A rising tide of anger and a torrent of blame in all directions as QPR made it one win in 14 with a diabolical showing at Hull - why so much vitriol for a team and club that's parring its financial course?

Huddersfield (7-5-15 WWLLDL 22nd) v QPR (10-8-11 LDLDDL 14th)

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I’ve decided to find Everton funny. Like you might decide to take up open water swimming, or painting oils on canvas, a doing a full re-watch of the West Wing — it’s a conscious decision I’ve made to pass some time in a less traumatic way than trying to sell my house through a firm of solicitors whose specialities seem to begin and end with picking their own bum, or watching Queens Park Rangers try to execute set piece routines. I’m going to have a good, long, stare at Everton, and whenever they do something daft (which they do, A LOT) I’m going to do a big belly laugh to cheer myself up.

This week actually started quite well for them, when somebody in possession of a Newcastle United company credit card thought “perhaps I’ll wet my whistle” on the way home from work, stopped in by the Bigg Market, got a little bit carried away, woke up the following day smeared in cum and curry sick and discovered they’d accidentally spent £40m on one Anthony Gordon (him of the many celebrated birthdays). Hey, we’ve all been there. And, look, it’s good news for any of us who have possessions of any sort, because if Anthony Gordon is worth £40m then imagine what that means for all the other goods and services? It’s not going to do much good for the rate of inflation I grant you, but I reckon I’ve got a wheelie bin (no hot ashes) out the back of my house that I can get £750,000 for if that’s the going rate for stuff now.

Anyway, in theory, that gave new manager Sean Dyche a nice £40m warchest to play with in the final week of the transfer window. Captain, captain, I know we usually bury the treasure but what if, this time, we use it to buy things — you know, things we like? With that they bid for all the players — all the players — who moved last week and secured precisely zero of them. At one point they tried to whack the whole lot on a part-used Conor Gallagher, who I still think might actually be a Thompson holiday rep called Beth who wandered into the wrong queue at Stansted looking for the Faliraki flight and hasn’t had the heart to tell Chelsea yet because the food’s so nice there. They couldn’t get it over the line. While the rest of us rub hands in glee at the prospect of Sean Dyche taking a team into battle led by Alex Iwobi, Everton fans are asking how that can be and the answer from the sort of off-the-record sources who like to talk to The Athletic a lot is that “the biggest hinderance in a lot of these negotiations was Everton being in the room”. They just don’t know what they’re doing, like sending Mr Blobby into negotiations and having him flop about all over the table, scattering the paper hither and thither shouting “blobby, blobby, blobby”, as he does, the fat mess. Or, Phil Beard.

So, funny. Funny because of all that racism they’ve managed to carefully airbrush from their identity, the stuff they used to sing and shout and chant at Les Ferdinand and others to such an extent that when we went there as recently as 1994 the debut of Nigerian Daniel Amokachi was still a sadly massive big deal. Funny because QPR are shit, descending rapidly through the air with the altimeter spinning around alarmingly and the pilot offering little more than “eeeeee Gary, it’s really burning, what we gonna do?”, it’s making me miserable and in those circumstances I like to look at other clubs that are heading towards the same sea at the same pace and revel in the misery of their fans to distract from my own — because that’s the kind of bloke I am. Funny, also though, and mainly, because their fans are taking it so unbelievably badly. You’d honestly think Real Madrid were about to be dropped into Conference North. Lads, you’ll come down, you’ll carpet bomb the league with parachute payments, 35 of your 46 games will be on Sky which will be more Everton games than you’ve ever actually watched in a season before, you’ll go back up — calm down (sorry), and let that poor bloke’s car out, he wants to get home to whichever girl he’s rented in tonight.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember a lot of these Everton fans, now setting up roadblocks and yelling at closed tinted glass car windows, a few years ago moaning like hell about Bill Kenwright, and David Moyes. About how there was no ambition, about how they just finished midtable every year, with only an occasional cup final, never beating Liverpool away. What these people had done, stop me if you’ve heard this before Charlton fans, was “taken Everton as far as they can” and what it needed was for somebody else to come in and “take us to the next level” which, of course, as we know, means buying exactly the same standard of player you were buying before (because if you’re any good, you’re not coming to Everton/QPR are you?) but in greater quantities and for ten times the amount you paid previously. What it needed was a bloke with so much money and so little sense that you buy Robert Green at the start of the transfer window to replace Paddy Kenny, and then replace Green with Julio Cesar at the end of it, taking your weekly spend on goalkeeping from £20k to £200k in one month without improving the goalkeeping. It’s a recipe for success, and when Everton decided to pay God-knows-whatever it took to bring the enlarged version of Wayne Rooney back for a swansong, only to then pay £40m for Gylfi Sigurdsson without noticing he plays the same position, or checking his hard drive, that sealed the deal for me. We all turn and point as one and say ha ha ha, have a look at this bloke will ya, what a complete cunt.

