At the beginning of the 23/24 season, QPR enjoyed the unwanted distinction of being the team most likely to be relegated. This wasn’t just according to the pundits – three of the Telegraph’s five football reporters predicted QPR would go down. It was also the verdict of Opta, a British sports analytics company, which had us finishing the season dead last. As I wrote in the Spectator at the time:
It got a supercomputer to run 10,000 simulations of how the season is likely to play out and 23 out of the 24 teams won the title at least once, with the only exception being the Super Hoops. Our chances of coming last according to the computer are 31.6%, higher than any other team, and our chances of finishing in the bottom three… are 62%.
Such dire predictions weren’t surprising, given how we’d fared in the previous season. Me again:
After a strong start in which we were briefly top of the league, we lost our manager to a more glamorous club (Glasgow Rangers), sacked his replacement after 12 games, and then brought in Gareth Ainsworth, the 49-year-old manager of Wycombe Wanderers, who looks like the lead singer of a 1970s rock band. He managed to keep us up, but only just, winning three of his 13 games in charge. Over the course of the season we conceded 71 goals, the second worst defensive record in the league.
Ainsworth’s record as manager didn’t improve. By the time he was sacked on 28th October, we’d lost six games on the spin, were second from bottom and six points from safety. Of his 28 games in charge, he won five, drew four and lost 19 – and only two of those victories came in the 23/24 season, with an away win against Cardiff and three points on the road against Middlesbrough. Those two wins plus two draws netted us a total of eight points in 14 games. Relegation looked nailed on.
According to the Telegraph, the person most likely to replace Ainsworth was Neil Warnock, who’d masterminded Huddersfield’s great escape the previous season. If it wasn’t him, it would be Nathan Jones, formerly of Luton Town, or possibly John Eustace, who’d been sacked by Birmingham a couple of weeks earlier, in spite of guiding them to sixth place. (What a disastrous decision that turned out to be.)
The manager of Swedish club Hammarby, a 41 year-old Spaniard, wasn’t on anybody’s bingo card.
Martí Cifuentes was a surprise appointment on 31st October. I rushed out a post after doing some frantic Googling and decided he looked a lot more promising than Ainsworth:
On paper, he seems impressive – far more so than Warnock. A quick glance at his Wikipedia entry reveals a win rate this season of 52.7%, quite a contrast to Ainsworth’s 17.86%. He’s never managed a team in the EFL before and the closest he’s come to taking on a challenge like this was being appointed manager of Sandefjord in 2018 in the middle of the season when they’d only secured five points in their first 12 games. In spite of his efforts – they only lost six of their next 18 – Sandefjord were relegated. But he rebuilt the team in the lower division, finished second to secure automatic promotion at the end of that season and then steered them to 11th place in the top tier, the club’s best result in 11 years.
But could his progressive, tiki-taka style work with our squad? I had my doubts, as I said in the Spectator:
That’s not a style QPR’s players are cut out for, to put it mildly. Cifuentes’s predecessor, Gareth Ainsworth, was an English manager from the old school, believing our best hope of winning games was to sit back and defend, then try to catch opponents off-guard with long balls over the top. This is disparagingly referred to as ‘Brexit football’ in contrast to the European approach favoured by brainy tacticians like Cifuentes. Expecting our ragbag of Premier League rejects and injury-prone war horses to play like Barcelona was a bit unrealistic, surely?
In his first game in charge, we drew 1-1 against Rotherham away, which at least brought our run of defeats to a close. In retrospect, the most significant thing about that game was Ilias Chair scoring his first goal of the season, heralding a return to form that would see the Moroccan net seven in total over the next six months, making him our joint top scorer in all competitions, alongside Lyndon Dykes.
It took until our last game in November, at which point we’d only won at home once in the previous year, for Cifuentes to chalk up his first win – 4-2 against Stoke. We then won the next two – and the fans’ enthusiasm for the paella-eating, Estrella-drinking Spaniard reached fever pitch. Three on the spin! Goals in front of the Loft! We’d forgotten what this was like.
But the glut of games around Christmas brought us back to earth, with a disappointing 0-0 draw against fellow strugglers Plymouth on 13th December – in spite of the fact that they went down to 10 men – a loss to Sheffield Wednesday away – these were games we had to win if we were going to stay up – followed by a 0-1 loss to Southampton at home on 23rd December. And then – the nadir – a 2-0 drubbing from Millwall on Boxing Day!
Was the little Spaniard eating low-carb paella and drinking alcohol-free Estrella?
Things didn’t begin to look up again until we beat Millwall 2-0 in the reverse fixture on 20th January. We were still in the relegation zone at that point, but with Cifuentes’s favoured formation of a back four and two defensive midfielders, we were conceding fewer goals – and Steve Cook and Jake Clarke-Salter began to establish themselves as the spine of our defence. This is what I wrote in my match report:
One stat that’s really improved under Cifuentes is the likelihood of our opponents scoring from open play, something that Andrew Scherer highlighted in a data-driven piece in Loft For Words last week. That stat is known as xGA and, according to Scherer, since Ainsworth’s departure we’ve only allowed an average of 0.80 xGA per game, which is less than half our xGA per game under Wild Thing (and below the league average of 1.29 xGA/game).
