What a difference a manager makes

Seven months ago, QPR were dead and buried. We were second bottom in the league and six points off safety. Relegation looked a certainty.

Fans started planning for next season’s League One away trips to Carlisle, Lincoln and Shrewsbury. Book your tickets now. Usually in such dire circumstances clubs will hit the panic button and change the manager. QPR know how to do that. They’ve had enough practice.

By last November we were on our seventh manager in seven seasons. The season before last we’d gone through no fewer than three managers in one season.

But the club decided to ignore the problem and hope it would go away. It shrugged its shoulders and decided to give the managerial merry-round another whirl. So, from the seeming obscurity of the Swedish League, we signed Marti Cifuentes the Spanish manager of Hammarby.

Deep in relegation trouble, we now had a manager who no one had heard of and whose name very few could pronounce. Marti who? What could the new guy know about managing the incessant demands of the Football Championship? How would he cope with dark and rainy midweek away games in the mud of Stoke?

Shambles

Marti Cifuentes arrived from Stockholm to be confronted by a shambles at the club. Les Ferdinand had resigned as Director of Football. There were rumours of more boardroom departures. The dressing room had never taken to Gareth Ainworth’s tactics or rather the lack of them. The team was playing as if they had never met each other before. 

But right from the start, Cifuentes made it clear he intended to change things. Early on in his tenure after a close drawn match he was asked in the post-match interview whether he was pleased that we had got a much needed point. Most previous QPR managers – especially one in his position – would have said Yes. Not this one. “No” he firmly replied, you need wins to escape relegation. “The other teams will not wait for us.” 

Slowly but surely, the players responded and the football began to improve as results began to follow. Part of the secret of Cifuentes success was his clear articulation of how he wanted the game played – a patient compact passing game with the ball on the ground. But he was also pragmatic. If he didn’t have the right player for a position in the style that he wanted, he compromised and changed the plan. 

QPR had always struggled at right back. We had tried a number of players there without great success. Then Cifuentes brought in Jimmy Dunne, a centre back at the club who hadn’t been a great success in that position and was now third or fourth choice.

Cifuentes switched Dunne to right back who, to everyone’ s surprise, began to make it work by the sheer forcefulness of his play. As opponents rapidly discovered his ‘they shall not pass’ style of play took few prisoners. But it worked. Even better, at the other end, Dunne also began to score goals at corners and set pieces.

Mood changes

The mood changed. Players started to look as though they wanted to play for the club. The crowd responded to what they were seeing, the noise in the stadium went up several notches and that in turn fed the players. Attendance figures went up and even though we were still in the bottom three, games began to sell out.

Draws began to turn into victories. Goals were still hard come by, but the defence was tightened up and we were often turning in clean sheets. By the time of our last home game we needed one point to finally be safe from relegation. But few of us crammed into Loftus Road that Friday night expected us to get it, especially against an expensive Leeds side pressing for automatic promotion.

What became clear as the game unfolded, as we scored once, then again and then twice more was that not only were we going to win, we were going to overwhelm a good Leeds side. By some margin this was our best performance for a decade.

Too often during the season just gone, there had been games that you wanted to end as soon as possible. Some you wished had never started! Not this one. This was the game of your dreams. You wanted it to go on forever. 

Next season

Can QPR carry this end-of-season promise over into next season? It will be hard. The team squad is limited. We still don’t have any natural goalscorers, we will need a new goalkeeper. The team still lacks pace. This season we were lucky with injuries, next season we may not be. We don’t have much money and no Premier League parachute payments. We have a small stadium. 

Marti Cifuentes still hasn’t been severely tested by one of those sudden inexplicable drops in form which bedevil all managers. When he first arrived much of what needed doing was obvious and he wasn’t tainted in the dressing room by past failures. Next time will be a lot harder.

Apart from the chairman, Lee Hoos, there isn’t a lot of football experience around the club. We don’t have a Director of Football, we have a relatively young and inexperienced Chief Executive. But we clearly have a very talented coach and manager.

It won’t be long before bigger clubs come calling. So, the longer we can keep people saying ‘Marti who?’, the brighter will be our prospects.