On 22 October 2022, QPR were top of the Championship table a point ahead of Burnley after each had played 16 games. Ahead of Saturday’s meeting between the clubs at Turf Moor there is now a 48 points gap separating the two; one has achieved promotion with fixtures to spare, while the other hovers perilously close to the League One trapdoor. Spoiler alert: it’s not Vincent Kompany’s Clarets who are in trouble.
The Championship is a notoriously volatile division. Numerous clubs have been swept up in its tide of misery, going weeks or even months at a time without a win, as QPR know all too well. From having their feet up on a lilo in the five-star hotel pool, QPR are now trying to escape a tsunami with armbands on.
After earning 30 points in their opening 16 games, they have since taken 14 from their last 27. Leicester, Reading and Forest Green Rovers are the only clubs in England’s top-four tiers to have won fewer points than the R’s in 2022 and had Reading not been docked six points earlier this month for breaching profit and sustainability rules, they would be in the bottom three with three games remaining.
Inevitably, given the club’s implosion, fingers of blame are being pointed accusingly in all directions. Mick Beale, the club’s first manager of the campaign, is the obvious villain in this particular horror movie, if by no means the only one.
“Integrity and loyalty are big things for me, and if they are the values you live by you have to be strong,” Beale said after rejecting an approach from Wolves in October. “I have been all-in here and I have asked other people to be all-in so I can’t be the first person to run away from the ship.” He promptly jumped into a speedboat headed for Glasgow as the Titanic started to approach the iceberg.
“They went for the bright, shiny, new age thing in Mick Beale who came in with all his bravado and brashness and chat, and I think he captivated the board, the director of football and the players a little bit,” Clive Whittingham from the Loft For Words website tells i. “They put a lot of faith in him, let him bring in lots of players he’d worked with before but he was looking to get out almost from the moment he got in.”
After enjoying an early season bounce under one of Steven Gerrard’s former assistants at Aston Villa, QPR sought a mid-season bounce with another. Neil Critchley succeeded Beale at Villa Park and then did likewise at Loftus Road. One win in 12 games later and he too was gone.
“It went really poorly for Critchley,” Charlie Wise from the Talking Rangers YouTube channel tells i. “Things were looking really bad, the mentality of the players was shocking, they were low on confidence and the downwards momentum just went out of control.”
Critchley was then followed by Gareth Ainsworth, a club legend from his seven years as a QPR player who answered their SOS call and left Wycombe Wanderers after 11 years in charge. The board “pulled the nostalgia lever” says Whittingham.
Alas, sentimentality only goes so far. Ainsworth has so far been unable to arrest the slide, losing seven and winning one of his opening 10 games. Results have been poor and performances hardly better, with Ainsworth’s renowned direct style of play appearing ill-suited to a squad that was assembled to play a more possession-based game.
“The Ainsworth appointment is hugely dissimilar to the last four of five managers that we’ve had,” Wise says. “The supposed strategy from the club is to create a platform for young individuals to come and play in a nice attacking style that will get them shining.
“What does Gareth Ainsworth’s style supposedly present an opportunity for players like Chris Willock and Ilias Chair to go out there and showcase themselves when they’re watching the ball fly over their heads for 90 minutes?
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Ainsworth but it was probably the wrong time for him to be thrown into the pit of doom that QPR are in right now.”
“They underestimated how rotten our team is, and overestimated how adaptable Ainsworth might be,” Whittingham adds. “It’s very sad to watch a guy we all think so highly of going through this now because his style and tactics with this group of players looks like a hopeless mismatch.”
The players themselves certainly haven’t got a free pass from the QPR blame game. Both supporters that i spoke to used the pointed phrase “downed tools” to sum up the squad’s efforts to halt the unstoppable descent.
Ears will have pricked up last weekend when veteran striker Chris Martin asked the rhetorical question “How dedicated are we off the pitch?” following a calamitous 3-0 home defeat against play-off chasing Coventry City. It seems damning of the leadership vacuum in the dressing room that Martin has captained the side recently, despite only joining in February.
There are undoubtedly talented players in the squad. Chair has been linked with Premier League clubs in the past and was a member of the Morocco squad that reached the semi-finals of the World Cup; Willock contributed towards 18 Championship goals last season; Lyndon Dykes is a consistent starter for Scotland. But collectively they have lost their way.
The production line from the academy has also seemingly run dry. Eberechi Eze was the poster boy for the club’s plan to develop talented young players, ideally from their own youth sides, and sell them on for big fees. Eze scored 20 goals and provided 11 assists in 104 Championship games for the club to earn a £20m move to Crystal Palace in 2020.
A failure to unearth the next Eze either in-house or through scouting has proven costly. Player sales are an integral part of QPR’s business model, but in the five transfer windows since that record-breaking Eze sale, the club has sold only one player for a fee: Jordy de Wijs to Fortuna Dusseldorf for less than £1m. Meanwhile, in February, the club’s financial results for the 2021-22 season revealed losses of £2m per month.
Inevitably, when nothing seems to work and everything appears broken, the suits in charge of overseeing everything from managerial appointments to player recruitment to implementing an academy programme, come under scrutiny. Director of football Les Ferdinand and CEO Lee Hoos have borne the brunt of criticism over their decision-making.
“Our owners are fantastic in the sense that they pay for their mistakes,” Whittingham says, alluding to the club’s financial situation. “But at the same time, they don’t know what they’re doing. The clubs like ours that are doing well have owners like Matthew Benham (at Brentford) and Tony Bloom (at Brighton) who are switched on and clued into everything, they’re at every game, they drive the whole ethos of the place. Ours are constantly fumbling around trying to employ somebody who does to do it for them.”
“We need some fresh ideas and a complete redirection because it’s an inexcusable demise this season from where things were looking,” adds Wise.
The prospect of relegation is bleak for any club but especially more so for QPR given their lofty position earlier in the season. With games rapidly running out, Saturday’s game with Burnley is a must-win. And an unpleasant reminder of just how far they have fallen.
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