I didn’t go to this game – couldn’t face the nine-hour round trip – and having watched it on QPR+ I’m glad I didn’t. Incidentally, I used to be slightly unsure whether to advertise the fact that I was watching games on QPR+ since the only way you can do that if you’re in the UK is by using a VPN. Would the club get a bit annoyed if someone was publicly flouting its own rules? Apparently not, because the QPR website is now advertising NordVPN, presumably to help fans get around its block on live streaming games in the UK.
Anyway, I’m not going to write much about this game because I wasn’t there and because little of interest happened. Like Middlesbrough, Sunderland are a mid-table club that has done enough to survive, has little hopes of getting into the play-offs and therefore has basically checked out for the rest of the season. Going in to this game, the hosts had lost the previous six, which is beginning to feel like one of Mick Beale’s signatures as a manager – toxic after-shock. These are the sides we need to beat if we’re going to survive, but, frustratingly, we lost to Boro and only managed a draw at the Stadium of Light. That’s not good enough. One point per game from now on will leave us with just 48 at season’s end, two below the average needed to survive in this league. Luckily, the teams around us either lost (Plymouth, Stoke, Birmingham, Sheffield Wednesday) or drew (Huddersfield, Blackburn), although that’s also a source of frustration since it means that if we’d secured all three points we would now be 17th instead of 20th.
Martí Cifuentes made two changes to the team he fielded against Middlesbrough, replacing Michael Frey with Lyndon Dykes and starting Isaac Haydon in preference to Sam Field. That meant we lined up in a 4-2-3-1 formation as follows: Asmir Begovic in goal; Jimmy Dunne, Steve Cook, Jake Clarke-Salter and Kenneth Paal in defence; Jack Colback and Hayden in front of them; Chris Willock, Lucas Anderson and Ilias Chair as the attacking trio; and Dykes leading the line.
We were the stronger team and, as Marti said afterwards, did enough to win, but we were better in defence than in attack. Our back four, with some assistance from Colback and Hayden, managed to deny the hosts a single shot on target, whereas we had five. Unfortunately, only two of those tested their keeper Anthony Patterson – an attempt from Anderson in the first half and one from Willock in the dying minutes of the second.
That latter effort was our opportunity to win the game. Sinclair Armstrong, who was on for Dykes in the 64th minute and proved to be much more of a handful, got in behind after a lovely ball over the top from Joe Hodge, who’d replaced Chair in the 63rd. Armstrong cut the ball back for on onrushing Willock, who got off a shot, but Patterson managed to get a palm to it. Even though he pushed it out back in front of him, Willock was travelling too fast to check himself, so didn’t manage a second. It was the best chance of the game and one Willock really should have put away.
Apart from a couple of periods in which the Black Cats went up a gear, we effectively controlled the game, which was good to see after our lacklustre second half performance against Boro. Cook looked a little off the pace, as did Chair and Anderson, but Dunne and Clark-Salter were both immense, as was Hayden. Hopefully, when we come back from the international break and play Birmingham on Good Friday everyone will have fully recovered from the recent glut of games. Of the remaining eight matches, only two will be played against teams currently below us – the Blues and Sheffield Wednesday – and Birmingham’s recent form is worse than Wednesday’s. So we really, really need to… well, you get the idea.
You can watch the highlights of today’s game on Sky here.
Incidentally, I’d recommend a recent Substack post by Peter Loehmann, a Wednesday fan, who’s come up with a fairly simple model to predict the final league standings. He produced it when there was still 11 games left to play and predicted the results, based on the form the teams had displayed in the five games before the last 11. The closer the number is to 0, the easier the game is to win, and the closer it is to 1, the harder, with the the square turning greener if the game is easier and red if it’s harder. A glance at the bottom 10 half of the table shows that QPR have a relatively easy run-in compared to our fellow relegation strugglers.
Loehmann thinks the three teams to go down will be Stoke, Wednesday and Rotherham, with QPR finishing 15th! But before you get too cocky, take a look at Loehmann’s estimation of the difficulty of our penultimate game, against Leeds. Let’s hope we’ve secured survival by then and aren’t relying on getting anything out of that.
Still in our hands.
No reason why QPR shouldn't do really well in the National League; It's all about finding your level.