Random QPR Stuff

What's MB on about when there will be one or two knocking on the door in next couple of weeks when referring to Bonne's position in the squad. As far as I can see with have eeyore and Armstrong as the only two strikers in the squad, who are these mysterious other strikers we have, or maybe it Ramkilde?!

 

This rant from Clives report about the Blackpool game is very good regarding the timewasting and ****housery we're seeing in football these days...

QPR should, should, have had plenty more time to try and get that right next time. Blackpool’s clock running started before half time at nil nil, and really kicked in in earnest after the break, with every trick in the book rolled out and bled to death over every throw in, every free kick, every goal kick, every thing, everything. Every. Thing. Thompson, already on a booking, took the piss like few before him. His theft of up to ten yards at every throw in took place in plain sight in front of the referee, who allowed it to take place unchecked all evening.

The ball is in play, on average, for 50% of Championship matches, by far and away the worst total of any European league. Blackpool fans travelling here this Tuesday night, Hull next week, at a disgusting £36 a ticket, plus train, plus hotel, plus petrol... can expect to witness a game in which the ball is out of play as much as it is in. The EFL and PGMOL had made this a priority in the summer, and promised a clampdown, which so far seems to have consisted of a couple of yellow cards scattered around on the opening day, and absolutely Jack **** since.

Davies, here, did less than nothing at all about it, encouraging it and increasing it with every moment of indecisive inaction. He then added just four minutes to the end of the game, as the equally piss weak Jeremy Simpson had in similar circumstances at Sunderland on Saturday. If four minutes was correct here, then we may as well just pack in now. Just make every game 94 minutes and be done with it. If this game, and Saturday’s at Sunderland, only warranted four minutes of added time, then truly what are we doing here? What’s the point? Complete horseshit. Just laughable really. Four minutes. Even Davies must have known deep down that this was a complete crock of absolute ****. All those subs, all those injuries, all that time wasting. Four minutes. **** off mate, and, when you arrive, **** off from there as well. Useless, limp-dicked waste of flesh.

Let’s go a jump further on this high horse. Thompson, Ekpiteta and others all tried repeatedly, and succeeded frequently, to stop the game for “head injuries”. They no more had head injuries than rabies. They know this, their team mates know this, the opposition knows it, the medics know it, and the referee knows it, but in 2022 we have to go through this embarrassing, pathetic, childish rigmarole of stopping the match to ascertain that they are, in fact, lying. At that point, having been made to trudge to the sideline, they come sprinting straight back onto the field, in Thompson’s case shaking his apparently injured head around to toss his dreadlocks back and forth at the crowd.

There’s a cloud heading football’s way on head injuries, concussions, and illness in later life. Panic, compensation claims and insurance issues have already changed the way rugby union is played and refereed fundamentally, torching what meagre spectacle that sport was able to provide in the first place in the name of making safe something that is fundamentally always going to be unsafe. Rugby league is trapped in a similar spiral, tying itself in horrible knots, suspending half the players in the competition, wrecking matches, in the forlorn quest to somehow make driving a car into a brick wall at 50 miles per hour safe. Sport, taken, analysed, handed to medics, dissected, chewed up, and turned out into a scientific practice, with “protocols” to follow. Referees now stand in front of screens going through step-by-step tick box exercises to eventually reach the conclusion that a big bloke could have dipped his shoulder a little bit more and therefore should be sent off and that's the game over with now as a contest.

Football, starting with the verdict of ‘industrial disease’ in Jeff Astle’s inquest, and continuing with cases like the tragedy that now adorns the Ellerslie Road side of our ground, has all this coming and more. Moves are already being made to ban heading in training, and youth games. I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility that in 30 years’ time heading won’t be allowed in the sport, and will be looked back on like doctors recommending cigarettes, or tossers riding around on orcas in Sea World, by future generations as “what the hell were they doing?”. Kids who grow up wanting to play football, and their parents, want to know the sport is safe, that they’re not going to end their days in various vegetative states.

Every footballer, every single footballer, who goes down pretending they’ve got a head injury to stop the match and waste time is complicit and guilty in undermining and damaging the sport, and every single genuine effort to make it safer. They are trivialising the whole thing, for the short-term gain of a 1-0, midweek, early season, away win nobody will ever remember 18 months from now. They damage that cause a little bit more every time they do it. Because what is a serious issue, with dozens of deaths and illnesses already, is weaponised in the name of cheating and ****housing. Head injuries are serious business, they’re not to be pissed around with and used like this. The trained medical professionals who come onto the field and partake in this absolute charade of checking pupils and neck flexion of a player who has nothing wrong with him are complicit and should be ashamed to be so. Some of these people have taken a literal oath, and yet we sit through them trundling onto the pitch – in the case of the Peterborough medical team last year winking at people in the Paddocks on the way off – to facilitate this con job. It is scandalous. It is a scandal.

At the moment every footballer knows if their team is under pressure, if they’re holding onto a lead, if they’re running the clock down, they can sit down, hold their head, and get the game stopped. If they’re lying and there’s nothing wrong with them, nothing will happen to them. Not only no punishment, but when only four minutes is added to the end of the game, and they’re waved straight back onto the field afterwards, they’re actually rewarded for the act. The referees and the sport as a whole are encouraging them to do it more. There’s incentive for you to cloud and mask a serious problem with fallacy and fake. It’s proper ‘boy who cried wolf’ stuff. I want no lawsuits and legal actions 20 years from now from people who sat down on the turf and held the back of their neck because they were frightened they might end up with a 1-1 from a midweek trip to a crap QPR side rather than a 0-1. If Dominic Thompson makes a claim and I’m defending in court I’m showing a clip of this game, him demanding treatment, the game being stopped, the medics coming on, the rigmarole they went through, the trudge to the sideline, and then the spring back onto the field at the first possible opportunity, and the big, exaggerated waggle of his head, dreadlocks flailing this way and that, to confirm to absolutely everybody present what they already knew – that the whole thing was a lie.

