Everything Must Go: The People who Relegated QPR

It’s not Arry’s fault. Honest guv.

Incompetence. Greed. Laziness. PR disasters. And thats just Jose Bosingwa. In a mere two seasons, QPR have stunk the Premier League out good and proper. Tony Fernandes has been left hanging from a branch like a bloated, beaten piñata, gleefully smashed by agents, managers and players. Today, Frankly Vulgar delivers it’s damning personal judgment on some of the people have contributed to this sorry, sorry mess. 

These two are probably less full of mirth right now.

Park Ji-sung

Park is what I imagine Europe’s capital cities were like in April 1945 – a fucking wreck. He isn’t so much a footballer as he is the remains of one. Gone is the big game gyro, Fergie’s go-to-hustler, his oxymoronically offensive shield. I remember watching Manchester United rout AC Milan 4-0 at Old Trafford. Park was the best player on the pitch. He smothered Andrea Pirlo, suffocated him, running him down into the pitch to the point where the Italian was entirely anonymous. It was a masterclass.

Watching Ji trot hopelessly around Loftus Road, misplacing five yard passes, having to make every second touch a tackle because he can no longer trap a ball, well, it would be sad – if he hadn’t cost the best part of £5 million. The only optimism to be found in watching Park these days is that he actually proves the existence of the afterlife – he has become a ghost.

Verdict: Due a trip to the glue factory.

As Esteban looked into Mark’s eyes, he realised he had only one question: What the fuck am I doing here.

Esteban Granero

Since Euro 2008 football has had a distinctly Spanish flavour. Tiki-taka has become a layman’s term. Fat, balding men with wheezy voices across Britain have had arguments in pubs about whether the Spanish style, the Barcelona piquancy of pressing and passing, is ‘boring’ or not. Well, regardless of its robotic bloodlessness, its a style that has until very recently been dominant.

I imagine Mark Hughes thought Esteban Granero would bring some of this confidence, this metronomic ability to terminate the opposition through a sheer tonnage of sideways passing, to QPR. In defeat against Manchester City and a draw to Chelsea, Granero made a positive impression: here was a player with pedigree, technique and awareness; an aristocratic footballer. Unfortunately what Granero lacked was balls. The man is a eunuch. As soon as things went sour at QPR this season Granero downed his tools. He started to mope around the pitch, unable to pass the ball without a sort of restless, tempo-sapping vacillation about the way he did it. He’s a wallflower.

Verdict: If Blanche DuBois was a Spanish footballer.

I’m actually amazed the good people at Soccer Starz thought Hoilett was good enough to justify being turned into one of these.

Junior Hoilett

David ‘Junior’ Hoilett is what some of my friends would refer to as a ‘sideman’. A wasteman. A dick. Last summer most QPR fans would have had young Junior at the apex of their transfer wish lists. We were giddy when he actually did sign – pacy, tricky , a provider of goals with an eye for the spectacular and he was young. Under 30. Not a big name but with the right management he could be.

We should have been questioning why he came to QPR when he could have played in front of 50,000 at St. James’ or played Champions League football in Germany with Monchengladbach. The player who turned up at QPR was pathetic – fat, slow, lazy and uninterested. Another player treating the club as a kind of money teat to suck on. You can see it on the pitch. It means fuck all to him. The biggest insult I can pay him is that Shaun Wright-Philips is a better footballer than him.

Verdict: Chubby Little Loser.

The Loftus Road turf wasn’t very receptive to Rob Green’s overtures.

Rob Green

Temporary unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis, completely unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals of life-long patterns of behaviour – these are the symptoms of Rob Green Syndrome (RGS). Those who suffer with RGS should avoid situations that involve high stress or pressure. If you think you are suffering from RGS call 999 without hesitation. Even if the symptoms of RGS disappear whilst you are waiting for an ambulance, medical professionals advise that you should still go to hospital for treatment.

A friend of mine supports West Ham and insists that ‘Greeno’ is a very capable keeper. Well if thats the case I would like to know where on earth he has been hiding for the last 9 months.

Verdict: Shell Shocked.

Chris tries to work out what the biggest animal he could kill without a weapon is. Experts at Frankly Vulgar have calculated that it could be as large as a Polar Bear.

