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• A tactical take on the great escape – tactics

I’m utterly made up and thrilled that Clive Whittingham has been recognised by the club and won Supporter of the Year, it’s made me almost as emotional as the the drama of the last couple of season’s have.

He is very worthy and deserving of the award. His late father was the first person to ever win the Supporter of the Year and it’s wonderful to see him follow in his footsteps.

Much of his love affair with QPR started because of his old man and much of the reason he’s kept going to games from living in Sheffield to flying back from New York for cup matches is just because he can’t let that connection go.

After his Dad’s death, his late friend Stuart continued the trend and kept taking him to games when Clive was just a boy but unfortunately he passed away too. To this day, Clive still rings Stuart’s wife after every match to touch base and tell her how it went.

You sense that it’s never the same for him without them, but he’s made QPR a more enjoyable experience for all of us and the work he’s done on his site for however many years it’s been has bound many people together in ways that we often can’t comprehend.

It wouldn’t be the same without him either and QPR just wouldn’t be QPR without him, and how many fans can you say that about?

Well done mate, thoroughly deserved and I’m thrilled to bits for you and it’s been a privilege accompanying you to games home and away over the last couple of seasons…Clive Whittingham, Supporter of the Year, it sounds good and it sounds right.

It’s hard to describe just how surreal it was, from being safe to being relegated, then safe again and putting a dent in Manchester City’s title hopes before throwing it all away.

Gosh, I’m not sure I want to experience that too much more, but I’ll never forget the game for as long as I live, or the atmosphere inside the stadium and outside afterwards. It took me several hours to unwind and process everything that happened, but being greeted, thanked, high-fived, hugged and shaking hands of City supporters will stay long in the memory. Some even bought us rounds of drinks in the pub afterwards and sang songs with us on the way home on the train.

But let’s try and talk football for a minute. I thought we defended superbly in open play. The players did a great job in an ultra defensive mode and deserve praise, even if all three goals were extremely soft ones to concede.

The shape was far better than Chelsea, this time, with the strikers dropping behind the City midfield and making it extremely difficult for them to break us down.

But we weren’t so hot in possession of the ball, and it’s almost as if we didn’t plan what we should be doing when we were on it. The players’ mentality was all wrong and they just couldn’t switch from defence to attack with any cohesion or harmony. Suddenly players could barely control or kick the ball properly when they’d taken possession of the ball, particularly Shaun Wright-Phillips and Nedum Onuoha.

You feared for us after we went behind, but what character and resilience to come back and equalise through Djibril Cissé and then go one further with Jamie Mackie’s incredible header. Forget about all the money being splashed out on bigger name players, that boy is just pure Gold.

The sending off of Joey Barton helped focus us even more in a strange sort of way. We hadn’t been great when we got on the ball, so it just meant City had it even more and we could continue with our defensive game plan.

I’m not sure if I want to see us approach games in that way too often, in the sense that it was a bit disappointing to see us hoof the ball down the pitch so early on, even before we were reduced to ten, but you have to really admire the courage and application they showed when they were outnumbered. It was a terrific effort and we restricted City and made life really difficult for them.

But I was disappointed by all of the goals we conceded, the third which decided the title was a mistake from the bench who failed to control their emotions and distracted all of our players. And in a flash, City scored and won the title. I say this because it’s important to maintain dignity and integrity, even if this was just an honest explosion of joy. We wouldn’t want something like that to happen to us further down the line.

It’s important to show no sentiment to anybody and to always be ready to do our job and get the results we want and we really should have come away with something here considering we were leading in injury time.

It was still a breathtaking way to end the game and season though and the scenes afterwards were amazing. Had we gone down, I would have still said it has been a wonderful season, but would have been one that ended in disaster. Instead, it’s turned into a fantastic campaign for the club and provides us with an incredible opportunity to move forward, and we must learn from our mistakes and seize it.

The fine margins in football can be so dramatic, and I want to say well done to Neil Warnock, well done to Mark Hughes and well done to the players and the Board.

We did it and we did it in the only we we know how, the QPR way.

You Rs!

The basic theme is they ask me a few questions about a match and my thoughts on what we should do for the next one.

I’ve done a few so far, which include:

• Wide areas hold key to positive result at City – tactics
• Coroner’s report on Chelsea massacre – tactics
• Redknapp found wanting by Hodson, Hughes and Barton – tactics

Check them out.

We’re not out of the woods yet by a long way, but what an astonishing end.

You have to give the players credit for hanging in there, even if they didn’t play very well, but we’ve got to understand the immense pressure they would have been under to deliver a result.

