What a weird season it has been. In the autumn we were top of the table with fond distant dreams of possible promotion. By the end, we were grateful to have scrambled clear of relegation.
It has all been like a bad dream, unfortunately the sort of bad dream you don’t wake up from. The repercussions of this season will be felt for some time at Rangers.
What went wrong? Clearly having three managers in one season was a recipe for disaster. Maybe the club should have recognised that a promising younger coach like Michael Beale was bound to attract suitors from other richer clubs. Unfortunately Beale’s definition of loyalty didn’t match anyone else’s when he publicly protested his devotion to QPR and then promptly decamped to Glasgow to manage the other Rangers.
He was swiftly followed by Neil Critchley, but in turn he was dispatched after another long winless run that saw us plunge down the table. In a crisis the club often turns to a popular former player. This time it was Gareth Ainsworth who was lured away from his perch at Wycombe.
These rapid changes meant that the team’s playing style changed abruptly three times. We went from the careful on-the-ground passing style under Beale to a more traditional 4-4-2 with Critchley and then that was discarded for Ainsworth’s hard running, hard pressing methods. All of this of course was supposed to be achieved by the same squad of players who were supposed to swiftly adapt to each of the managers differing demands.
It also led to some strange team selections with central midfielders being asked to try to play at left back. No wonder the payers looked confused. Sometimes they looked downright uninterested. The defence became a muddle of mistakes, the results were disastrous and we played some of the worst football I’ve seen since the dreadful days of Paul Hart.
Ainsworth has made it clear that there is going to be a big clear out of players this summer. This will be only four seasons after Mark Warburton got rid of most of the first team when he came in. The most successful clubs seem to be those where there is a settled playing squad and a settled style of play. Good examples of this are say Brighton and the Ajax method at Amsterdam.
There do seem to be some deeper seated problems at QPR. The role of the director of football, currently filled by QPR legend, Les Ferdinand, has come under increasing scrutiny. Some fans have questioned whether we need the role at all. The leading shareholders at QPR, who ultimately control the club are often not in the country. That means that there are strong arguments for having someone in place to advise the board on football matters and to act as a buffer between the manager and the directors.
Another role of the director of football is to take an overview of the whole club from the very junior teams to the first team squad and ensure there is a coherence to the whole. That means identifying a consistent style of football and seeing that it is played throughout the club. At the top, the managers we hire have to fit the club and not the other way round.
By Championship standards, QPR is not a big club. Our attendances hover somewhere around the 15,000 mark. Our stadium is cramped and aging. The scope for hospitality income is limited. We do have rich owners but their scope for largesse is limited by the Football League’s Financial Fair Play regulations. (We are still paying off the fines from 2014 when we last breached those rules.)
The club has had to adopt a different business model. The plan is to identify promising young players, polish them up, promote them to the first team and then sell them on at a handsome profit. But successive managers have made it clear that they don’t rate the talent that is coming through.
Part of the reason that Mark Warburton got the sack was that he was unwilling to promote players from the youth team to the first team squad. The only major talent that QPR have managed identify and to sell in recent years has been the brilliant Eberiche Eze who is now lighting up the Palace team at Selhurst Park.
The board, the Chief Executive Lee Hoos, and Les Ferdinand as Director of Football have got to quickly devise a way of installing a better conveyer belt for young talent at the club. Otherwise I fear the nightmares of this season will continue.
Phil Harding is a journalist and writer. He lives in Hammersmith, is a season ticket holder at QPR and has supported the team since the early 70s.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and unless specifically stated are not necessarily those of Hammersmith & Fulham Council.
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