Chris Samba

Chris Samba has all the attributes of a player that an idiot (Robbie Savage) thinks would make a good centre back. He’s just a pretty big guy. He’s also pretty slow, pretty cumbersome and pretty mediocre. Journalists still attribute ridiculous adjectives to Samba – I’ve seen him described this season as monstrous, commanding and imperious. The only thing ‘monstrous’ about Samba is his weekly wage – the joke doing the rounds on Sunday was the he missed that days dire derby suicide pact game against Reading because he dropped his wallet on his foot.

Verdict: Big Man Big Money Big Mistakes

Stéphane Mbia

Awwwwhh! Bless Stéphane Mbia! Look at him giving his shirt away after the game! To a little kid as well! Look how cute he is on Twitter!

Call me a cynic but if Mbia was anywhere near as good as his tooth-achingly saccharine PR then QPR wouldn’t be looking forward to trips to Bournemouth, Barnsley and Burnley next season. Mbia was an excellent (if Wikipedia is to be believed) defender at Marseille. He has been a palpably below average midfielder for QPR. When Mbia signed from Marseille, Joey Barton was packed off the other way on loan. If you’d told me at the time that Marseille would get the better end of the deal I would have ridiculed you. Shows how much I know.

Verdict: His head is the same shape as a  really big baked potato. Creepy.

The Samba philosophy.

Samba Diakité

Samba is that kid in your class at school. The quiet one who head-butted the door when he got angry. The one who stuck pencils in his nose until it bled and he started crying. Ralph Wiggum with a dash of the old ultra-violence. That kid.

Samba terminates another opposition midfielder. With EXTREME prejudice.

Samba Diakité’s QPR debut against Fulham last season was utterly extraordinary. He was on the pitch for about 30 minutes and in that time he made thirteen fouls. You could have made a case for each one of them being a red card. Samba has rarely featured this season and when he has he is just as inanely violent as he always is. Most of his time has been spent taking a few sabbaticals in a attempt to make peace with his (incredibly destructive) inner-self.

Verdict: A Chickenless Head

Bobby’s one man remake of ‘The Karate Kid’ wasn’t universally popular at Loftus Road.

Bobby Zamora

QPR got seriously fleeced when they paid £6 million for this wanker. Bobby is better at moaning about shit than he is at playing football. He makes fancy dress enthusiast Julio Cesar look like a good PR guru.

QPR faced Reading at Loftus Road in November for what was already a relegation six-pointer. This is what Bobby had to say before the game. How clueless can you get? Also for most of the season Bobby has had a very sore hip. He shows this during games by puffing his cheeks out and rubbing it – just in case we didn’t realise. It was impossible not to know about Bobby’s mythical hip this season – Harry Redknapp never stopped going on about the bloody thing. ‘If only’ Bobby could be fit alongside Remy, then we would have a chance said ‘Arry. No. ‘If only’ we had a manager sensible enough not to rely on a hypochondriac like Bobby. ‘If only’ we hadn’t packed off the superb Heidar Helguson to Cardiff for a pittance. Bobby is half the man.

Verdict: The Walking Dead.

Jose was delighted to hear from his agent about the contract offer QPR made him.

Jose Bosingwa

Some questions:

1. You’re a multi-millionaire. You have a mono-brow. Why persist with it? Why?

2. How did a player this useless win the Champions League twice?

3. Why did Harry Redknapp keep playing him in the second half of the season? Nedum Onuoha and Fabio are better players and are also, importantly, not Jose Bosingwa.

4. Dear Jose why do you move like a really awkward crab when you shuffle up the touchline?

Verdict: BOOOO-singwa

Phil Beard in a situation that would make David Brent proud.

This is exactly how I imagine Tony Fernandes sits in the boardroom.

The Board

It is very fashionable to blame QPR’s predicament on Mark Hughes. He signed the players. He failed to motivate and prepare them properly. He was an awful manager. Nobody seems to blame Harry Redknapp. He ought to get some of the blame as well. With more games and as much money as Hughes he ended up presiding over just as much of a shambles. What both men have in common is the ability to blame anyone, anything, other than themselves. That and not being as good as their buddies in the media make them out to be.

