REST AND RESPITE

QPR: misfits R us?

Yes, this is my england has bored on at length twice (here and here) about having felt a bit underwhelmed during the current QPR Championship campaign. But, like any fairweather fan upon whom one cannot rely in the mythical "trenches" about which I hear so much from various Twitter interlocutors (a "melt", if you will, in the vernacular de nos jours), I am finally feeling a real sense of excitement as Saturday looms. That sense of excitement would probably be felt even more keenly were I currently in the UK and spending my weekdays at my usual office, which offers a very good view of Wembley Stadium from one window.

Instead, I am writing this from faraway Bangalore, a week into a ten-day trip. I'm having a busy time of it out here: Meeting. Meeting. Meeting. Meeting. etc. So the distance and the lack of spare time are, respectively, dialling down the sense of being amongst excited people and leaving very few pauses for anxious thoughts.

That said, I am keeping an eye on the build-up to the weekend's Championship play-off final via various online outlets. The buzz of anticipation is, of course, palpable when I look at my Twitter timeline.

Apropos of said timeline, I spotted something there at 7.13 a.m. local time. That's 2.43 a.m. back in England. It was a photo tweeted by our West Ham loanee Ravel Morison.

At the centre of the picture we can see Morison himself. He's surrounded by a group of what I take to be his friends, some throwing rascally gang signs. The setting could well be a nightclub. So Morison would appear to be out and about and having it large during these last few days before what is QPR's biggest fixture for quite some time. Late at night, it seems.

I guess he can't have been doing anything likely to impair his performance. I guess nights out like these are something Harry Redknapp is fully aware of and does not see as a problem. If not, why would Morison make such a picture available to his 108,000+ Twitter followers and to any tabloid journalist (who all hate our club, remember) looking to stir up a bit of shit for QPR? That said, Morison did delete the picture shortly after I spotted it and asked whether he's keeping himself in good nick for Saturday's game.

I guess if the West Ham man is, in fact, being pwopa nawty and thereby affecting our chances of win in some small way, it's just a case of same old same old. We thrive on the legend of Stan Bowles being in the betting shop minutes before kick-off. For quite a long time, many of us were indulgent of Adel Taarabt's apparent lapses of discipline. Both players, after all, delivered the goods many, many times. So I'm sure my worries regarding Morison will not only come to nothing but that he'll also pop up with a dramatic last-gasp winner come the weekend. It's in the script, right? Talented misfits: it's what we're all about when we're at our best, right?

U RRRRRRRRRssssssssss

The silent season ends now?

To date, this blog has featured 88 pieces related in some way to the game of football. This one today is the 89th.

The vast majority of this stuff has been about QPR. I am, after all, much more of a QPR fan than a football fan. Queens Park Rangers can have me ranting and raving and cheering and swearing and all that. Almost any game not involving the Rangers, though, tends to leave me cold. This includes England matches. Because it's been ages since I watched our national team with anything beyond lukewarm interest.

So I've never been a Sky Sports subscriber. If QPR are playing away and it's live on Sky, then I'll make the short trip to the pub at the end of my road. But I've never felt any desire to watch, say, Aston Villa vs. Everton playing live from the comfort of my own sofa. I just don't have a dog in a fight of that kind.

The same goes, I might add, for the razzle-dazzle of whichever league is currently meant to be the best in mainland Europe. I'm dimly aware, for instance, of a UK craze for watching encounters between Spanish sides. But I'm quite content to confine my consumption of that stuff to an occasional YouTube snack: some much-discussed and improbably brilliant goal, for example. A few seconds is fine. But I don't need more.

The Rangers, though. That's always been different. The purely partisan fervour of following my own little club, however dispiriting their adventures have often been. That's what I'm all about. Why, then, has this blog not said a word about the club since January?

All I can say is that without always fully understanding why, I've found the 2013-14 season to be the most weirdly alienating period I've known in almost 40 years of supporting the Superhoops. It's just been a bit meh. A bit blah. A bit whatever. Not for you, maybe. But for me, it really has. I've cheered a few (too few) goals, of course. But I cannot recall swaggering away from a match on an emotional high. It was all oddly boring, I thought, even when the team was occupying top spot in the Championship table.

In QPR terms, then, silence has reigned at this is my england this season. But not only here. At Loftus Road too.

It has been quiet down there, hasn't it? Think back to times when the old dump has really rocked. Even when we lost! I recall, for example, Kevin Keegan's words back in 2003. The then-Manchester City boss brought his team down to London for a League Cup tie and watched them win by a three goal margin. After the match he raved about the noisy, passionate atmosphere at our ground. That all seems a world away from the listless response of the home crowd this season.

The last time I wrote about these feelings, a couple of commenters weighed in with their thoughts. Someone called littlestint6 wrote this:

The issue is partly about the some of the drab football that we have produced this season but also about the conundrum of Premier League struggle against Championship success... I cant go to QPR and want us to lose so that, as a consequence, we dont get promoted but neither can I get that excited about the prospect of us going up only to go back to getting hammered most weeks! The Premier League is in equal parts both the Holy Grail and the Poison Chalice.