Given that QPR can, just about, still be classified as midtable got me pondering whether we’re a bit guilty of that ourselves at the moment. We are currently one deflected, last-minute equaliser from Sheff Utd and one late leveller from Swansea at Loftus Road away from having an additional four points which would lift us five places and land us just a single point outside the play-off picture.

I know, I know, aunty, wheels, bike but, still, hear me out for now. By any measure, really, QPR are about where they should be. In fact, without the owners propping the club up to the tune of £1.8m a month, we shouldn’t even be this high. If we had a wage bill commensurate with our income, somewhere around the £8m p/a mark rather than its present level just north of £20m, then in all likelihood we’d be in League One, to go with our League One stadium, and our League One average attendance which this season is less than Derby, Sheff Wed, Ipswich, Bolton (!), Portsmouth (!!) and Plymouth (!!!). We think of QPR, at the moment, as underachieving because the vast majority of people reading this column (hello to both etc.) will have fallen in love with the team in the 70s when it was one of the best in the country, the 1980s when it reached cup finals and went on European adventures, or the 1990s when it was the best London team in the new Premier League. But the sport has changed - mostly for the worse I’ll grant you but to deny it is to howl at the moon — and QPR has not. We have been left behind. There’s a lot of blame going around at the moment: some people think Les Ferdinand is at fault, some blame Lee Hoos, others want the owners out and are planning protests. But, league table wise, we’re probably at the upper end of where we should be in the modern sport and, sadly, we’re only able to maintain that because a rich bloke writes a cheque to cover the salary bill each month. We were punching above that weight, the manager walked out on us, our key midfielder has been injured for three months, so we’ve gone into a bad run of form— shit happens. It’s always worth bearing this sad economic reality in mind when we’re demanding sackings, protests, big bonfires etc.

So why are we so angry? And it is ‘we’ because, in case you couldn’t tell from the Hull match report, I’m fairly well raging. Please don’t think otherwise because of the drop intro. There are other QPR fans on the ‘awayday nutter’ circuit who are usually pretty calm, sanguine and reasonable who are raging too. We’re QPR, we don’t follow this team around every Saturday expecting to win — that really would be mad. But, once the burning rage of watching that fucking nonsense last Saturday had finally been doused (Wednesday morning-ish, it was Worcester Cold Storage levels of inferno) and I tried to rationalise why it’s pissing me off this much, I concluded there is a collection of things happening at QPR at the moment, all at the same time, that really boil the piss of football fans generally.

The theme, is inconsistency. Football people trot this word out a lot, as a catch all. Drag yourself through those two hours of EFL Highlights on a Saturday night on ITV and count the managers, players, presenters and studio pundits queuing up to lament that basically everybody apart from the top one or two in each division just “need that little bit more consistency” and then they’ll be fine. This ignores the definition of the fucking word. Gillingham don’t need more consistency: they’re second bottom of League Two with 21 points accrued and just 14 goals scored from 26 games played, that’s very consistent indeed. You turn up every week, Gillingham are fucking shit, and you go home — consistency. Everybody knows where they stand.