We had a fantastic February – W3, D1, L1 – partly as a result of doing good business in the transfer window, picking up Lucas Andersen and Isaac Hayden, both of whom would prove critical to our improved performance. Michy Frey and Joe Hodge less so, although they did score a goal a piece – and to be fair to Michy, he was injured for the last part of the season.
We then managed to beat Leicester 1-2 in front of 3,000 visiting fans at the King Power Stadium on 2nd March. That moved us up to 19th and the subhead on my match report was ‘The Great Escape’. It began to look as if we might actually stay up.
Needless to say, there were more stumbles to come. We lost at home to Middlesbrough on 9th March, then got tonked 0-2 by Sheffield Wednesday on 6th April. We managed to go one-up against Plymouth on 9th April, but Martí brought on Albert Adomah for Chair in the 77th minute and the 36 year-old scored an own goal, robbing us of a vital two points. Incidentally, that was Asmir Begovic’s fault and even though there were signs of improvement all over the pitch since January, our Bosnian goalkeeper was alarmingly prone to these howlers.
Our final loss of the season was a 3-0 drubbing from Hull at the MKM Stadium on 13th April. As I said in my match report, we were still just three points from the drop at the end of that game and the teams around us – Huddersfield, Plymouth and Sheffield Wednesday – were all picking up points, not to mention the fact that clubs that had been sucked into the relegation battle – Millwall, Stoke and Blackburn – were pulling away.
Happily, we managed to beat Preston 1-0 at home in the next game, which eased the pressure – although not by as much as some fans thought. I wrote a Nervous Nelly piece on 22nd April entitled ‘Are We Safe?’ in which I went through all the different scenarios in which we could still go down. But those depended on us losing to Leeds in the next game and, praise be to God, we managed to play the best we had all season, beating the Whites 4-0. What a night that was under the lights! Our 1-2 victory against Coventry on Saturday was the icing on the cake.
So, what magic has Martí brought to Loftus Road? Much of his success comes down to tactical nous, setting us up well against rival teams, making clever substitutions and knowing how to deny opponents goal-scoring opportunities. He’s also good at rotating the squad, one reason QPR hasn’t suffered a glut of injuries, which has plagued us in previous seasons (although credit is also due to Ben Williams, our Director of Performance, who was brought in last July to address precisely this problem). Under Cifuentes, we’ve also got better – much better – at defending from set pieces and scoring from them, too. Indeed, our final goal of the season at the Coventry Building Society Arena was from a set piece.
But the thing that stands out for me is Martí’s ability to get the best out of our players. During his tenure we’ve seen significant improvements in Chair, Dykes and Willock, and transformations in the performances of Clarke-Salter and Jimmy Dunne. Who knew Dunne would be so good at right back? Or that JCS wasn’t so injury prone after all? He’s also got Sam Field scoring goals, adding a new weapon to the midfielder’s already impressive arsenal.
How’s he achieved all that? I asked Andy Sinton that question on this year’s Tiger Walk and and he told me it was because Martí coaches the players in the style they want to play in. Ainsworth’s mode of play – hoofing the ball up the pitch and hoping a target man can bring it down – is no one’s idea of what a modern footballer should aspire to. Rather, they want to learn about low blocks, keeping possession and counter-pressing. This is the stardust the little magician has sprinkled on our players. He’s shown them his Spanish box of tricks and given them the confidence to try them out for themselves.
For the long-suffering fans, beginning to lose hope after a succession of poor managers, the last six months have been a vital tonic. I thought some disgruntled former player had put a curse on our dressing room, but Martí’s success has dispelled that sense of doom. I’m feeling more optimistic about the next season than I have done for many a year.
The worry, of course, is that Cifuentes will be poached by another club and rumours are that Sunderland are eying him up. You can’t rescue a team in such dire straights as QPR and beat Leeds 4-0 at home on Sky without attracting some unwanted attention.
I’m hoping he’ll stick around for at least one more season, but he’ll need to be given inducements to stay, such as a budget to rebuild over the summer. That, in turn, will mean selling Clarke-Salter for a decent wedge and getting a cut if Palace sell Eze to City. But if the stars align, and God knows we deserve a bit of luck, next season could be our best since 2010-11. With some money to spend, I have every confidence that Cifuentes and our 26 year-old CEO, Christian Nouri, could strengthen our much-improved squad.
If the Spaniard is still at the helm at the beginning of the 24-25 season, expect some very different predictions to the ones at the beginning of 23-24.
Thank you for your reports, I have only recently found them.
Is your namesake Mr Jones an Rs fan too? One of my most favourite actors.
A very readable post of all Rangers games - I’m not that interested in all the facts/expected goals etc. I am always interested though in your views and your sons. You are a dedicated fan and more of the same next season please.