This seems very neatly put. Both of our recent Premier League campaigns, after all, offered far more pain than pleasure. Of course there were some bright spots. Jamie Mackie's late winner at home to Liverpool in March 2012 and that improbable Shaun Wright-Phillips goal at Stamford Bridge the following season are the ones burned most firmly into my memory. But stuff like this was rare.

Last summer, wanting to consign all of that firmly to the past, I tried my best to recover my enthusiasm for going to matches by looking forward to more exciting times in the Championship. This is not meant to imply high hopes on my part, I might add. I really had no idea about how far QPR's ragbag of overpaid failures would successfully adjust to life below English football's top table. Looking ahead then, I had no clear picture of what to expect. Would it be a blue-and-white cakewalk, with rampant Rangers dispatching all opponents with ease? Would it be a spectacular disaster, with ragged Rangers spiralling down to the foot of the second tier and following poor old Wolves into the league's lower reaches? Would it be - as has turned out to be the case, of course - something else in between? I just couldn't call it. That uncertainty, in fact, added a frisson of nervous excitement. But this was soon to pass.

Why? Well for one thing, I'm not alone in having found the brand of football on offer to be mostly pretty boring. Our friend littlestint6, after all, opened his remarks with exactly that observation.

But that wouldn't be a problem if dullness had been accompanied by unqualified success. I'm sure I'd be feeling OK about having already secured promotion on the back of a long series of unentertaining victories. Mourinhoesque bus parking. Ruthless efficiency. All that stuff.

But here we are, trailing in the wake of far more enterprising Leicester and Burnley outfits and facing the nervous business of the playoffs. If you think in terms only of QPR's wage bill and transfer budget, that has to be seen as a reasonably disappointing outcome. Sure, that won't matter if we all get to see QPR's first successful Wembley outing since 1967. Euphoria and a big knees-up should that come to pass: fully justified.

But for my part, with tickets secured for both legs of the impending playoff semi-final, I'm still not feeling anything like the emotional turmoil I experienced in 2003 when Oldham Athletic stood between us and a day out at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.

I guess this could simply be because I am eleven years older, tireder and generally more jaded. Perhaps my emotional range is just getting flatter as I pass into the second half of my short stint on this earth. But I think it's more than that.

For one thing, try as I might, I've just not been able to put aside my reasonably intense (and growing) dislike of Harry Redknapp. I never bought the whole Redknapp thing when he was managing other clubs and I fervently hoped that Tony Fernandes would look elsewhere when seeking to replace Mark fucking Hughes. But he didn't, did he? So I wanted to get over my aversion to the new manager. Success, I reasoned, was all that was needed. Or, if not success, then some sign of really wanting to be at QPR and really caring about our club's future ought to be enough.

But as the months unfolded, I found I could not bring myself to watch a Redknapp press conference. Even a short clip of him being interviewed after a match soon had me wincing. 

Look, I can't read the man's mind and it goes without saying that I don't know him personally. All I have to go on is the evidence of my own eyes and some experience of dealing with human beings. But to me, Redknapp looks bored, tired, irritable and detached. To me, he looks like a man pissed off about his exit from Spurs and about not getting the England manager's job. He looks like a man who wants to be elsewhere and who thinks he's doing little QPR a favour by taking the club's money. To put it, for a moment, in terms of trying to care about his feelings, he just doesn't look happy. Perhaps it's time for him to retire from the game. Or at least from management. His place among the TV pundits, after all, is surely secure.

Redknapp aside, I wonder if my lack of excitement about the playoffs may also have something to do with trepidation about the way ahead. On one hand, this country's shitty newspapers are bandying about the idea of some insanely swingeing FFP-related sanctions being imposed on QPR should the club remain in the Championship. On the other hand, it seems hard to believe that promotion would not be followed by a Premier League campaign as trying as the ones we've recently endured.

Beyond that, I'm finding it hard to decide how I feel about the longer term future of our little club. When I filled out the recently distributed questionnaire about the proposed new QPR stadium, some of the questions filled me with dread. How would I feel about a neutral section? How would I feel about a fucking singing section?? I'd feel incensed. That's how I'd feel. After all, I've been to Craven Cottage in recent years. I've seen what it's taken to attract crowds of 25,000 or so to a club that used to play in front of a fraction of that number. I've seen it and I hate it. Neutral section? Up your arse! Seriously.

It all fills me with a vision of watching a team in blue and white hoops in a very comfortable but completely sterile arena, surrounded by visitors to London who are pleased to have the opportunity to get tickets for what they think of first and foremost as a Manchester United/Liverpool/Arsenal fixture. I guess it's a way to balance the books. More than balance the books. But it doesn't sound like much fun for crusty old QPR fanatics.

Thinking too much... forget all that. Let's just see what happens tomorrow. I'm bound to get excited at some stage. Unless we get a solid tonking in Wigan tomorrow night, I guess. Should that happen, I guess quiet despondency may be the order of the day on Monday - and not just on my part.

But if we return from Lancashire with a realistic chance of getting to Wembley, then surely Loftus Road will rock anew come Monday evening. Surely. Perhaps I'll even be moved to write something optimistic. Perhaps our hitherto silent season will roar to a noisy climax of some sort. I bloody hope so.

U RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRssssssssssss

NO MORE HEROES?

It's been a long while since this blog last featured any musings about life as a QPR supporter. Prior to the most recent post of that nature (written back in May 2013), Rangers-related ramblings had been something of a staple here at this is my england. So why have I not since felt motivated to write about my beloved club?

Well, I only have to look back at that last article for a sharp reminder. I was writing, back then, about the lack of respect for the club displayed by one its overpaid and under-performing players, a certain  Stéphane Mbia. The Cameroonian's crassness, for me, added a shit-flavoured cherry onto the piss-scented icing of what had already been a depressingly toxic 2012-13 campaign for the Superhoops. Yes, there was the odd point of light in the gloom - the unexpected triumph at Stamford Bridge, of course, stands out in the memory as the brightest of these. But, by and large, last season was an unpleasant one for those of us who struggle through life carrying the burden of an affection for Queens Park Rangers. Notwithstanding all the frustrations and disappointments which followed, my own disenchantment reached its nadir during the home game against Southampton. I was surrounded by fellow fans who united in song, berating the men on the pitch in blue-and-white hoops for only being at Loftus Road for the money.

It was in this context that I felt moved, in March 2013, to indulge in a sustained moan about various features of twenty-first century football with which I felt dismayed: the know-nothing virtual "fan" spouting ill-informed garbage from a keyboard in Singapore, Mumbai or Riyadh; the dismal intersection of snide journalism and questionable veracity on the part of football managers; the deluge of filthy lucre and its numerous poisonous effects.

Nothing I've experienced or heard about since has disabused me of any these unhappy notions. I continue to attend matches at Loftus Road and continue to want QPR to do well.  I continue to enjoy sharing all of this with my dad, my son and my Rangers-supporting pals. But I really haven't felt the old fervour which used to sweep me along on match days. Perhaps this is partly down to the nature of the fare on offer this season - I'm certainly not alone in feeling that most Rangers performances have looked over-cautious and rather unexciting. Yes, there are solid reasons to remain optimistic about the prospect of immediate promotion back up to the division from which the club was ejected so ignominiously last May. But, to me at least, something is missing.

The last time the Rangers were pushing toward the bright lights of the Premier League, I experienced sustained feelings of excitement and anxiety, ending with an outburst of almost angry relief when the shadow of Faurlingate was finally lifted and promotion confirmed. This season? Yes, it's good to cheer a goal and celebrate a win. But it all just feels flatter and less vivid than last time around. Am I alone in this? I don't think so. Little Loftus Road, so often a noisy, exuberant arena in the past, has seemed oddly quiet in the last few months.

Some other time I may feel inclined to think more deeply about why I feel this way and to try to understand if others share these unsettling feelings. For now, though, I'm just choosing to resist the allure of nostalgia.

My feelings about current manager Harry Redknapp remain stubbornly mixed, resulting in a strong temptation to compare him negatively to former QPR bosses towards whom I have found it easier to develop some measure of affection. Neil Warnock, for instance, was someone to whom I warmed far more readily. But that doesn't mean placing the outspoken Yorkshireman on a pedestal marked "hero". Any admiration for Warnock, as with Redknapp, should not, perhaps, be wholly unalloyed. Rumours of sharp practice cloud the images of both men, after all, adding baggage to their various successes.

We were reminded of this only today when Jason Puncheon, once brought to Loftus Road on loan by Warnock, unleashed a potentially libelous Twitter tirade against the former QPR manager. The tweets, all since deleted, include a very serious allegation of what can only be described as disgracefully corrupt practice. It will be interesting to see what follows. If Puncheon is neither sued nor forced to retract his remarks, serious new questions about Neil Warnock's ethics are bound to occur. This is a shame for me. Even in middle age, and even with a ton of reasons not to be so sentimental, I continue to want my football club to provide me with heroes - men for whom my admiration is uncomplicated, uncompromised and unarguable. It's silly, I know. But there you have it.

SAME OLD CRAP FROM AN UNEXPECTED VOICE

When Tottenham Hotspur F.C. is mocked, experience has taught me not to be surprised when the mockery takes an unpleasant anti-Semitic tone. Experience has also taught me not to be surprised when stuff of that nature springs from the lips or the keyboard of a Chelsea supporter. More surprising today, though, has been seeing this sort of thing from a Chelsea supporter who also claims to be a sports broadcaster working for BT Sport. It's good that she writes "all views my own" in her Twitter profile because presumably today's bit of unpleasantness is not quite in line with the values of the recent arrival on the UK TV sports scene:

WEST HAM: GREAT WIN, UGLY TAUNTS

I'm not about to wade into the complexities of the debate over the use of the word Yid at White Hart Lane.  I have strong views on the subject, but limited time in which to express them right now. Another time, perhaps. In the meantime, I merely present some of what passes for banter in the minds of some West Ham fans.

