With thanks as ever to our friends from @LoftForWords – Sam Down gets a visitor perspective on tonight’s game.
An awful lot has happened since we last met. What are your views on last season as a whole, especially the stuff that happened after we last spoke before the game at Home Park in January?
We’d gone into last season relatively confident after ending 23/24 so strongly under Marti Cifuentes. The feeling was a full summer and season under him, with the disaster of the prior two years behind us and some more FFP headroom to work with, offered great promise. It became clear pretty quickly that this wasn’t to be the case and all was not well between manager and CEO. The recruitment last summer was mainly development and analytics projects from European backwaters and the squad was not built for the rigors of Championship football – no pace, no power, no height, no durability (our results decline 10% from an already pretty low base when it’s game three of a three game week). We won two of the first 17 games for the second season running and from there it’s always going to be a struggle. We put a run of results together through the winter by setting up a low block and stodging the midfield up, including the 1-0 at Home Park, but it was rarely good to watch and when injuries chewed into us in the spring we fell off a form cliff again necessitating a couple of nervy wins at Oxford and Preston just to get us over the line. I think with everything that went on staying up with games to spare was a significant achievement.
Obviously the big story at the tail end was Marti Cifuentes’ departure. What happened and who is to blame?
Great question. Depends who you ask at the club. Depends who you ask in our support base. Depends whether you accept that in modern football everybody’s agent is talking to everybody all of the time or if you think that’s some heinous crime.
The relationship with Cifuentes had started to break down the previous summer. After we beat Leeds 4-0 on Sky I think his agent got on maneuvers and started putting him about quite aggressively for the jobs at Norwich, Burnley, Sunderland… There were disagreements over recruitment of backroom staff. Disagreements over recruitment of players. The manager at QPR is now the head coach, the job is bibs balls and cones. The club is run by CEO/DOF Christian Nourry and head of performance Ben Williams who have put together a large coaching and support staff which doesn’t change. To manage the team is to drive Martin Prince’s soap box derby racer – the driver is essentially ballast. Cifuentes wanted more control than that.
And QPR are in a certain place in this world PSR/FFP wise. We’ve got one of the lower wage bills in the league, we don’t have headroom to spend, ambitious managers who do well here are going to want to go places with a higher ceiling. You’ve seen it this summer with your manager, with Liam Manning going from Bristol City to Norwich and so on. So, of course he was pitching for jobs this summer and has eventually got one at a parachute payment club. Personally, I think the gardening leave/West Brom thing was a bit of an excuse – they weren’t getting on and wanted rid.
Do fans hold any resentment to him at Leicester and what sort of reception will he get this season?
We’ll see. The snake emojis have been doing the rounds on Twitter. Personally, I think he saved the club from itself twice in two years – first from the Mick Beale meltdown and disastrous Gareth Ainsworth spell which left us adrift at the bottom, and then from a horribly naïve summer of recruitment that left us with a team that couldn’t physically cope with the league it was in. I’ll always respect the job he did here.
It seemed like your search for a manager went on forever: what are your thoughts on Julian Stephan and the process that lead to his hire?
As said above, we’re looking for a head coach, not a manager. PSR means we’ve also got relatively little to spend (despite having one of the richest owners in football). That immediately means you’re going to attract a certain style and caliber of candidate and that candidate is almost certainly going to be European because they’re more used to this system with the CEO. From a totally uninspiring list, somebody who won the French Cup and qualified for the Champions League at Rennes was probably the standoutcandidate.
How is the team shaping up this season? Recruitment gone as you’d hoped?
There’s been hints at learnings from last summer. In AmadouMbengue from Reading, Kwame Poku from Peterborough and Rumarn Burrell from Burton we’ve focused on putting some speed and physicality back into the team and also bought players who are used to EFL winters and three game weeks. That’s welcome. However…
What are your strongest and weakest areas of the team?
The team finished last season with issues at full back, central midfield and up front. All we’ve done to address that is release the first choice left back and sign a forward from Burton Albion who was playing for Cove Rangers 12 months ago. There’s still a month of window left and, look, it’s QPR, so there’ll be signings plural because we’re always signing somebody. If we add Max Lowe from the Sheff Wed mess as rumoured, if we’re finally the Championship side that prisesKone out of Wycombe, if we sign Brian Central Midfielder who can pass the ball forwards every now and again, it looks very different. At the moment we’re short, but it’s August 11.
How was your first game? Do you think many of the players will be rested for the league cup?
Another problem from last season that apparently hasn’t been cured is our chronic injury list. Already Jimmy Dunne has a hip issue, Steve Cook a foot problem, Jake Clarke-Salter hasn’t been seen all summer, Ziyad Larkeche missed the first game (a whole back four, right there), Jonathan Varane has been injured and linked with moves away and now has a concussion, Kwame Poku seemed to pull his hamstring in game one, Michi Frey hasn’t been seen all summer, Zan Celarplayed very little pre-season and then had the birth of his second child so missed the final friendly, Paul Smyth has done a groin, Rayan Kolli has missed most of the summer… It’s just never ending, and we’re losing players faster than we’re getting them back.
We played very well in the first half against Preston, but looked gassed from half time and ended up clinging to a point against, in my opinion, as poor a team as we’ll face in a long time. We just don’t look fit enough at the moment.
How do you see things playing out, both in this game and the season generally?
Given all that I’m basically expecting our development squad to play on Tuesday. I believe QPR and Plymouth are one and two for most FA Cup Third Round exits, so it’s two teams with a nonsense cup pedigree probably focusing on other things. A real treat in store.
This season… there isn’t a Paul Warne’s Rotherham coming up from League One this year is there? Wrexham and Birmingham are spending Premier League money and Charlton have chucked £10m at their summer. You’re seeing clubs like Derby respond to that in kind. Swansea have just spent £5m on a player. We’re very focused on forcing the average age of our team down so as to try and create development prospects we can sell for serious money so we can start trading our way up the league as well – Varane, signed last summer, already has significant interest from Espanyol and elsewhere. But are we focused enough on putting a competitive team on the pitch? We’ll find out. I’ve got us 18th.