Now, you could say the same about QPR: one win from 14 games is not inconsistent form, it’s splendidly consistent. The inconsistency, though, does start with the team. Midtable teams are always going to win games and lose games in equal measure, play well some weeks and poorly the next, otherwise they wouldn’t be midtable. But the gap between QPR’s best and worst this season is seismic, and we’ve seen the best of them often enough (Boro H, Hull H, Watford A, Sheff Utd A, Bristol City A, Millwall A, Cardiff H) to know that it wasn’t just a dog having a day. It is within this group to do more, and when you see them nevertheless play like they did at Fleetwood and Hull, that’s very, very difficult to take. You look at Kenneth Paal last week, spending 40 minutes making Cyrus Christie look like a Viking invader and then insisting he had to be taken off with some non-descript injury that apparently might not even keep him out of this week’s game, and you compare it to how he played and stood up to that barrage Millwall tried to inflict on him at their place, and fans don’t like that. They don’t like Tyler Roberts, because he slouches about on the pitch, walks around too much, bitches and moans at team mates too often, and limps out of games with nothing very much wrong with him — so self absorbed last week that he only belatedly acknowledged the away end on the way out to his latest sabbatical when the few hundred who’d stayed that long coughed in his ear and asked him who the fucking hell he thinks he is. Ethan Laird, another, who at times has looked like Kyle Walker, and at others hasn’t even looked like somebody Kyle Walker would trust to clean his house — again, out of the Swansea game in the first half with an injury so mortal he’s back again tomorrow. Fans hate this sort of thing. This level of commitment, this sort of body language, this perception that they could do so much better — because we’ve seen them do so much better — if they could be arsed, but they can’t. It’s a red rag to supporters, particularly when you’ve got a set of away games involving the distances and expense we have at the moment.

If we turn to Les Ferdinand, his critics would say he’s been here eight years and the club is stagnating. Stagnating while other clubs who have exactly the same economic realities I referred to earlier, and worse, have been able to excel and go past us — Luton at Kenilworth Road, Brentford at Griffin Park. It drives me mad too that Luton are able to sign the strikers they have done, on their budget, in their stadium, while we’re stuck with Lyndon Dykes, Macauley Bonne, and a disparate collection of half-arsed loans. But, again, for me, it’s more the inconsistency. Whenever I listen to Les speak — about agents, about the director of football role, about what happened here before, about protecting the future of the club, about FFP — I agree with him. Whether it’s him, or somebody else, I think the club desperately needs a DOF system in place, because we saw with Mark Hughes and Harry Redknapp what happens when you leave these owners alone with football managers and nobody in between. But then, if you’re running the director of football system, Mark Warburton shouldn’t be allowed to spend our money on Dom Ball because he used to work with his dad at Watford, or Lee Wallace because he had him at Glasgow Rangers and it’s a magnificent football club, or Moses Odubajo, or Andre Gray - deals that meant we got to this summer without a first team full back in the whole squad, nor any FFP headroom to do anything about it. I shouldn’t be sitting in interviews with Mick Beale in June hearing about all the conversations he’s had with agents, all the great players that have told him they want to come and work for him, all the bed time stories he used to read Jake Clarke-Salter, all the nappies he changed when Kenneth Paal was a boy. I think we’d all agree, to one extent or another, the players who came here to play for Beale have downed tools since he left — the director of football system is here to protect against exactly that. It’s the inconsistency.