I’m as surprised as anybody that we’ve won five games on the bounce at home, which is a remarkable turnaround and without it, we’d have been long cut away at the bottom.

It was an awkward match for us and as we grew in desperation, the worse our play became by the decisions we made and played right into Stoke’s hands.

Stoke weren’t great on the day but should have taken the lead through Cameron Jerome early on. He missed an absolute sitter and had it put that away it might have been curtains for us.

I didn’t agree with Mark Hughes’ decision to bench Djibril Cissé, even if it looked like a genius thing to do, but Adel Taarabt was thoroughly outstanding and really carried the entire side. He was the only player who didn’t seem to be affected by the magnitude of the occasion and was able to play his game and apply his quality.

When Cissé finally arrived, we suddenly had two players of genuine quality and unfazed by the occasion and that made all of the difference.

It was a tidy finish by Cissé, because it wasn’t an easy one to hit as it bounced up on the half volley, but he’s just such a classy operator that you knew if it fell to him in there, he’d have a chance.

Apart from that, we just didn’t build our play very well and didn’t keep the patience we needed to go side to side and generate pressure or waves of attacks. Until we scored, we never really looked like scoring and hadn’t tested Thomas Sorensen a great deal in their goal.

I thought we could have been a bit sharper and brighter when looking for second balls too. That’s the key to Stoke, they’ll always win lots of headers in attack or defence, so really you’ve got to come alive when the ball drops and win your skirmishes in there.

I know the fans got on Robert Huth’s back as well, but I thought he had an excellent battle with Jamie Mackie, which he largely won. It’s not often we’ve seen Mackie physically dominated like that and he found the German really tough to get past and Huth was also playing out of position at left-back.

Anton Ferdinand rose to the occasion well for us though and put in a commanding display. We coped with their aerial bombardment relatively well.

Overall, we have to simply be delighted about the win and at this stage it’s not about performances, it’s just about results and we’ve got a huge one here.

But the players have now got to go to Manchester City and play the game of their life. They might just need the one point and they’ve got to play for as many as they can.

This time next week, it’ll be all over, but boy we aren’t half digging our heels in and clinging on for dear life.

Come on You Rs!

Oh Rangers, why oh why?

It’s difficult to fathom how an expensively assembled side like this can play in such a stupid and dumb manner. We gifted the win to Chelsea on a plate and everything we could have done to play to their strengths we did, and everything we could have done to play to our weaknesses, we did. It was really mind boggling and astonishing to watch. Or “dunce”, as I put it to those around me.

We were truly woeful from a tactical perspective and lacked any sort of intensity needed for a derby match like this and Mark Hughes has to bare the bulk of the responsibility for the way the team played. They were clueless and they’ve no excuse for it at this stage of the season and given the pedigree of some of the signings he’s made.

I’m still trying to work out what exactly the game plan was from a defensive and offensive perspective, because we couldn’t have been any more naive at any point, and it’s difficult to know where to start.

But I spoke about a lot of things in the week in a piece I did over on LoftForWords on what to watch out for in this match and we ignored them all.

We didn’t man-mark the defensive midfielder, which should have been Bobby Zamora’s task and let Michael Essien dictate play from the base of the midfield. What Zamora’s role in this game was defensively, I’m not sure. He didn’t get close to anybody. Not Essien, not John Terry and not Bosingwa. He just operated in an in-between, not really picking up anybody or impacting play or shape in any form and I thought it was a dreadfully disinterested performance on his part. It was like playing with ten-men.

This led to the midfield trio being sucked way out of position and the way they just waited for us to blindingly wander out of shape and pop simple balls in behind was pretty embarassing given the amount of times we fell for it and it was very much rabbits in the headlights in there.

I also spoke about the need to be clean and tidy in the centre of the pitch, but sadly Shaun Derry lost the ball with barely 20 seconds on the clock with an unforced error and the rest was history. He gave the ball away cheaply and Chelsea are just too mechanical and efficient to waste opportunities in the way we did and they waltzed through us with terrifying ease. Once Daniel Sturridge had opened the scoring we surrendered and waved the white flag in a way that was reminiscent of the Fulham game at Craven Cottage earlier in the season.

We paid no respect whatsoever to changeover of possession, barely tracking men, not getting tight and generally not doing anything to sensibly maintain shape. When we did have the ball we were very stactic and the defence just walked out from the back, further seperating them from the midfield unit who were already being pulled out of positions all over the shop. We didn’t deal with the way they play and hold possession of the ball just on the inside of the channels, where they can thread angled through balls or the forward players make late runs from midfield, or diagonal runs across defenders. We just never got close at any point and it was all too easy.

