gianni Paladini’s role and responsibilities as chairman of the football club?

These are just some of the questions I’d like to see addressed, but we shouldn’t have to ask them. The club should be telling us what’s going on without the need to be pressed on this and I hope over the coming days and weeks that we’ll start to see a clearer picture of what the future holds and that communication across all levels within the club improves.

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Busy summer ahead

If you look at the squad today, how many of them will realistically be here next season? My guess is not many.

The likes of Carl Ikeme, Matt Hill, Adel Taarabt, Jay Simpson, Tamas Priskin and Marcus Bent will all probably be on their way for different reasons. Some of them are not going to be up to the standard, whereas others, the better players, will probably want to move on and also play at clubs with more stability.

Then we’ve got players in the last year of their contract, such as Radek Cerny, Nigel Quashie, Martin Rowlands and Gavin Mahon. It’s feasible that some of these guys could be on their way out too. In Cerny’s case, he appears to have been made some sort of scapegoat by Ikeme’s arrival and I can’t see him being happy at being ousted by a short-term loanee who really hasn’t improved us either.

With Nigel Quashie, he’s had a long history of injury problems and people pointing the finger at his performances and he’s already been no stranger to that here having been booed, heckled and consequently substituted at half-time during the Ipswich game. Unless he has an injury-free and an amazing end to the campaign, it’s hard to see how the club would offer him an extension. There will be doubts over whether Martin Rowlands will get back to his best and questions will be asked about his fitness after a career that’s seen a leg break and two damaged cruciates and Gavin Mahon’s not getting any younger either.

Then you’ve got the guys we’re trying to ditch too. Heidar Helguson, Patrick Agyemang, Fitz Hall and Allessandro Pellicori are four players who are going to feel unloved and unwanted by the club, so their futures are going to need sorting out too. It will only be an unhappy camp if they’re left lingering around the place and you might even be able to toss Matteo Alberti into that mix as well.

Those are just the obvious candidates, but what about the rest of them? Who knows how they’re feeling and judging by some of the performances we’ve seen in recent weeks, it clearly looks like some of them just want to get away as soon as possible. And we’ve not even got onto the footballing questions yet, such as, will Rowan Vine ever be the same player again after that injury?

So we could find ourselves with quite the rebuilding job on our hands come the summer and really with major surgery required, the hard work should have already started. We need a manager because this isn’t just about whether these players are good enough anymore, it’s also about solving the lack of harmony, team spirit and togetherness too. And it’s the manager’s job to do this and nobody else.

The manager needs to work out who’s in his plans and which targets he wants to chase in order to rebuild and get players in who fit in with his philosophies and concepts. There’s no better time to start all this than right now and the only reason you wouldn’t is if you’ve already got somebody else lined up but who isn’t available until the end of the season.

The fans will continue to grow restless if these aspects are not dealt with. What are we doing about this stuff and do we have a plan? Because if we’re not careful and don’t sort this out properly we’ll be starting next season on the back foot too.

How the club handles all of this will also impact season ticket sales, but if they do it right they’ll win back support and everybody can start over again with a fresh clean slate. Do it wrong though and make a mess of it, well, I fear the place will be something like a ghost town come August.

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

OH PLEASE, NO…

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse!

If there is one man in football who makes my stomach churn, then it has to be Sven-Goran Eriksson who has just left Notts County.

QPRReport posted this cheeky rumour on Twitter earlier and I am probably in the minority here, but I cannot stand the man and quite frankly if he was ever let near my club’s managerial hot-seat, I think I’d walk away.

For all the talk about the disgraceful behaviour of John Terry as England Captain, well I despise Sven’s lack of footballing principles and morals even more. For me, he took the pride out of being an English player or an English fan and I will never forgive him for that as I can’t look at the Three Lions in the same way as I used to. He’s done generations of almost irrepairable damage by setting a horrendously bad example from the top to the bottom.

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

QPR 1:2 Ipswich Town

Well what can you say?

This was a terrible performance and we didn’t get what we deserved, which should have been a total hiding from The Tractor Boys whose finishing let them down on the night.

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