Similarly with Lee Hoos, somebody I have a good deal more time for than many on the QPR press beat at the moment, who I think has by-and-large done a very good job having inherited a financial catastrophe here that was at one stage losing north of £70m a year. He’s never pulled punches or given people answers they wanted to hear rather than the truth, he says the long term future of the club depends on getting it to a point where it doesn’t rely on one guy to write a £1.8m cheque every month — and he’s right, because if that guy leaves tomorrow and isn’t replaced by another with similarly deep pockets we’re off the side of a cliff without a parachute. On that sustainability drive he pushes back on things like The Stan Bowles Stand, extra coaches to away games, player of the year dinner, marketing in the local community, because it’s money the club doesn’t need to spend to exist, and if the fans want it then the fans can pay for it themselves. But, as he said himself, no club ever went into administration ordering too much stationary, and while we can’t afford £5,000 for a new sign for the Ellerslie Road stand, you’ve got Macauley Bonne walking away saying in interviews: “QPR changed my life in certain aspects, financially they did help me out. I went from not being on a lot of money to getting a good contract for a few years.” Dillon Barnes took three years of money from this club. I would strongly refute the need for a senior third choice goalkeeper anyway at a club that’s got so many keepers racked and stacked through its academy, and lo and behold Murphy Mahoney has been able to do it just fine since he finally left. Warbs would get angry with me when I brought this up, say he was “very confident in Dillon’s ability to step up if required”, and then when all the goalkeepers died at once last season we learned that this confidence didn’t even extend to including him in the 25-man squad — we’d deliberately left him out, precisely to leave space for the prospect of a Kieran Westwood signing instead. There’s so many little examples like that where you just want to yell ‘are we skint or not skint, pick a team’. It's inconsistent, sometimes we're tight as a mouse's waistcoat, others we're making it rain and lighting cigars with £50 notes.

Both Les and Lee talk about us being a development club… Brentford, Brighton, Southampton and others have been able to trade their way up the divisions into promotion pushes by selling players for big money and reinvesting that money each time into better and better players. Last season’s promotion push was built on the money received for Eze, and the FFP headroom that created. Now, with the market for Championship players severely deflated, you could argue this is a plan for a pre-Covid time, and we’re pursuing a pipe dream here, but Bristol City with Antoine Semenyo and shortly Alex Scott, Stoke with Harry Souttar, Swansea with Finn Downes have shown it is still just about possible. You’re not, however, going to develop many players if five of your outfield ten every week are on loan. You can’t talk about pathways to the first team while you’ve got a 19-year-old on loan from Aston Villa learning on your time in midfield, while other, older, boys we own are playing (and in some cases playing very well) in our B Team and U21s. Bristol City, also pursuing this strategy, have just received £10m for Semenyo, will get double that for Scott, and last week got two goals out of Sam Bell in their FA Cup tie, another academy graduate. We've graduated Osman Kakay from our academy in the last three years. Bristol City have zero loan players this season, we've borrowed half our team. You’re also not going to sell many players for profit if you keep working yourself into a position where you’ve got so little headroom under FFP that you can’t offer a handsome enough contract renewal to get them to stay — Chris Willock seemingly about to go the same way as Bright Osayi-Samuel and Ryan Manning.

Again, it’s the inconsistency. Saying one thing, doing another. We’re a development club, we need to grow our own, we need assets to sell, we need pathways from our very well staffed academy to our first team, but, hey, we’ve got a new manager with a big gob and he wants Tim Iroegbunam and Leon Balogun who he’s worked with before so we’re going to do that as well. It’s incoherent, and inconsistent. Saying one thing and doing another. That’s where it gets people’s backs up.

Nothing succeeds like winning. If we’d beaten Sheff Utd and Swansea, there’d be a very different mood around the place, there wouldn’t be nearly as many pointy fingers. But we didn’t win those games, and when you travel around and watch this team every week you can see why we didn’t. Win tomorrow, at lowly Huddersfield, and things will calm down a bit into next week — but everybody who was at Hull last week knows full well a repeat performance will bring the same result, however poor the opponent may be. Phone one in like that again, lose this game in that manner, and it’s going to start getting very aggy behind that goal.

Links >>> Intrusion on private grief — Interview >>> Macca’s last minute winner — History >>> Eltringham in charge — Referee >>> Huddersfield Official website >>> Ground Guide >>> Down at the Mac — Forum >>> And he Takes That Chance — Podcast

Below the fold

Team News: Lyndon Dykes remains in hospital a week on from his admission with pneumonia. He is hoping to be discharged this afternoon but his return to first team football is, one would presume, now a long way off. We’re not exactly blessed with a lot of options in his position now, with Tyler Roberts once again mortally wounded at the end of the Hull game. Sinclair Armstrong came on and did some bits and pieces from the bench on Humberside but remains incredibly raw. One would suspect it’ll be Jamal Lowe up top with a selection of tens behind him. Who knows, maybe even Taylor Richards - we’re offering a private guided tour of the Chelsea Flower Show with Princess Michael of Kent for a sighting. After a sub outing at Hull, Rangers will be desperate to have captain Stefan Johansen back from the start — the with and without stats on him are stark this season, as we’ll explore in the form section.