If we’re actually taking this seriously, if these head injuries are genuine, if it’s not a cynical ploy, if we do actually care about this… then let’s ****ing do it right shall we? Balls deep. You go down clutching your head, fine, we believe you. We believe you. We believe you so much, and we’re so concerned about you, that as well as stopping the game, we’ll remove you from the field for the 15-minute concussion check now in place in the rugby codes. This may mean your best centre back is off for a crucial bit of the game, it may mean we play added time of 15, 20 minutes each game, but, come on, this stuff is important right? To make sure you’re properly ok. If an independent doctor passes you, you can return to the field. But your health is paramount. At all times. Football is just football, come on, there are more important things. And we’re worried about you. A substitute will play in your place in the meantime – I mean, we’ve got five of the ****ers to use haven’t we? To try and stop Klopp moaning for 20 minutes. Let’s use one for this charade.

What, do you suppose, might be the result of this? How do you think it might alter things like the last half an hour of last night’s match? Lots and lots of previously undiagnosed and missed concussions? Or lots and lots of players for whom there was **** all wrong in the first place packing in this shameless act? Real, genuine head injuries would get the immediate medical treatment they need and deserve. Referees would not be in this invidious position of having no choice but to stop the match, even when they know they’re being conned. I don’t see a downside personally. I’d put every penny I own on Dominic Thompson being absolutely fine if that was the ‘protocol’.

We’re either serious about this **** or we’re not, and the last half an hour of that game last night, with then a paltry four minutes added to the end of it, was not a sport taking this seriously at all, nor one that should be taken seriously by anybody else. It was a farce. A farce for which everybody involved, including and specifically the medics coming onto the field, should be abjectly ashamed to be involved in.

 

Can't argue with that. I would love it, absolutely love it in that situation to see the board go up at the end of the match with 20 minutes on it and the reaction of the Blackpool bench and better still for us to score twice in the final 5 minutes. Those c*nts are an affront to the 'beautiful game'...

 

Do you think QPR would play that differently if the circumstances were swapped?

It’s endemic, women’s game will be next. So easy to deal with as well.

 

When do the Watford tickets go on sale? I thought they'd have been up for grabs by now??

 

Sold out our allocation of just under 2000 last Thursday pal ! Thought they'd have given us more

 

I wish they displayed it on the tickets page as sold out. It just isn't there at all, which makes you think it hasn't gone on sale yet.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know the bad news

 

The new app is pathetic, even worse than it was before and that's saying something. I agree it should be displayed .

 

And on the subject of crap refs we've got that Muppet Keith Stroud at Watford, I wonder what sorcery he has in store for us?...

 

That’s three points for Bournemouth then.

 

Looks like they've actually listened to the fans, better late than never !

 

As an ST holder I used to get an alert when away tickets went on sale for each eligible group. No longer it seems. Checked settings and all the notifications are turned on, and I’m getting the match day line ups and scores sent. In effect this means I won’t go to as many away games as I don’t plan ahead very well.

 

And as if by magic, today I am bombarded with notifications for buying Swansea tickets, in rapidly descending loyalty points tiers.

Thanks Mr Benn.

 

Beautifully put. I've seen us do it too though, so it's not a Blackpool thing, it's a championship thing. It would be so easy to stamp out and I can't believe they haven't done so already. I left the Blackpool game questioning if I'd actually enjoyed the spectacle, irrespective of the score, and if I'd have enjoyed watching us do that. I don't want to pay £40 to watch any team, including us, perform those antics and wind down the clock. It's not sport, it's not entertainment, it's not fun. We're already fighting a losing battle against the PL for fans and the championship becoming* unwatchable won't help that.

*becoming more.

 

Very sad and emotional article about sharing your love of QPR with your dying father....

Me, The Auld Fella and Charlie Austin – Column

Wednesday, 24th Aug 2022 16:40 by Robert Donnellan

Robert Donnellan’s father Terry had a dying wish – to see Charlie Austin score a winner at Loftus Road one more time.


It’s often asked “why do bad things happen to good people?”. But recently I learned that even in dark times, those good things, however small, still happen too.

It is December 2020. In the middle of a global pandemic that is suddenly re-escalating, for some mad reason we are allowed to go to a football match. Most people enter lotteries to win life-altering prizes, so perhaps fitting that I easily win one where the prize is sitting through an insipid QPR defeat to a mediocre Reading side. The whole day is exceptionally strange. Sitting in the garden of the Crown & Sceptre trying to order the smallest amount of food that permits us to stay for the longest amount of time. Sitting in a mask, a sterile atmosphere and the faint feeling that it was madness that we were there at all.

But the thing really compounding the oddity of the whole occasion was walking into an unfamiliar part of the ground, and realising that my father, Terry, might never make another QPR game, and this would be the first match of an era of my life attending without him.

In August 2020, my father was diagnosed with cancer in his liver. In September they confirm that the primary cancer is pancreatic. Which as far as cancers go, is basically game over. So severe, his life insurance paid out while he was still alive. Later when his oncologist told him there was nothing more they could do, dad asked if it meant he was in end-of-life care. He replied that he had been in end-of-life care since he was diagnosed. They offered him chemo, but warned it would be a testing experience, and it had a low chance of delivering positive effects.....

Continues here...

https://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/news/58345/me-the-auld-fella-and-charlie-austin-–-column