pause for thought at loftus road

Make what you will of the Evening Standard's assertion that our QPR are looking to pick up a couple of unwanted Spurs players. It's not a great newspaper. It gets things wrong. There is rarely any evidence of much affection for our club. But if there is any truth in this, how excited should we be about the prospect of Jermain Defoe and William Gallas joining Mark Hughes's rapidly evolving squad?

Defoe is (just) the right side of thirty and is considered good enough by the England manager to have warranted a place in the Euro 2012 squad. He would be signing on the back of a decent 2011-12 campaign (11 goals in 25 league games, 17 goals in 38 games overall) so we know he can still find the back of the net. A reasonably exciting prospect then.

Gallas? Very much the wrong side of thirty, and looking back on a season disrupted by a variety of injuries. Were he to form a central defensive partnership with the Tottenham cast-off already at Loftus Road (Ryan Nelsen), we'd be looking at the Premier League's most grizzled pair of stoppers.

Perhaps more exciting than talk of Gallas in a hooped shirt is the news that our popular club Chairman is now looking seriously at three possible sites for a new stadium.

Loftus Road has been the only home-from-home that most of us have ever known. Only the true veterans among us can remember the 1962-63 season, when the Rangers plied their trade at the cavernous White City Stadium just along South Africa Road. Fewer still will remember the club's other short period of playing at the giant former Olympics venue. Anyone who was ten years old when QPR played the final game of their 1931-33 White City stint would be eighty-nine now. Any fans of such long standing reading this article today are warmly congratulated on their incredible staying power.

With the prospect of a new ground now seeming to be a less distant one, talk among supporters is rightly turning to concern that any planned stadium should keep us close to the pitch and able to create the Istanbul-like atmosphere that visibly rattled some visiting teams last season. But whatever the level of justified affection we have for Loftus Road, many will agree that it is not a suitable home for a club looking to establish itself at English football's top table in the twenty-first century. Small, cramped and with basic facilities, it offers no room to grow. So worries about how far any new base would resemble the current ground in terms of atmosphere are, perhaps, a nice kind of problem to have. Better, surely, than the prospect of being forever hemmed into a tiny plot of land between the flats of the White City Estate and the terraced houses of Ellerslie Road.

Should that new ground ever be constructed, it is to be hoped that as well as being properly atmospheric, its design will include elements of tribute to our greatest names from the past. Those of us old enough to remember him are still reflecting on the horribly premature passing of one of the most distinguished of these, the late Alan McDonald. Will anyone coming up through the club's youth system now go on to play more than 400 games for QPR? Or anyone who comes up through the improved system being set up by the recently appointed technical director? It seems doubtful.

With the worst of our traumas behind us, it seems, the future of the Rangers does now seem brighter than it has for many years. Great players will join us. Perhaps even players good enough to join the ranks of our few true legends. But it does not seem very likely that any of these will dedicate as many years to the Superhoops as Macca did.

If you have time, a summer visit to Loftus Road is to be recommended. The streets thereabout seem eerily quiet in comparison to what you experience on a match day. But this is fitting. It gives you pause for thought when casting your eye over the tributes to Macca which are arranged to one side of the players' entrance on South Africa Road. The book of condolence is still open and you might like to jot down a few words of appreciation. As we ponder what a seemingly exciting future may hold for our club, it's good to offer up our appreciation for one of the players who truly shines out when we look back over the often frustrating but always compelling story of QPR to date.

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