Kenneth Paal, like Ethan Laird the game before, suffered a first half injury against the Tigers so severe he couldn’t possibly carry on even until half time however, like Ethan Laird, it’s apparently not serious enough to keep him out for long. Laird should return at right back, Jake Clarke-Salter stands by for the left back slot if Paal doesn’t make it with Nico Trävelmän getting another stamp in his passport through a loan move to Racing White Daring Molenbeek. This splendidly named Belgian outfit is owned by American billionaire John Textor, who’s on the board at Crystal Palace but more to the point also owns Brazilian outfit Botafogo — scene of Trävelmän’s last fucking ridiculous loan deal. Rich friend of the family perhaps? He’s also got a stake in French giants Lyon so you never know Nico, maybe they’ll need someone to wash the kit or something next season?

Huddersfield made the fairly odd decision to send Sorba Thomas, for me their best player in the fixture at Loftus Road, out on loan to Championship rivals Blackburn during the transfer window. They’ve ostensibly replaced him with three times world champion men’s synchronised 3m springboard diver Anthony Knockaert, but the French Olympian arrived from Greek outfit Volos injured, hasn’t played yet, and isn’t likely to here. Horny show-off Joseph Hungbo could, however, get a full debut — the Watford loanee came off the bench in last week’s meek defeat at Coventry. Goalkeeper Lee Nicholls, whose heroics on the way to the play-off final last year made him the Championship’s keeper of the season, has been ruled out for the rest of the campaign so Czech veteran Tomáš Vaclík arrives with 53 international caps to his name from Olympiacos for the remainder of the season and will debut here.

Elsewhere: Huddersfield’s problems this season stem from last season’s Championship play-off final, given to creaking referee Jon Moss as a retirement present and billed as the first Championship fixture to use VAR, with disastrous consequences. Having escaped two blatant penalty appeals in the second half to win promotion, Forest then raided Town for their two best players (Harry Toffolo and Lewis O’Brien) while the Trees’ owner poached manager Carlos Corberan for his Greek team Olympiacos — the husk it left behind is now heading for League One. Corberan was sacked after a month in Greece, and is now leading a play-off charge at West Brom — they go first this weekend in a TV game at home to Coventry tonight. Toffolo, who was only signed because Forest bought Omar Richards from Bayern the month before without picking up on his broken leg in the medical, is now appealing to UEFA to allow a January loan move to Anderlecht to go through after the deadline. O’Brien is in similar limbo, with a last minute loan move to Blackburn — at home to Wigan on Monday night — also resting on an appeal. Forest have now signed 29 players this season, and O’Brien is one of those not even included in their 25-man squad for the second half of the campaign. You think we've had bad luck, Huddersfield fell in a barrel of tits and came up sucking the Ebola virus.

Speaking of Wigan, they’re under a third new boss of the season in Shaun Maloney for that trip to Ewood Park. Steven Caulker however, and prepare to be shocked here as I tell you this, won’t be going with them. Having started January with the standard ramble about discovering himself and becoming a new man in Turkey, only for some beastly football manager or other not to pick him, Wigan presented him with the new challenge he apparently craved. Two games later, and having committed a dreadful error for a Luton goal in that three-game series followed by a multi-par Facebook apology that concluded “one thing you can be certain of, I will keep fighting until the very end”, he’s walked away from the Latics. Best see if that Guardian journo is still in the contacts book I suppose.

