Queens Park Rangers 1 Watford 0 (11/03/2023)

1- So.  Been in Spain all week.  Did I miss anything?

2- There’s got  to come a point, surely, where the tutting and the handwringing stops and Something Happens.  When a straw is recognised as the final one, when all of this bullshit being served up in front of us is deemed enough already.  Are we there yet?  On balance we should have been there a long time ago, much as it’s hard to know quite what to do from this distance.  Difficult not to feel that this sense of impotence is part of the masterplan, a deliberate and cultivated consequence of the deluge of nonsense.

The smokescreens are quite deliberate too, of course.  They don’t need to be artfully constructed, no conjuror’s slight of hand this… it’s quite easy to provide a distraction from what’s going on over there by creating something else to get outraged about over here.  It’s not as if we’re short of options.  The Gary Lineker thing is just such a smokescreen;  the rights and wrongs of the argument itself are so straightforward that they don’t need explaining unless your brain’s full of cabbage, in which case no amount of explanation is going to help. But whilst we’re getting all outraged about that, we’re suddenly not talking about Hancock’s WhatsApps and what they suggest, or the cost of living crisis, or nurses’ wages, or the litany of other charges against this disgusting government including the shameful, illegal, disgraceful demonising of refugees which prompted Lineker’s tweet in the first place.  Meanwhile the BBC, the clearest loser out of the whole episode, tears itself apart from the inside which was surely the point of Richard Sharp, Robbie Gibb and Tim Davie being there at all.

3- Meanwhile.

It comes to something when a Maths lecture blows a game of football out of the water for entertainment value.  Not just entertainment value actually… excitement, inspiration, escapism, a lot of the things we watch football for.  Hell, some sense of life being worth living and not wanting to drive drawing pins into your forehead.  But then we live in a strange world.  And much as the Maths lecturer had the advantage of being delivered by the remarkable Professor Hannah Fry, and on the gently warm and sunny Spanish coast rather than cold, wet and almost joyless Shepherds Bush and much as the match itself, which I’m desperately avoiding trying to get on to, wasn’t much of a benchmark it’s still a remarkable revelation.  After all I was being paid to be there, and paid through the nose to be at the football (again) out of my own pocket.  

During her talk, Professor Fry quoted psychologist Daniel Kahneman‘s assertion that “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution”.  A statement that provides countless opportunities to wander ever further away from the supposed subject of this report but I’ll resist the temptation to ask “Is Keir Starmer substituting in the question ‘How do I win the next election?’ for the real question, ‘How do I do anything halfway useful?’ ” and steer back on topic.

Because one has to wonder whether “Should we change the head coach?” is the question that’s being substituted in because it’s the easy one to answer.  The harder one is “How do we sort this shit out?”, the subtext of which regarding underperforming players and listless performances will need no further elaboration to anyone who’s got this far.  “Sort it out Taylor!” was a much mocked and revisited theme of BSaD reports during GT’s second era on the odd occasion (they did happen) when things didn’t look great.  A shout of desperation and hopelessness from the stands that suggested so little but betrayed so much.  “Sorting it out” is difficult when problems run deep.  Changing the head coach, as we know, is pretty easy.

4- Bilić’s removal was, at the very least, easy to make a case for.  Indeed, most (not all) of the dismissals have felt at least reasonable at the time, which begs questions about both the hiring and the environment in which the Head Coaches have to work.  When the injured players came back and the performances got worse…  did the players know what was coming and step back and wait accordingly?  Consciously or subconsciously?

I don’t believe that the hire-and-fire thing is totally without credibility.  It manifestly has worked in the past, and I don’t really see that the fact that we’re underperforming now precludes it from working in the future.  Thing is, it’s a bit like hiring Sam Allardyce.  It’s fine for as long as it’s working.  When it stops working you’ll find little patience from a fanbase who want someone to invest trust in and are tired of being the butt of everyone’s jokes.

5- This is a monumentally terrible game of football.  The hosts play a full and effective role in this outcome, for all that they deservedly win it…  indeed, it’s not stretching the truth too much to suggest that for all of our failure to look remotely threatening (again), it could have gone a very different way had it been us that pulled a goal out of nowhere rather than Rangers.  Arguing that “If we’d scored and they hadn’t we’d have won the game” doesn’t add much in terms of insight admittedly but… Tim Iroegbunam’s fine finish, abetted fully by hapless non-challenges from Choudhury and Porteous and perhaps by Bachmann’s positioning, was a startling outbreak of competence on an afternoon distinctly lacking in similar from either side. 