We also failed to adapt to the pitch conditions and seemed surprised whenever the ball didn’t react in a fashion you would normally expect it to. To be fair, Chelsea struggled with this a little bit too, but they eventually adapted and we were never able to.

They were able to shift through the gears at will and we were very fortunate that this ended just 6-1, because it easily could have been a far greater score.

We lacked everything from intensity, pride, character, discipline and fight here and that’s desperately disappointing and certainly this wasn’t the type of performance I expected to see.

We have to put this to bed though and regroup fast, because Stoke City is a make of break game for the club and they’ve already put themselves under an enormous amount of pressure by the manner of which they played here.

You can accept losing to good sides, but you’ve got to try and play properly and we never did that and never looked like we wanted to either.

I thought Spurs looked like they lacked the energy levels needed to really pry us open, but their technical play was still excellent and required us to put in another gutsy backs-to-the-wall job.

I’ve always maintained over a long period of time that Adel Taarabt would be crucial to our survival hopes, and he’s produced another match winning moment here with a very important goal. The sending off was really petty as well and totally unnecessary. Do we really want to see players getting red cards for the two incidents that he was booked for? It it really worthy? It’s just spoiling the game and making a worse product overall. The referees have to apply more common sense and Mark Clattenburg really lost control of the situation from here on, especially as he didn’t book Scott Parker for diving moments earlier or Gareth Bale for going into the stands. It created an incredibly intense atmosphere from the home fans and it really was bubbling and threatening to boil over.

But back to the goal, perhaps Brad Friedel will be disappointed he didn’t do better, but I actually got on the pitch at half-time as I was doing a pitch side presentation on behalf of QPR1st, and when I looked back across the pitch towards the away stand it was really difficult to see anything because of the sun.

So whoever switched the sides around for kick-off was a smart cookie, because the low sunlight would have had an impact on the players and is maybe the reason why Friedel kept skewing the ball out of play in the first half.

But we really put in a shift. We were a bit sloppy in certain moments when we could have broken away on the counter a little more cleanly, but overall it was simply just about the result.

Jamie Mackie really set the tone from the outset and I thought Taye Taiwo was superb at the back and my pick of the bunch. He’s grown from game to game and has rarely looked troubled by the pacy wingers he’s faced recently. Mackie meanwhile gave the Spurs defence a torrid time with the way he pressed and harried them into mistakes. What a fine season he’s had and he’s growing into an excellent Premier League player to have.

We can only be pleased at how the players have started to gel together and look like they care for one another too. They’ve gone from looking like a fractured group to one that is prepared to fight for one another, just at the right time.

It’s just so important for it to be about the team than any individual. There was one moment when Joey Barton had the ball in the second where he looked like he was about to play a hollywood pass into the channel, but at the last second checked back and just played a simple five-yard pass to retain possession and move us into a better attacking situation. That, considering what went on before with him, is remarkable progress in a short space of time. It wouldn’t have been long ago that we’d have needlessly conceded possession back then, but his return to form proves he can be a really important cog in the machine and looks focused on the job.

They’ve got themselves another clean sheet as well, just at the right time of the season as it breeds confidence and means the players know they can shut top sides out. If we continue to keep the ball out of our net, we will pick up more points and that could be all the difference.

Then of course you have us, the fans. I think we’ve been absolutely marvellous over the past few weeks and have really played our part in lifting the team and getting right behind them. Loftus Road has been a cauldron of noise and it really sends shivers down your spine when we’re in full force. You can feel the impact it has on both sets of players.

All we wanted was for us to give it a real good crack and not go down with a whimper, and whatever happens you can only admire the shot the players are giving at this. They’ve played the last few matches, particularly the home ones, without fear or pressure, and that’s really impressive given the enormity of the situation they find themselves in and this match against Spurs was no different.

Well done Rangers, keep on fighting.

You often hear other clubs commenting on the poor state of our pitch and it’s been that way for years. We need to invest in the best technology and groundsmen available to sort this out and I hope it’s something we’re not going to overlook or just attack with a temporary measure.

Manchester United’s pitch was amazing for this time of the season and we’ve got to make sure ours is better than it has been. If they can do it up North, there’s no reason we can’t improve ours either and I was at The Emirates the other day when Arsenal played Wigan, and couldn’t help but be impressed by the quality of theirs too.