Rotherham start the Saturday fixtures off with a lunchtime South Yorkshire derby at home to Sheff Utd — a fixture they surprisingly won at Bramall Lane pre-Christmas. With financial losses of only £700k and £1.3m on their slate over the last couple of seasons there’s plenty of FFP headroom to play with at The New York Stadium, but this January has been the first time in all their recent Championship stays that it’s felt like they’ve had a bit of a dig at surviving. Admittedly they did fetch in £1.5m for Dan Barlaser from Middlesbrough — at home to Blackpool this weekend — but a three-and-a-half-year contract for 30-year-old Jordan Hugill won’t have been cheap and must be knocking on the door of making him their best paid player ever. Domingos Quina from Watford, who scored a spectacular winner for Barnsley against us at Oakwell last season, is one of half a dozen loans which also includes experienced Sunderland centre back Bailey Wright. Former Cardiff captain Sean Morrison has been picked up on a free.

That’s potentially bad news for the other teams down there who you’d think had designs on reeling the Millers in more than most other potential victims. Cardiff, fourth bottom, lost late at Luton in the week in Sabri Lamouchi’s first game in charge and now head to Hull. Birmingham have now sunk to fifth bottom after five league defeats in a row ahead of their trip to Swanselona — who did six out and none in during January sparking fury among their fans and a press conference this morning attended by all of Russell Martin’s coaching staff to present a united front. Stoke, too, are now in the danger zone, sixth bottom ahead of a tough trip to Lutown, but they have signed Ben Pearson oon loan from Bournemouth which is such an obvious fit I can’t believe it hasn’t happened before now.

Up at the top the game of the day is undoubtedly the battle of parachute payment clubs Norwich and Burnley on Saturday lunchtime. Another quick £10m spent by the Clarets this window, including £8m forward Lyle Foster from Westerlo, and they’re now 17 points clear of third place. Watford, the only other side in the six we’re yet to mention, go to Reading. Sunderland have been riding high in form, recruitment and the table of late, but lost star striker Ross Stewart to an Achilles injury for the rest of the season in their FA Cup draw at Fulham and now look light up front with the recall of Ellis Simms to Everton ahead of a trip to a sold out Den to face Millwall — not sure Alex Pritchard doing the West Ham “hammers” gesture at the away end in the first meeting was the shrewdest move in hindsight, sure of a warm welcome here.

If you’re going to Preston v Bristol City you deserve everything you get.

Referee: It’s only a second QPR appointment in two-and-a-half seasons for Championship mainstay Geoff Eltringham, which given our 2-2-9 record with him is probably a good thing. However, he has consistently topped the LFW referee rankings over the last few seasons and is currently on a run of 7-7-8-6-8-8-9-8-8-8-7-8-7 with us. What could possibly go wrong? Details.

Form

Huddersfield: The Terriers’ 2-1 win at Loftus Road in October is one of only seven they’ve managed in the league this season, and one of only two away victories — they are third bottom, three points adrift of Cardiff in the final safe spot, but with two games in hand on the Welsh side. Ruffels the Gentleman Fullback scored twice that night, his only goals in 20 appearances this season, his only goals in his last 37 games dating back to April 2021 when he was playing for Oxford in League One. Since that night at Loftus Road they have won two of eight — back-to-back successes at Preston and at home to Rotherham over Christmas. If that hinted at a recovery in progress, hopes have been rather dashed since, with three defeats and a draw in all comps leading into this weekend’s fixture. The first goal tends to be crucial — of Huddersfield’s five home wins this season, four of them have been to nil, and the other was a 3-1 win against Stoke where they took the lead. They have recovered only seven points from losing positions all season, and three of those were against QPR in the first meeting. Only Cardiff (21) have scored fewer goals than Huddersfield (25). Only Wigan (10) have lost more home games than the Terriers (seven). Jordan Rhodes is top scorer here with five league goals in 14 starts and 13 sub appearances.