Almost exactly a year ago, I felt genuine revulsion when a fellow QPR supporter used Twitter to tell the world that the song he'd most enjoyed singing last season was one containing a reference to gas chambers and directed at the Spurs crowd. I was at the match at which he claimed to have delivered this chant and I am pleased to say that I didn't hear it - and didn't hear anything else similar. The words of that one fellow Rangers supporter aside, my Twitter timeline (I follow several hundred QPR fans) has also remained mercifully clear of tweets with an anti-Semitic tone on the occasions my team has played Tottenham over the last couple of years. So it is to be hoped that he was singing alone. Among the West Ham fan base, though, many more people seem to believe this sort of stuff is not beyond the pale. Yesterday's impressive Hammers win has not brought out the best in some followers of the East London club:

Mbia fined, QPR mugged off

On Monday, tweets from the Twitter account of QPR's Stéphane Mbia seemed to indicate that the player was keen on a return to Olympique de Marseille and that he was stupid enough to say so via such a public channel. This was followed by press reports to the effect that Mbia's account had been hacked. Then came a further tweet from Mbia's account to the effect that the account had not been hacked. Right now (Wednesday lunchtime), this latter remark remains on the player's timeline. As promised, QPR have investigated the matter and taken action. This just in from the club's press man:

So we are to believe that even now, Mbia cannot log into his supposedly hacked account and remove the remarks written by some third party? Well, I know what we would have said at school on hearing such an obviously false story: CHINNY RECKON. BENNY BULLSHIT. FANTASY ISLAND.

What's really happened, then, is that the idiot Mbia, caught out like a naughty child, refuses to do the decent thing and admit what he's done. So the club has to give him his deserved rap on the knuckles but pretend it's for allowing his account to be hacked rather than for his real offence (i.e. mugging the club off by announcing publicly that he wants to return to his beloved l'OM). Ridiculous. Farcical. Only at fucking QPR.

more on (moron?) Mbia

Perhaps this is a feeling entirely alien to the kind of thick-skinned sociopaths writing for our nation's tabloids, but some of us can sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable when really laying into the subject of some particularly angry piece of writing. Yesterday, for example, this is my england featured a particularly heated piece about what appeared to be the moronically insensitive behaviour of QPR's Stéphane Mbia. The Twitter account of the error-prone Cameroonian had issued remarks indicating that the player wished to leave Loftus Road and head back to Marseille. 

Having dashed off a piece written in haste and in anger, the reason for feeling uncomfortable here was the lurking fear of having somehow been taken in. What if Mbia's Twitter account had been hacked? What if the player's feelings for our club and respect for our fans were, in fact, unimpeachable? After all, this is the guy who picks out some deserving-looking kid to receive the gift of a shirt at the end of many matches. This is the fellow in whom some fans feel they have seen a hard-working exception to the general disinterestedness of the Rangers team. Oops? Shame-faced retraction of angry blog post needed?

Well, that started to look possible when The Guardian's Dominic Fifield claimed his 'paper had had contact with Mbia:

Yet Mbia, when asked to explain that follow-up, claimed he had not written the messages. "I do not know how this happened but someone must have got hold of my login and password because I did not write these things," he said when contacted by the Guardian. "This was not me. I did not write the tweets, and I have made people at the club aware of that. I saw the messages this morning and spoke with the club about them, but now I see there are more appearing in my name."

In light of this, it's hard to explain the latest from Mbia's Twitter, written just this morning:

Translation: "I want to deny the rumours of hacking on my Twitter account."

Some people might want to contend that this latest message also comes from a malicious hacker. But that's hardly likely, is it? It doesn't take long to reestablish control of a hacked Twitter account. So if Mbia's account had been compromised, the player would, surely, by now have had time to delete the offending tweets, write his own clarification and worked with the QPR media team to untangle this messy situation.

So the feeling here is that not only did Mbia write the original messages but he must have also lied to journalists at The Guardian and then decided to revert to the uncomfortable truth. So it's looking rather as if that as well as being a pretty useless player and a shamefully disrespectful twat, the (hopefully soon-to-be former) Rangers man is a rather confused person. A bit of a nutter, it seems. What are the chances of another club wanting to part with good money for such obviously damaged goods? It's a worry. Add it to the QPR worry pile.

Stéphane Mbia: MORON

Writing about QPR this season has been a pretty dispiriting business. This accounts for the lack of Rangers-related output here at this is my england over the last few months. Many a depressing game has been attended but not been written about. It's just been no fun at all. That said, some sort of bitter rant is on the cards and will doubtless appear here before too long.

In the meantime, yet another piece of dismal social media misuse on the part of one of our players cannot pass without brief comment. Here (in a since deleted tweet) is Stéphane Mbia making it clear that he'd like to return to Olympique de Marseille:

Surely it is be hoped that he gets his wish. Why should we remain saddled with players who are too fucking stupid to be subtle about having no regard for our club? It's not even as if Mbia is much of a player anyway. All that money just to totter around like a daddy longlegs on roller-skates, giving away game-changing free kicks and rolling around like a play-acting tart when an opponent breathes on him? No thanks. With any luck, we've seen the last of this waster in a hooped shirt. If not, perhaps anyone reading this might want to give him an appropriately warm reception at the next couple of fixtures - fixtures rendered meaningless by the ineptitude and gutlessness of Mbia and his pals.

