QPR 1-2 Norwich

Match Report

This home game and the next were supposed to be bankers – first 23rd placed Norwich and then 24th placed Sheffield Wednesday on three days’ time. And we’ve won our last four home games back-to-back. But this is QPR so, of course, we bottled it. Our performance wasn’t quite as bad as it was against West Brom, in which we didn’t have a single shot in the first half and no shot on target the entire game. But it was close. We let a very mediocre team who’d only won four games in the entire season before this run rings around us. We kept giving the ball away needlessly or kicking it out when under no kind of pressure. Richard Kone, Rumarn Burrell, Paul Smyth, Karamoko Dembélé, Isaac Hayden and Rhys Norrington-Davies all had bad days at the office – even the normally flawless Nicolas Madsen made some unforced errors. I felt sorry for the fan who’d flown all the way from New York to watch this slop, heralded over the PA system before the opening whistle.

Julien Stéphan made seven changes to the team he fielded against West Brom, replacing Ben Hamer with Paul Nardi between the sticks, Kieran Morgan with Amadou Mbengue at right back, Liam Morrison with Steve Cook at centre back, Esquerdina with Norrington-Davies at left back, Jonathan Varane with Isaac Hayden and Sam Field with Dembélé in midfield, and Kwame Poku with Rumarn Burrell up front. That meant we lined up in a 4-4-2 formation as follows: Nardi in goal; Mbengue, Jimmy Dunne, Cook and Norrington-Davies in the back line; Haden, Madsen, Dembélé and Smyth in midfield; and Burrell and Kone in front of them.

We struggled to get going in the first half and were lucky to go in at half time without conceding. A better team would have punished us with at least a couple of goals, but, like us, the Canaries’ offered very little in the final third. It was a difficult watch, with neither team showing any quality. The closest the visitors came to scoring was in the 37th minute, when a strike from David Jurásek was kept out by Nardi with a good, one-handed save. That was their only shot on target in the first half. According to Fotmob, we had one too, but if we did I must have missed it.

I turned to Charlie during the break and said, “You know what their manager is saying in the dressing room right now? ‘This is ours for the taking lads.’” Sure enough, Norwich came out of the stops looking much more up for it and scored within less than a minute of the restart. It was a defensive error from Mbengue, letting Josh Sargent run in behind him and head the ball into the bottom left corner from the right-hand post.

I was hoping that going a goal down would light a fire under us and we might actually start playing some football, but no such luck and Nardi had to make two more saves as the visitors grew in confidence. We improved slightly when Stéphan replaced Dembélé and Smyth with Poku and Koki Saito in the 57th minute, although Kieran Morgan was no better than Hayden when he came on for him in the 65th minute, giving the ball away with his first two touches and at fault when Jovon Makama scored the Canaries’ second in the 96th minute. The final substitution was Ryan Kolli for Richard Kone in the 75th minute, but the Algerian made little impact.

The only QPR player to turn in a decent performance was Mbengue, although not until the second half. He scored a consolation goal for us in the 99th minute – there were nine minutes of added time, due to the visitors’ time wasting – when he got hold of the ball just outside the box and unleashed a fizzing shot straight down the throat of the keeper who really should have done better. It did little to compensate for another miserable display from the R’s.

How we’ve gone from winning four home games on the trot to the last three performances is a head scratcher, but, as Charlie said afterwards, we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that QPR are a ‘streaky’ team. We enjoyed a winning streak, climaxing with our 4-1 victory over Leicester, so now it’s time to strap in for a losing one. Prepare for us to to be beaten at home by the Owls on Sunday, gifting them their second win of the season.

You can watch the highlights on YouTube here.