One problem we have with all the changes we’ve made, is that many of the players and the manager do not understand us well enough yet.

There is a history and culture at Loftus Road and an expectancy on how we want our players to play the game. The fans can be 100% behind you or you can lose them in an instant by your behaviour and actions on the pitch, or your reluctance to do what’s obvious.

I’ve been thinking about how certain players can improve their performances, especially at home, because the support can make a difference.

The players have got to learn how to play to the crowd and get them going. There are some passages of play in football when you build your attacks that please supporters. There’s certain simple passes that allow units to move forward, and when players opt not to make those passes it frustrates the crowd.

Sometimes a simple five-yard pass square is the key to getting the whole stadium behind you and the players need to learn how to do that. Take Joey Barton for example, if he adopted the approach Shaun Derry employed when he arrived last summer, then we’d immediately take our game to another level.

Derry would win the ball, which in itself is always a crowd pleaser, but then whenever he had possession he wasn’t cheap with it. He just played a simple five-yard pass to someone in a better position who could then make a pass that he couldn’t. This sensible play gave us a platform to build on and always got the crowd going.

There’s other situations on the pitch too, when a striker like Heidar Helguson wins the ball with his back to goal, but plays to his strengths and keeps it short and simple. He often finds another man in close proximity keeping the attack alive where others may have not won the ball in the first place, or even if they did, then didn’t make good use of it afterwards.

When you’re out wide, you expect the man to have a go. When Jamie Mackie is on the ball, he gives it a shot and whether he wins his skirmish or not, the crowd appreciate his intent to try and penetrate whereas Shaun Wright-Phillips doesn’t seem to want to have a go, and when he does, he’s doing it very tentatively and looking very worried he’ll get beat. Mackie doesn’t worry about his success rate, he just keeps plugging away and often surprises opposing players because he’s so willing to gamble and ask questions of them.

Clint Hill does his job with minimum fuss. He doesn’t try to be what he’s not. When he’s up against it he’ll simply put the ball out of play and ask his mates to regroup. He rarely ever takes any risks or plays balls that he’s not capable of doing. And that’s why he’s respected by the crowd.

Mackie will chase, harry and close down everything. Maybe he goes overboard going for balls he clearly won’t get and therefore lose his positioning, but he does actually create opportunities out of nothing and still manages to win more balls than you expect he wouldn’t and that kind of work ethic is always going to be admired by onlookers.

Even Adel Taarabt, for all his flaws, just keeps wanting that ball with intent. He will go at it again, and again, and again. Sometimes his decision making lets him down, but other times it doesn’t. He might get kicked and fouled repeatedly, but you know two minutes later when he next gets the ball, he’ll be back for some more.

You can tell right now that some of our newer players know the crowd are not with them, but whenever you try to do something right, they will get on your side and support you. They will get behind you, they will applaud the effort you’ve put in even if things go wrong and they are so willing and wanting to do that it’s unbelievable.

Then we can generate thunderous noise and support from the stands and help create an atmosphere that unites you on the pitch.

In an average game, a player will spend around three minutes on the ball over the entire ninety which is not a lot of time, so you need to make sure that it’s a good three minutes and the best three minutes you can produce.

Block building is important too. If things aren’t going well, simplify your game and tell yourself “today I’m going to make sure every pass I make gets to the person I intended” and go from there. You’ll find that it helps improve your decision making, your concentration and your consistency on the pitch. And it will win you back the crowd.

Know your own strengths. Know your own weaknesses. Know how to play your crowd and get us on your side, because we so desperately want to be and you need us to be.

If I had to award a Man of the Match for matches this season to date, it would go something like this:

4 – Adel Taarabt
4 – Jamie Mackie
3 – Anton Ferdinand
2 – Alejandro Faurlin
2 – Shaun Derry
2 – Daniel Gabbidon
2 – Radek Cerny
1 – Heidar Helguson
1 – Shaun Wright-Phillips
1 – Joey Barton
1 – Jay Bothroyd
1 – Akos Buzsaky

Now, I’m sure if I went over all of the matches again, I might come out with one or two different answers, but the performances fall into three categories: when we’ve played well, when we’ve played poorly and when we’ve been downright awful.

When we’ve played well, it’s been hard to choose a player, and often there are two or three candidates. When we play poorly, there’s usually at least one primary candidate, maybe sometimes two, but when we’re awful there’s generally nobody you could highlight for such an accolade.

It’s harder to choose when we’ve played well, but this is the reason why the likes of Alejandro Faurlin and Heidar Helguson have lower figures than even I expected, but it’s simply because one or the other, or someone else, may have just pipped them on the day they also played extremely well.

So the figures can fool you, because some players made more telling contributions in poor matches, whereas those who have played consistently well look less influential. A better analysis would be to pick the top three players from every match, but I won’t be doing that for the sake of this post.

I think our player of the season to date has been Alejandro Faurlin followed closely by Heidar Helguson. After that, the men that next fall into the list are Adel Taarabt, Jamie Mackie, Anton Ferdinand and then probably Luke Young and Armand Traore would get a potential mention too, and those latter two don’t even make my MoM list but are generally an important component for the team to help it tick over and work.

On the other hand, it also shows that our players from last season have dominated the performances overall. The fact that Taarabt and Mackie lead the charts tells its own story when you see that Shaun Wright-Phillips and Joey Barton have one apiece by my assessment.

I asked myself why Taarabt and Mackie led the charts and the answer I found was that because they either made more telling positive contributions in a game, or provided more effort than anybody else. Those two things are very different, but you’d expect the higher profile players to be hitting the mark in those areas far more often than they currently are.

There were five matches this season where I felt I simply couldn’t pick out any player and because the performances was just so poor and that’s an alarming number of games to be saying that.

I’m really pleased for Rob Hulse. There are those out there who are taking the mickey out of him, but he’s always been a solid and steady kind of player and having made the 25 man squad, he’ll relish the opportunity to try and make a mark for us between now and the end of the season.

When he was last playing in the Premier League, he broke his leg for Sheffield United long before the season was over and still ended up their top scorer with eight in twenty nine games – not too bad. And his goals to games ratio and performance level has always been pretty decent elsewhere.

He’s never been fully fit with us, and that didn’t help him when you’ve a crowd like ours who bay for your blood if you can’t get going from the outset. I wish we were more patient and forgiving sometimes, but he’ll pleasantly surprise when called upon and under Mark Hughes, who likes to play 4-4-2, he’s got a much better chance of playing to his strengths than not.

I think he’s done well in his last couple of outings and I hope if he continues to get playing time that he can grab a goal just for his own good, and I’m actually convinced he can score goals if he gets service in the box. Sure, he’s still probably more a Championship style striker over a Premiership one, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still do a job when called upon.