Football: trust no one?

It's a good job that it's still good to play out the old rituals. Travelling the same way and by the same routes. Parking in the same place. Setting out for the station at the same time and in the company of the same people. Friends. Family. Thinking, sometimes, about the dead ones. The granddads and uncles who will never come down to the ground again and whose ghosts sometimes seem to be about on match day. It's a good job that it's still good to see familiar faces and shake familiar hands. The chap who always arrives a few minutes after kick-off, smiling ruefully and smelling of pub. The old feller who's always looked old.

Yes, and it's a good job that when the net bulges it still feels great to bounce around for a few minutes, roaring out the relief, hugging that bloke next to you (who's been irritating you since kick-off and seems likes a bit of an arse), loose change flying from the pockets, tepid tea kicked, spilling around the ankles.

Rangers down and out?
It's a good job, too, that failure cannot go on literally forever. You can suffer a season even more dismal than the very dismal season you endured last year. But even bleakness this severe is peppered with little points of light. You went mental when SWP, of all people, scored against Chelsea. Yes, you yelled yourself hoarse that wonderfully unlikely night at Stamford Bridge. More than this, there is still hope - and that's good too. Two wins on the bounce? Really? So that means that buying yet more tickets to away games may not be an act of lunacy? Could more luck and light really be coming our way?

Well, perhaps not. QPR fans trudged home Villa Park on Saturday feeling despondent all over again. A real six-pointer gone the wrong way and then the news from St. Mary's Stadium was not good. Then we had another kick in the teeth on Sunday. Some herbert playing for fellow strugglers Wigan stayed on the pitch despite murderously thundering into an opponent. Then that bloody Kone fellow popped up with a last-gasp winner. So it was hard not to feel as though those triumphs over Southampton and Sunderland will turn out to have been in vain. But at least we had the pleasure of travelling up to the Midlands in hope, in good fellowship and with songs on the lips.

Football's endless pack of wankers
These good vibes, even if a little fragile, are great news. Because so much else of what goes on around football today is an endless blaze of crass wank. Know-nothing goons crow at you from their keyboards, each of them about five minutes into a love affair with some EPL (I feel sick) or BPL (I want to punch someone) brand they have selected from a limited menu on their stupid satellite electronic programme guides.  The choices, of course, are as follows: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United. Some of the fuckers are from Cheam. Some are from Hastings. Some are from Singapore. Some from Mumbai. Some are from fucking Riyadh. They are recruitment consultants and trainee accountants. They are business studies students (customers) of dull universities which have long since morphed into profitable schools of human capital management and corporate double-speak. They've never been to a match. Fifteen minutes ago they hadn't even heard of Queens Park Rangers. But now they want to give you some static about how QPR are shit and how Anton Ferdinand needs to be taught that JT is the boss.  

Dizzying sums of money are spunked by TV networks and sprayed into the pockets of foolish, charmless young men from every corner of the earth. Journeymen second-choice centre-halves live like cash-drunk gangster rappers, driving to training in custom-painted luxury SUVs.... bored by comfort, they tattoo themselves endlessly... they never say anything interesting... they inhabit nightclubs of breathtaking vulgarity... they launch clothing lines (getting malnourished Bangladeshi slum children to stitch a stupid word onto a beanie hat).  Watching from boxes: a joyless procession of plundering über-spivs and desert dictators. Plastered over everything (the players, the stadium, your children, the ticket in your pocket): LOGOS. BRANDS. USE FINANCIAL SERVICES. DRINK LAGER THAT TASTES OF NOTHING. PISS YOUR MONEY AWAY IN AN IMAGINARY CASINO. FLY TO DUBAI TO GO SHOPPING AND LOLL ABOUT ON THE BEACHES OF A PLACE WHOSE RULERS BELIEVE YOU ARE SUBHUMAN.


Thank God for Tony...?
Awful, isn't it? Not like the good old days. Fings ain't what they used to be. But that's just the wider context, right? That's just how things are. There's nothing you can do about any of that. Come on. Don't live in the past. The game's changed. There's no point resisting progress or grumbling about it. More to the point, you are reminded by your fellow QPR fan, Rangers are different. We've had our ups and downs, sure. But we're lucky. We've got the best owners in the world.

You can trust dear old Tony, right? Look, there he is - walking around the pitch before the kick off, pressing the flesh with all and sundry. Rarely caught on camera without his bright red AirAsia baseball cap.

Tony will never leave us. He's in it for the long term. OK, OK, there was that time when he took to Twitter, hinting that stick he'd received from disgruntled supporters might cause him to reassess role at QPR. That started on January 27th when he said that "many fans" were "attacking" him. Yes, it was a little strange that anyone who searched Twitter on that day was unable to find any such attacks. A bit of mild criticism here and there, and little of that actually tweeted directly to Fernandes. But that must just be some sort of glitch in Twitter search mechanism, right? Because Tony wouldn't invent or exaggerate flak in order to worry all those supporters who are so desperate to believe that his stewarding of the club will turn out to be wholly benign. That would be sly. That would be manipulative. That would be like some sort of cult of personality. AND TONY ISN'T LIKE THAT. Look, we all want to believe in today's statement about the Chairman's "lifelong commitment" to the club. We all want to believe that relegation will not mean the end of the Fernandes era. No one wants to worry about whether this statement has been made in good faith or about whether the word lifelong was used in earnest. But we are Queens Park Rangers supporters. Our faith has been abused before. Disappointment is not a stranger to us.