I am thrilled by the news the club is investing in its youth infrastructure and hope to achieve Level 2 academy status under the new Elite Player Performance Programme that’s being introduced for the start of next season.

The current set up would be considered as Level 3, so it would be interesting to know what specifics we are looking at implementing to go up a level, but nevertheless Level 2 is a good starting point to aim for considering how underfunded the set up has been for so many years.

Then there are reports circulating that we’ve taken on Manchester City’s Mike Rigg as a Technical Director to overhaul our scouting and recruitment network, which has been something of a non-existant shambles over recent years, so this is encouraging progress.

Mark Hughes has also recently appointed Damien Roden as Head of Sports Science, and that’s another area we’ve lagged behind in versus other clubs and need to be on the top of our game with.

From here, we still need that training ground but I will hold my breath on it until plans are finalised and approved. It’s so important that we sort that out as quickly as possible, but overall, it’s these things that are the foundation and future of the club and having them in place and shown a bit of love will allow us to grow and prosper properly. It may one day give us a chance to stand on our own two feet, without the need of handouts from wealthy backers.

It’s great that investment has been made in the playing side, but like managers, players come and go and don’t last forever, and neither do owners, which is why it’s critical to build an infastructure that can last the test of time.

We were relatively average in the first half and were poor to begin with, because it took us a long time to get going, but I thought West Brom played well and passed and moved the ball really nicely.

They are a well drilled side and were just a bit too strong for us in all departments throughout the first forty-five minutes and we struggled to deal with their movement.

I was disappointed with the goal we conceded as well, because we just didn’t react to the danger quickly enough and allowed Graham Dorrans too much time to pull the trigger and Paddy Kenny will also feel he should have possibly done better with the effort too.

But on the balance of play they deserved their lead at the interval. We did have some chances in that period, but we couldn’t capitalise and we were always lurking as well, because whenever we did knock the ball around patiently and string passes together, we looked better for it.

The main problem was that we didn’t move the ball quickly enough in the right areas, but at the same time, we weren’t patient enough to hold the play and probe, so often when we passed the ball along the backline, as soon as there wasn’t an option forward, we simply went direct and often gave the ball away. Bobby Zamora had little support too, with players not really getting beyond him and the units in terms of defence, midfield and attack all looked like they were not in tandem.

We got our act together in the second and dominated proceedings, but couldn’t find an end product. The passing was much quicker and we held the ball better in the right areas, forcing them backwards and into a defensive shell for the first time.

But we were sloppy in too many key moments and our own worst enemy when it came to our good play breaking down, and we killed our own momentum we were building by some of the substitutions we made.

I thought Shaun Wright-Phillips had his best minutes after coming on in a long time, and looked threatening intially down the right, but that evaporated as soon as we took Adel Taarabt off for Heidar Helguson.

Taarabt, despite not having one of his better games, was just finding space in the channels inside the penalty box, and had delivered some dangerous balls across the face of the goal. In the first and second period, his best moments came when he was allowed to come off the left and drift into the middle, where he looked lively on the ball.

Taye Taiwo had also managed to put a fair few decent balls into the box, so removing him for Armand Traore was a risk and it didn’t work out. You can understand why the decision was taken, but Traore disappointed and didn’t actually get one single cross into the box, albeit he did win a couple of corners. But it meant Helguson and Zamora effectively got very little service of quality from either flank.

Zamora obviously had several decent chances throughout and will go away bitterly disappointed he didn’t convert any of them, especially the golden chance he miscued in the second that he really ought to have buried.

Nedum Onuoha had a pretty clumsy game as well and a lot of his play was really naive, both in defence and attack. I was frustrated by his lack of conviction at times and there were a couple of occasions where he offered the wide man absolutely no support whatsoever when we were on the attack, despite being in clear space and unmarked. I found that really strange.

But on the other hand, Clint Hill was outstanding again at the back and put in another colossal performance. He won several superb tackles and headers and generally marshalled the defence really well. He didn’t deserve to be on the losing side.

West Brom played better than the first encounter this season and we often had trouble with their system, especially dealing with the players at the top and base of the midfield, where Marc-Antoine Fortune and Youssouf Mulumbu allowed them to control passages of play at the right times for them.

Overall, a point might have been a fairer reflection given how we dominated in the second, but it was always a very close and tight contest that could have went either way and despite all our possession and intent to get forward, we just couldn’t find the right quality on the ball to create the chances we needed, and when we did, Zamora fluffed his lines, so it was just one of those days at the office.

Some will see it as points dropped, but it’s gone now and we’ve got to focus quickly on the next one.