I would call both of them incompetent. Then again, I would say that the board is incompetent for appointing them. Tony Fernandes is an embarrassment, his tweeting is an embarrassment  his comparison of QPR to his shit Formula1 team was an embarrassment and his damaging, destabilising little meltdown was an embarrassment. He might actually be a decent man, a good bloke and all the other things his sycophantic legions of followers say he is. That wouldn’t change the fact that his near two years in charge of QPR have resembled a forced death march towards the Football League.

Verdict: Fresh Meat in a Piranha Tank.

Adel Taarabt (A love letter to)

 

“Nutmegs… I prefer.”

Words can make a man. In the case of Adel Taarabt the three words above and the aphorism they form embedded him, and his unique brand of football even deeper into the folklore of Queens Park Rangers. Maybe its the way he says them, a  little smile as he talks, the pause and then “prefer” – words to accompany his deeds. These words aren’t idle, they aren’t empty: Adel means it when he says he prefers nutmegs. From Joe Allen to Joe Cole, ‘Fat’ Frank Lampard to occasional “Splash” contestant Ashley Young, there aren’t many players left in the top two divisions of English league football who haven’t endured this Moroccan’s particular brand of footballing humiliation. His skills have become something ritualistic, a sacrifice Adel makes to appease the crowd, and to satiate his own artistic lust.

A winger and a prayer.

Life always throws up mavericks, originals in the truest sense of the word. These people tend to end up in one of two places; under the Westway, living in a cardboard box surviving off chewing gum spat out of the windows of passing cars or they become outrageous success’. Taarabt is heading for the latter. Why is he an original? For a start he doesn’t look like a footballer, in the same way that Andres Iniesta looks like a concierge or the bloke who sorts letters in the post office, and Michu looks as if he should be a roadie for Nickelback, Taarabt simply doesn’t have the svelte, streamlined body of today’s standard professional footballer. He is stocky, squat and boxy, his arms are unhinged and move as if they constantly caught in a strong breeze. There is a nonchalance to Taarabt, a swagger not seen at QPR since the days of Stan Bowles. 

Unhappy bedfellows: Taarabt and the Tottenham shirt.

“We used to play in the French national team and he was just nutmegging the same guy for maybe four or five times, the manager used to tell him, ‘If you don’t give the ball, you come off.’ And he didn’t care. He was bringing us penalties, scoring goals.” – Armand Traoré

“I arrived to find that, at three o’clock in the afternoon, it was already night. I played for the Tottenham reserves against Chelsea and I could not understand how the English played. Somebody put me on the floor but there were no free-kicks, nothing. The referee just played on. When you play in France it’s quiet, the players do not talk. In England I hear players saying, ‘F**k off. Man on. Come on’. Players in my team, they are shouting at me. I think they’re insulting me.” – Adel Taarabt

Becoming a success wasn’t easy; Taarabt’s natural game as a teenager, his desire to play unencumbered by little things like positioning and tactical discipline, his bad attitude and his inability to speak the language made him the latest in a long line of enfant terrible’s to arrive in England, at Tottenham in this case, in January 2007. After two weeks in England he wanted to leave and by his last season at Spurs Juande Ramos refused to even give him a shirt number (the same fate befell Kevin Prince-Boateng who is now a superstar at AC Milan).Taarabt’s time at Tottenham, with its fall outs and frustrations, damaged his reputation amongst the mainstream media and football fans in general in a way in which it has yet to recover. Having arrived at Tottenham in 2007 hailed as the next Zidane, Taarabt wound up at Queens Park Rangers, a player with a reputation for being a ‘fruitcake’ found himself at a club run by fruitcakes.

It worked though. The things Taarabt did in the Championship for QPR between 2008 and 2011 won’t be repeated soon by any player in the division. Take the goal against Preston above. Taking the ball down from a goal kick inside his own half, Taarabt turns, brushing aside two challenges, rinses a third Preston player with a nutmeg, pushes the ball a few yards further and then nonchalantly swerves the ball into the top corner from 25 yards outside the goal. C’est magnifique. Watch it again. Few players at any level score goals as good as that. Few players are capable of that at any level.