But never mind. Such is the strength of Fernandes's assertion today, that surely all we can do is believe it. Because if it's been uttered in bad faith, we'll know one day. We'll know, and we'll feel more let down than ever before.

Football journalists: scum of the earth?
But maybe you DO end up wondering whether anyone connected with football can really be trusted not to speak with forked tongue. From the toxic swirl of media reporting around our club this terrible season, consider two particular incidents. In both cases, a gentleman of the press has alleged something fairly horrible. In both cases, the club has declined to issue an official rebuttal. In both cases, if the hurtful stories were actually fabricated, why has no one resorted to legal action in response?

The most recent nastiness concerned the club's warm weather training break in the UAE. Via Martin Lipton of the Daily Phonehack, we were told that the trip had descended into a chaotic farce. Lipton would have us believe that the following quotes from his piece are from QPR players:

"In the evening some players were out, until 3am, 4am, 5am – and then went to training at 8am. It was like a stag party."

 "Two or three players couldn’t train the next day. It was that bad."

Harry Redknapp, of course, angrily denied both the details of Lipton's story and the allegation that Rangers players were the source of those details. "This story has come from somebody who is trying to disrupt the football club," said Redknapp. "I know exactly who it is, I know his reasons for doing it and we all know who it is. It's not come from the players, it's come from an agent."

Via Twitter, Lipton's version of events has been challenged by numerous QPR fans. Take a look at these exchanges:

'onest 'arry?
Lipton seems adamant, doesn't he? The story is true and he wrote it off the back of "direct testimony" from several QPR players. He seems VERY confident that the club will not sue him. He attaches significance to the lack of an official denial from club officials. His interlocutors in these exchanges believe that Lipton is simply lying through his teeth. But if they are wrong, of course, this means Harry Redknapp is the liar here.

Leaving aside some people's unfriendly (and, we hope, baseless) insistence that Redknapp is shadowy, bung-loving spiv, can we find any actual examples of him fibbing and getting caught out? Well, yes.

Last Sunday, The Observer's Daniel Taylor rattled off a few examples of the very obvious untruths uttered in the football world. One which he foregrounded was an anecdote about our man Redknapp:

A quick story about Harry Redknapp going back to his days as West Ham's manager and a press conference at the club's training ground. There are reports of him taking Marco Negri on trial from Rangers but Redknapp looks bewildered. He is striking a pose that Robert De Niro would be proud of. "Negri?" he wants to know. "Who? No, don't know what you are talking about." That's the moment someone points out that if you look through the window you can see Negri outside, getting some stuff out of his car. "Oh," he says. "Oh, that Marco Negri."

But, that's ancient history, right? That's just Harry being a bit of lad. Just Archbishop of Banterbury stuff. That doesn't mean this Lipton prick isn't bang out of order, does it? Well, when journalists are challenged about the truth of stories like this - stories whose assertions rest on quotes from unnamed sources - we see them reaching for well-rehearsed responses about people not understanding the media game and about the publishing articles of this sort. Now call me a cynic. But what is to stop any journo simply inventing a story and then endlessly repeating a tired line about the importance of the protection of anonymous sources as a non-negotiable cornerstone of a free press?

Well, it's easy to see that confidentiality of sources is vital in cases where stories of legitimate public interest can only be broken with the help of people who would be deterred from coming forward without the protection of a strong guarantee of anonymity. Crime. Corruption. Made-up nonsense used to justify wars or otherwise mislead the public. Matters of genuine import. Yes, yes. But wouldn't it be a tragedy if frivolous misuse of this important press privilege adds more weight to the arguments of those who would go further than whatever turns out to be allowed by the post-Leveson Royal Charter dominating the headlines today?

This is not the first time that Lipton himself has been derided for his use of this seemingly too convenient confidentiality-of-sources argument. A little while ago, our dear friends at Chelsea poked fun at one of his stories about the goings on at their club, making him look rather a plum in the process. 

So that's enough about Lipton. What about this season's other example of a tabloid hack cooking up a QPR story from the supposed testimony of nameless sources? 

Anything to fill the page
If you're struggling to see how the bender-in-Dubai story being put our way was somehow in the public interest, you'll really wonder about the tale told by The Daily Blackshirt's Sami Mokbel back in September. Mokbel's piece contended that QPR midfielder Samba Diakité was suffering from depression. No sources named. Lots of "it is thought" and "it is unclear". As with Lipton, QPR fans weighed in to take Mokbel to task. Also to no avail. He simply responded with those tired lines about us not understanding how the press works. But let's say someone at the club really did speak to the Mail man about a medical condition endured by one of our players. Why is that even a story? What interest is served by writing about it? 