QPR: The defeat at Hull last weekend was QPR’s third 3-0 loss in eight league games. Now just one win in 14 games for hapless Rangers, and they’ve failed to score in eight of those games. It’s the worst run of results since the Redknapp-Ramsey period of Premier League football in 2014/15. Overall they’ve fired blanks in 12 of their 29 league games and six goals scored in 13 league games is the worst record since 2006/07. They’ve scored three goals in a game on four occasions (Boro, Cardiff, Hull at home and Watford away) but haven’t scored more than two in a game in 16 attempts and have scored one goal or fewer in 13 of their last 14 games. Away from home they’ve gone from winning four out of five to one of the last nine. All of this began happening before Mick Beale departed, and coincides almost exactly with Stefan Johansen’s injury picked up in the defeat which started the whole sorry tale at Birmingham City. QPR had won eight and drawn four of Johansen’s 17 appearances prior to his injury — 1.64 points a game. Since then they’ve won only one and drawn five of 14 — 0.57 points per game. Since this fixture was rekindled after a ten-year absence in 2013, QPR have won only one of six visits to this ground, and have lost three and drawn one of the last four visits.

Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Last year’s champion Cheesy tells us…

“Hopefully the players have read Clive's match report from last weekend. We are not expecting players to be world beaters here at QPR. What we do expect is 100% effort. Mackie, Derry, Hill etc are still loved at this club for doing just that. Armstrong is running around, showing passion and getting caught offside more times than Bonne, but is turning into a fans favourite. Roberts on the other hand, will never make it at this club with his attitude. £4m? No thanks. My prediction for Huddersfield will be the usual after a bad result. An improvement just to get our hopes up. I've not seen Huddersfield this year so not sure what to expect.”

Cheesy’s Prediction: Huddersfield 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Jamal Lowe

LFW’s Prediction: Huddersfield 1-0 QPR. No scorer.

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Pictures — Ian Randall Photography

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TacticalR added 23:23 - Feb 3 Thanks for your preview. Enjoying the misfortunes of others is one of the most enjoyable things about football. In fact, in the situation we are in, it's just about the only enjoyable thing about football. In the Everton case it's particularly satisfying in a déjà vu sort of way, because they are doing all the things we did, such as picking up all the discarded head cases of football like Dele Alli. It's becoming increasingly obvious that Beale's actions have wrecked our season. You can argue that the Beale loanees and signings shouldn't have been affected like this, but it looks like they have been (and who knows what Beale promised them). It does make you question why we got rid of players like Barbet, especially when the defence parts like the Red Sea as it did against Hull. I did hear a couple of different perspectives this week. Maz Farookhi on the BBC London Radio hour about QPR said our goal should be simply not to get relegated, although I doubt that will satisfy the long-suffering (and long-distance travelling) away fans. Kevin Gallen on the West London Sport QPR Podcast suggested using the rest of the season to try and bring through some of our own players (assuming relegation is unlikely given the points we have got so far). One way or another we need a coherent strategy that the fans can understand. I have a feeling the Huddersfield game is going to be a dogfight given the current situation of the two clubs.

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snanker added 05:13 - Feb 4 Accurate as always Clive and this game reeks of a CPR result given recent forms and Terriers chance to do a double ! Just hoping Johansen can add some structure in the mid-field and we don't go meekly into the night........again
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062259 added 05:41 - Feb 4 It’s known in medical circles as PLSS - Premier League Schadenfreude Syndrome. My latest bout predominantly involves Chelsea and the aforementioned Everton, with mild symptoms of Liverpool and Man City thrown in for good measure.
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Andybrat added 11:31 - Feb 4 Mentioned on other Fred, our point tally would already keep us up last season ( would be 4th from bottom) so aka Kevin Gallen, time to blood in the future potential players. Thing is we will never know how good they could be until the play for the 1st team and they need to play more than once. If the season is almost concluded for us it is the perfect time for NC to build his superhoops from within. None of the B team were brought in ( bar Dixon-Bonner possibly) from MB so hopefully only playing for the club and their own ambitions. Great write up Clive and you know the owners are keeping us afloat so maybe their ambitions match the youngsters, I think they do. On that positive note think we will lose today.

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qprninja added 15:35 - Feb 6 I see Dixon-Bonner mentioned above, I'd completely forgotten we'd signed him. Does anyone know how he's been performing for the B team, is he anywhere near challenging for the first team?
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