He promised so much in his early loan spells at QPR. Neil Warnock took Adel under his wing once he became manager in 2009. For both it was a revelatory experience:

“Warnock’s wife [Sharon] has looked after me and his kids have been like family to me. I cannot describe our relationship. Sometimes I think God has brought this guy to me, I am very difficult guy to control but Neil does it.It is special between me and him, he changed my life. He tells me to just go out onto the pitch and enjoy it. After all that he has given me I try and repay him.

“When a manager tells you, ‘I want to play the team around you,’ then you think, ‘This manager loves me’. At half-time against Preston [in November], I wasn’t playing so well. Neil knows I don’t like it when the other players shout at me. So he took me to the showers and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And in the second half I scored two goals.” – Adel Taarabt on his relationship with Neil Warnock.

Thanks to Warnock’s shrewd management, 2010/11 was the most entertaining season of Taarabt’s career to date. It encompassed a sensational series of displays – his movement, his strength, ability to keep the ball in seemingly impossible spaces, his link-up play, his willingness to shoot (rewarded with a plethora of outrageous goals such as the one against Swansea above) all made him a worthy player of the year that season. With Wilfred Zaha moving to Manchester United for a fee that could rise to £15 million pounds, it is worth bearing in mind that the former has done nothing in the Championship consistently comparable to Taarabt – yes Zaha is a good dribbler, yes he is less ‘risky’ but he doesn’t have a talent anywhere near as off-the-wall, as enigmatic as Taarabt’s.

What was astonishing about that season was the ease with which Taarabt did extraordinary things. Here was a man who played like a boy; as if this was his own game, as if normal considerations didn’t apply. It was a destructive season – Taarabt destroyed teams and reputations, in a way that was as thrilling as it was unconventional. Having had the pleasure of witnessing it I would say it’s the finest individual season any player has had in the second division of English football in the last decade.

“Mark Hughes had a big impact on him, showed him how much of a good player he is and on the other hand he has to work hard. I think it was a really good step for Adel to have that manager.” – Armand Traoré

“He can be a top, top player. He’s like Di Canio, doing things nobody else can do. He nutmegs people, he goes past two or three and they’re hanging on to him, but they can’t get the ball off him.” – Harry Redknapp 

If Mark Hughes has any legacy at QPR other than potential ruination in the years to come, it is his impact on Taarabt. Hughes turned him into a professional footballer again after a poor start to the 2011/12 season when injury, wasteful immaturity and the arrival of Joey Barton at the club derailed his progress. Taarabt in 2013 is a different proposition to the player of years past. He is more mature, more of a leader and far harder working than ever before. In a QPR team riddled with rank inadequacies this season he has stood out like a particularly obese man in a crowd full of flesh-eating cadavers.

“There were, inevitably, times when he overcomplicated things and lost the ball in unnecessary situations, but his skill and imagination when playing the false nine role was marvellous. Taarabt saw little of the ball in dangerous positions, yet managed to manufacture genuine goalscoring opportunities” – Michael Cox on Taarabt’s performance against Tottenham

Harry Redknapp quickly realised that Taarabt is the only player at QPR good enough to drag them out of the mire they are in, even playing him as a lone striker in impressive performances against Chelsea and Tottenham. Playing as a ‘false nine’ Taarabt dispelled the stereotypes that have followed him around since his teenage years. He has come of age. People who sit in their armchairs tweeting about Taarabt being “lazy” and “arrogant”, are lamentably lazy and arrogant themselves.

Redknapp indicating the length of a certain part of Stephane M’bia’s anatomy.

Personally I feel great affection for Adel Taarabt. He is symbolic of certain qualities – a triumph of imagination and talent over the mechanical, statistical side of modern football. In England we don’t appreciate this. Especially if the player is a foreigner. I get the impression that metaphorically, most people would rather watch James Milner slowly peel an orange instead of seeing Taarabt juggle five of them in the room next door. They want order, not chaos. Yet if QPR are to stay up this season it will be by playing to Taarabt’s strengths not ostracising him for his occasional bouts of carelessness. After two years of transfer business at QPR that has seen millions of pounds wasted, it remains a fact that it will be by embracing Taarabt’s chaotic talent that the club remains in the Premiership.