At one stage in a Twitter exchange with this is my england, the Mail man conceded that were a member of his family to suffer from mental illness, he would not like it to be casually described in a national newspaper. He appeared to concede that the story was of doubtful value and hinted that, in writing it, he was only following orders. Wow. What a dismal job. Q: What did you do at work today, daddy? A: I wrote a pointless story about a not-especially-famous footballer's depression, thereby adding to the pressure in his life and perhaps contributing to his illness becoming worse. From the Twitter exchange, it was easy to get the impression that Mr Mokbel is not always proud of what he does for a living.


Just watch the bloody football
What the Diakité incident tells us, perhaps, is that not only should we feel disinclined to distrust the truth of what we see written about football the 'papers, but we should also distrust the intentions of the hacks.  When you add this to the evidence of massive fibbing on the part of managers, as discussed by The Guardian's David Conn, you may want to decide that no one in this filthy game is to be trusted. That, of course, should do nothing to detract from your enjoyment of the actual 90-minute spectacle of twenty-two men kicking a bag of wind. That still has blood, thunder, balletic artistry and drama aplenty. Thankfully. Because everything else about the game is just so much bollocks.

HE'S GUNNER BUST MAD RHYMES

GUESS WHO'S BACK? BACK AGAIN?

... so begins a famous number by a certain paleface rap artist from the Motor City. His masterwork, perhaps, with Dr Dre and Jenna Jameson taking roles in the accompanying bit of video comedy. Rather less accomplished in the field of rhyming is the latest offering from an old friend of this blog. Since we last saw him, this funny little feller from somewhere outside London (listen to the vowel sounds in that accent) has cut his hair and, it seems, gone further down the road of being a strangely unembarrassable loon. He's a bit like Sean "Marmite Man" Allan without the racism:

SAME OLD CHELSEA

I won't bore you with the details, but this evening I had one of those conversations that can  make you worry about how many horrible sods there are in the world, about the positions of influence some of those horrible sods can occupy, and about the fact that there's often not a lot that decent people can do about any of this. During the preceding working day, I'd taken so many phone calls that my mobile battery had run right down to zero, cutting me off from the news, information and comment beyond the long and surprisingly dismal chat in the pub next to the office. 

So then I came home and fired up the laptop in order to check on today's football scores. Hoping for a little brightness, I wanted to see how I'd got on with my fantasy football selections, and I was hoping to learn that Chelsea had been knocked out of the League Cup. Happily, I'd racked up a fair few fantasy points, courtesy, in the main, of Messrs Cazorla and Podolski. Even more happily, those blue bastards from SW6 had indeed succumbed to the stifling style of Swansealona. 

The result, of course, has been overshadowed by the moment of madness around the 81st minute of play. 

Sure, the ball boy seems to have been a bit of an arse. Sure, we know that clubs clearly instruct ball boys to hold on to the ball and waste time when the home side are hanging on for a favourable result. It seems naive to believe that doesn't go on. But the lad at the Liberty Stadium was clearly a bit too obvious about it, not only during tonight's silly incident but also ahead of the match:

But Eden Hazard is the bigger idiot. Kicking out at a ball boy? REALLY? In a packed stadium? In front of the home fans? On live television? The Belgian player has talent. But intelligence, judgement and common sense? Not so much. 

Hazard, as we already knew, is not the only talented moron employed by Chelsea Football Club. The indiscretions and the arrogance of Messrs Terry and Cole are the stuff of legend. 

To this list we can now add the unprofessional, immature prick who runs the official @chelseafc Twitter account. In reaction to Hazard's richly deserved red card, the nameless tweeter opined thus:

Yes, that's right. Football must have "gone mad" when a professional player gets a red card for kicking out at a teenage kid. If the game were sane, in this tweeter's analysis, grown men should be able to do whatever they feel like when frustrated and provoked, up to and including sticking the boot into an uncooperative ball boy.

Of course, the Chelsea social media person has since retracted (and deleted) the above remark... 

... but, once again, the true colours of the south west London club have been clearly shown. The Pensioners' official Twitter feed's comment is entirely consistent with the brand values of an organisation which:

• fights tooth and nail to defend a player who shouts "fucking black cunt" at an opponent
• imposes no meaningful punishment on a player who shoots someone with an air rifle
• employs humourless goons to frisk away fans so thoroughly as to ensure hundreds of them miss the opening minutes of a match
• feels comfortable with a home supporter bringing an EDL flag to games
• behaves in a markedly odd way when its players falsely accuse (with delicious irony) a referee of racial abuse

Same old toxic, unlovely Chelsea: shaming the decent people among its supporters again, and again and again... 

To dare is to do?

It's difficult to remember many awayday experiences as wonderfully strange as the one celebrated by QPR fans last Wednesday evening. How many of the travelling faithful at Stamford Bridge were merely hoping to witness a narrow defeat rather than a horribly heavy one? A good number, probably. All the omens were bad. 

The Rangers had just stumbled through three dispiriting defeats, thereby wiping out the feelings of joy and relief we had gained from the home tie with Fulham, that long-anticipated first league victory of the season. Chelsea, meanwhile, while not winning the full approval of their petulantly greedy fans, were riding a five-game Premier League winning streak. Given our side's frailties, one of those five wins seemed particularly ominous. Just before Christmas, the Pensioners had stuck the ball in the back of the net eight times without reply against Aston Villa. 