Prior to that, QPR had looked every inch a side that had gone forever without a win.  They were the more competitive, aggressive side from the off but…  in a way that suggested willing adherence to what their own new boss Gareth Ainsworth had installed as the new blueprint (a blueprint short of surprises to anyone who saw Ainsworth’s Wycombe side in action) but also a choking lack of confidence.  Chris Martin has been employing the same base thuggery as a Championship centre-forward since Archimedes was deriving the value of pi.  Here, his petulant punch in Wesley Hoedt’s back occurred in the third minute, not the dying seconds of a lost game as might have been more likely. Right wing-back Aaron Drewe, making only his second league start, looked horribly jumpy and some rare excitement was provided by an overhit Jimmy Dunne backpass that briefly appeared to trouble a stranded Samba Dieng.  It was to prove the closest we’d come to scoring, and no Watford player was involved.

The last thing that we needed was for this physical but anxious Rangers side to have something to defend.  If we’d gotten the break they might have folded themselves, but taking the lead buoyed the Loftus Road crowd and gave the home side visibly more belief.  Drewe was now hammering up and down the right flank in front of us whilst we struggled for any attacking shape at all, our only first half forward movement coming from JP taking the game into his own hands, often with the end point being a free kick in a threatening area which inevitably delivered nothing of interest.

6- The second half was better.  We came out with a bit of zip, the previously invisible Sarr was suddenly popping up here and there (if to little consequence) and the game being played in the half closest to us just as the first half had.  You don’t need to be a Professor of Mathematics, however, to be aware that zero is kind of absolute, that bigger or better than zero doesn’t have to amount to very much.  Positives, if you’re minded to look for them, were provided by the Chris Wilder trademark of all three centre backs in what was initially a 3-4-3 formation surging forward with the ball and providing some disruption which conservative sideways passes hadn’t provoked.  We are, however, cripplingly low on belief and whilst our focal point Keinan Davis worked hard to hold the ball up his reluctance to shoot at a half chance scuppered us more than once.

Two things can be guaranteed from any Watford game at the moment.  One is that at some point there’ll be a kerfuffle in a penalty area prior to a corner; maybe an opponent will hit the deck clutching their face in mock agony and we’ll be on our feet in outrage before noting that it’s Wesley Hoedt involved again and, once more, you don’t need to be a Professor of Mathematics to spot a pattern evolving. 

The second reliable touchpoint is the fact that we’re still easily outfought, outbullied.  QPR were aggressive and wandered over the line pretty frequently but we’ve got to be able to fight this by more than simply following the referee around moaning about it.  We’ve got to be much more resilient.  For all that we had more of the ball in the second half, for all that Louza was more prominent and we did actually get balls in dangerous places, an equaliser never felt like more than a remote possibility.  When João Pedro’s twisting and turning finally saw him go down in the box rather than outside it referee James Linington waved appeals away;  when we countered deep into injury time and the options seemed to swarm either side of an advancing Louza he found Davis with an imperfect pass, the centre forward dug the ball out from his feet, hesitated, tried to open a better angle, and hesitated again as the chance closed up.  The game ended with an inordinate number of QPR players going down with cramp;  the official did a reasonable job of refusing physios when he thought he was being played and added on seven minutes to a half with no goals, but adding extra time doesn’t compensate for disruption of momentum, of which we had precious little to begin with.

7- I’d said that Shepherds Bush was almost joyless.  The brief joy was provided by a hitherto undiscovered Ethiopian restaurant hidden in Shepherds Bush market, the high point of a difficult day that concluded with a prolonged and uncomfortable train journey home.  Daughter 2 continues to dutifully cross the grounds off but her dedication has been given precious little reward over the last two and a half seasons of matches watchable live.  Daughter 1 never has any problem telling me if she doesn’t fancy the football, all power to her for that, but Daughter 2 might be more likely to not want to upset her Dad by not attending.  I’ve frequently promised her that she doesn’t need to come, shouldn’t come, if she doesn’t want to.  I’ve not been brave enough to repeat that assertion recently.

If the hoped for liberation of our listless, punchless side under Chris Wilder is to be realised over the coming weeks I’m unlikely to be there to see it.  I’ll be at Birmingham but probably unable to file a timely report;  thereafter a prior engagement next weekend is followed by a trip to Addis Ababa to eat yet more Ethiopian food.  

I’ll be back in circulation for Bristol City after Easter.  

Until then, yoooorns.

Bachmann 3, Mario Gaspar 3, Sema 2, Porteous 2, Cathcart 3, Hoedt 2, Choudhury 2, Louza 3, Sarr 2, *João Pedro 3*, Davis 2
Subs: Asprilla (for Porteous, 76) NA, Assombalonga (for Sarr, 77) NA, Aráujo, Koné, Kabasele, Ngakia, Hamer