The Glut of QPR Games at Christmas is the Highlight of the Year
I’ve written about how much I like going to QPR games over the holiday period for the Spectator Christmas issue. Here’s an extract:
I remember racing to Loftus Road after a Christmas lunch in 2014 to rendezvous with my wife and six-year-old son to see the Rs play West Brom. I was so worried about keeping Caroline waiting that I ran straight into a lamppost, smashing my glasses. As I squinted into the floodlights, trying to figure out what was going on, Charlie gave me a running commentary, which turned out to be more exciting than watching the game. We were near the bottom of the Premier League at the time, having been promoted at the end of the previous season, and destined for relegation. The Baggies went two up in the first 20 minutes and another defeat looked certain. Then Charlie Austin, our 25-year-old striker, scored a hat trick in the second half, with the winner coming in the 86th minute. That was probably the best Christmas present I’ve ever had.
This year, I’m even more nervous than I was going into that match. At the beginning of this month, the Hoops were again languishing in the relegation zone, only at the bottom of the second tier rather than the first. In the past 13 months we’ve had four different managers – never a good sign – and we’re currently without a director of football. The CEO is doubling up as QPR’s chairman, keeping the seat warm until we can persuade some Gulf potentate to pour money into the club. Going into our last game of November, we’d only chalked up one home victory in the previous year, a club record. Somewhat miraculously, we won that game but with a great deal of help from our opponents, Stoke City, who guided us to victory with an own goal in the 89th minute.
Actually, that may be slightly uncharitable. After a succession of journey-man managers, we’ve just recruited a 41-year-old Spaniard called Martí Cifuentes who looks like he could be the real deal. He’s never managed an English team before, having cut his teeth in Scandinavia, but last season he steered Hammarby to a third-place finish in the Swedish first division and got them into a cup final.
For his first game in charge, QPR were away to fellow stragglers Rotherham, a brutal introduction to Championship football, and I was expecting another defeat. Cifuentes likes his teams to play what’s known as ‘tiki-taka’ football, with the emphasis on short passes and keeping possession, probing for an opportunity to mount a swift surprise attack.
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 fact, we managed a 1-1 draw, which was a big improvement on the previous six games, all of which we’d lost. Some of our defenders were clearly struggling to adapt to Cifuentes’s ‘progressive’ style – it was like watching the hippos trying to perform ballet in Fantasia. But others who’d bridled under Ainsworth’s head-banging approach began to show signs of life. Our most technically gifted player is probably Ilias Chair, a 26-year-old Moroccan international, and he’d been languishing under the old regime, like a racehorse being harnessed to a cart. But he scored a wonder goal against Rotherham, his first of the season. We won another draw the following week, then lost to Norwich, then chalked up our first victory in 13 games against Stoke. We also won again on 1st December. Things are looking up at Loftus Road!
You can read the whole thing on the Spectator’s website.