As if this context for the match were not sufficiently inauspicious, a couple of stark stats were in the mix for added toxicity. For starters, QPR had not won away at Chelsea since 1983. On top of that, we had to contend with the knowledge that in the Premier League era, only one club has entered the New Year at the foot of the table and then gone on to avoid relegation.

Hence the doom and gloom expressed here at this is my england just a few hours before kick off:

Yes, some of us are crazy enough to be heading to Stamford Bridge this evening. Bonkers, right? What pleasure can there possibly be in schlepping down to that hell-hole and in contemplating the near certainty of a humiliating defeat? Also throw in the prospect of show-boating mockery from English football's most loathsome fans and a fifty-five quid (plus booking fee) ticket price. Then there's the prospect of getting home late in the dark, cold pissiness of this first grim week back at work after the seasonal festivities. Also, as we turn our keys and climb our stairs, many of us will be returning to long-suffering spouses or partners who will wonder at our ongoing masochism. This bloody football club. The behaviour into which it pushes us - repeating the same pains and hassles over and over again, and all the while hoping for different results.

How shockingly brilliant it was, then, for this gut feeling of impending disaster to prove unfounded.

I had never dragged myself so unwillingly to a QPR match. Memories of last season's battering at the Bridge were not distant enough for my liking. On that day, the thrashing we witnessed on the pitch was only one component of a truly miserable day. Other components: getting soaked to the skin by driving rain; a terribly maudlin sensation on seeing the graves of my great grandfather and great uncle in Brompton Cemetery and hearing my dad talk of miserable childhood Sundays built around visiting them; being threatened with a glassing later in the day on account of having the temerity to object to a Chelsea fan's rendition of Spurs are on their Way to Auschwitz.

That I found myself at Stamford Bridge again last week is entirely down to my dad. He had bought a ticket and then pretty much emotionally blackmailed me into buying one too. Had the expected awfulness unfolded I would still be blaming him now for making me suffer it. As it turned out, he now has my eternal thanks for making sure I did not miss the historic win.

There's not much point in offering a match report here now. A week has passed and you've all had the chance to watch the highlights a few times, to read the newspaper coverage and to enjoy the more partisan accounts offered by QPR fans such as Steve Heard, Clive Whittingham and Emily Foster.

For my part, what unfolded last Wednesday was unprecedented. In the context of following QPR, I have never experienced such an extreme gap between what I expected to happen and what actually took place. Yes, I have enjoyed much better away matches before. Last week's tie was notable more for the result than for much that would please the eye of any neutrals watching. But due to those two explosions of joy (when SWP scored and when the final whistle blew), it seems certain that this match will live forever in the memory.

Perhaps it will prove to be the starting point of a miraculous feat of escapology. It seems more likely, however, that it won't. Relegation is still more than a distinct possibility. But if the season does end on that sour note, those of us lucky enough to have been in SW6 last week will surely not feel so despondent as to suffer an eclipsing of our memories of this famous victory. 

So what must be done if last week's unlikely triumph is to prove to be a real turning point for the Rangers' fortunes? 

First of all, Spurs must be beaten at Loftus Road this weekend. Yes, they will be tough opponents, but many more failures to secure all three points at home would surely prove to be the undoing of this attempt to remain in the top flight.

This blog never offers any detailed analysis of tactics, formations or team selections. Let's leave that to others who feel better qualified to comment along those lines. But it is surely the case that Harry Redknapp must risk a more attacking style than we saw at Stamford Bridge. Of course last week's defensive approach was entirely the right one to take. But can Redknapp really favour the same plan in front of a home crowd? We will see.

If a more expansive style is favoured, how well can our often-beleaguered defence be expected to cope? Messrs Hill and Nelsen were magnificent last week. But Tottenham will surely present more of a challenge than was offered by the woeful Fernando Torres at Stamford Bridge.

Nelsen, of course, is set to leave us, having opted to embark on his career as a manager. Some QPR fans have expressed a bit of resentment about our most effective defender heading for the exit when he is needed most. But there's not much point in dwelling on it, not least because it does seem that the Kiwi centre-half will be with us for a little while longer.

Replacing the veteran defender must be a particularly pressing question for Redknapp as he ponders the transfer options during the January window. For this is my england, it remains a case of jury out when it comes to the wisdom of risking yet more of the owners' money on further expensive signings. But this may be a moot point because you'd be forgiven for wondering which well-regarded players will be tempted to come to a club over which relegation's sword of Damocles still visibly hangs. That said, a couple of wins from these next two London derbies might improve our manager's negotiating position, albeit with only a few days to do a bit of frantic last minute business. Cue the hysterics of Jim White on deadline day, perhaps.

So let's see what happens. Will Redknapp dare to try a more buccaneering approach to these next two fixtures? Not for for the first time this season it feels like do-or-die time all over again. Perhaps it won't be the last time we have that feeling. 

U RRRRRRRRRRRRRsssssssssss