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.
Billy Sharp put in a real poor performance for them and I thought his attitude and lack of commitment stuck out like a sore thumb when compared to his team-mates. He cost them getting anything from the match.
Still, they had one or two questionable offside decisions go against them after beautifully working the high line that our defence tried to hold.
They also showed us how you’re supposed to take corners. They fooled us more than once and in return, we had the usual complete breakdown in communications at the other end between Akos Buzsaky and Antonio German.
O’Driscoll may have not been happy with his team, but you could see there was a plan and that the players were trying to execute it against us. It’s that organisation that we’re missing and something a new manager must solve.
Our performance however was a step in the right direction. We’re still a long way from the levels we should be at, but we worked hard and got what matters, which was the win and three points.
The players are still playing in a reactive fashion and relying more on individuals to carry us through, but it was still more positive than negative overall and a massive improvement over recent weeks gone by.
I hope we can be less naive in the future, because playing as long as we did without Alejandro Faurlin in most cases would have been suicidal. Doncaster could and should have punished us in the time he was off getting patched up.
Antonio German will rightly grab all of the headlines with his performance and goal, but it’s important not to get carried away and expect too much of him too soon.
He isn’t the finished article and still has that rawness about him that young players do and at times he played with a youthful mentality by trying to bulldoze his way through two or three men at a time.
You can’t get away with that at this level and that’s something he will learn over time with experience. It was great however to see a youngster come through and put in a shift with such a positive and fearless attitude.
He won many headers and retained possession at the same time that a lot of our senior strikers would not have and he led by example by showing them that working really hard will win you support from the terraces too.
I really hope this win is the turning point for the players and that we can use this as a springboard for a good finish to the campaign. It’s now our turn as fans to get behind them more and really show them our support.
