Back to the drawing board for QPR

It had seemed pretty straightforward. Would I write an end of season piece on QPR for the website? Fine. It had been an okay season. We looked set to finish 15^th. Nothing special but nothing too awful. The last few months had perhaps been best summed up by the page on the BBC football website which had us down as "chances of relegation 0%, chances of promotion 0%."

After the ructions of the last few years the prospect of a season of mid-table obscurity was no bad thing. For a pleasant change there had been no sudden crisis at the club. But of course I should've known better! This is QPR we are talking about - the Donald Trump of the football world with an unerring ability to create a crisis out of thin air. And sure enough just as I was about to press 'send' on the article the newsflash came through: QPR had sacked their manager Marti Cifuentes. The club statement actually said he had been placed on immediate 'gardening leave' but we all know what that means.

This didn't all quite come out of a clear blue sky. For some weeks there had been rumours that something was going on at the club. Faced with an ever lengthening injury list Cifuentes was said to be increasingly unhappy with some of the backroom operations. But rumours swirl around clubs all the time, and I guess a lot of us thought this was another of those stories dreamed up by a journalist from The Sun with a couple of pages to fill on a quiet Monday morning.

But no, here it was as a news alert, the club were "hoping to resolve the situation as soon as possible". We are back on the managerial merry-go-round. The club is now looking for its fifth manager in three years.

There clearly has been some friction behind the scenes. The club has had an alarmingly long injury list this season with six or seven first choices ruled out at any one time. Cifuentes has expressed his frustration. Some have pointed the finger at QPR's director of performance, Ben Williams, who is responsible for a lot of the physical conditioning of the players. But in September Williams also took on a second job as Director of High Performance at the American basketball team the Brooklyn Nets. On my atlas it's some three thousand four hundred miles from Loftus Road to Brooklyn. That's quite some stretch for one man with two jobs.

A lot of names are being bandied around for Cifuentes successor. Several of them regularly appear whenever a managerial vacancy occurs. I suspect Gary O'Neill's name comes up because of the QPR connection: many of us remember him as the player who got sent off in our in our memorable Wembley play-off win over Derby ('…oh Bobby Zamora!...').

My hunch is that this time it will again be someone from outside these isles, probably from one of the European leagues, most likely an unknown name that will have us all scurrying for our search engines.

Whoever the new man is will have to be comfortable working in a fractured management structure with a twenty-seven-year-old CEO who also doubles up as director of football. As we have seen that can make it very tricky when it comes to signings and transfers. Unsurprisingly no one wants to admit responsibility for some of last summer's disasters. We have ended up with no reliable strikers, too few full backs and a surfeit of midfield wannabe playmakers.

He will also take some time to adjust to the gruelling demands of the Championship fixture list. We have a squad at the moment with too many players who only want to play pretty football. Some games in this league you have to be willing to get stuck in.

We will miss Cifuentes. He got us out of two relegation scares. Only last September he signed a new long-term contract. He wasn't the messiah but he did do enough to keep us in the Championship. A period of relative stability under him might have given us enough time to bring through some of the promising players in our development squad. Now a push for promotion looks further away than ever. Instead it's back to drawing board. Again.