http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jan/09/neil-warnock-loved-qpr Against Norwich, one QPR defender shouted to Neil Warnock: You've got to change it! It's five against four! They've wing backs! A new documentary about life at QPR under Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone, The Four Year Plan, shows Neil Warnock arriving at Loftus Road to take up the job of manager. He walks past the home dressing room, whose door bears a sign with the words "Winners only" and says with a half-laugh: "We'll have to get rid of that." The QPR Warnock took over in March 2010 were anything but winners â plunging towards relegation in a season that saw them run through three "permanent" managers and two caretakers. A little over a year later he'd led Rangers to the Championship title, playing often scintillating football. Which is why, today, you won't find many Rangers fans celebrating his departure. In fact, across the main Rangers messageboards â Loft For Words, qprdot.org, We Are the Rangers Boys, QPR Report â you'll find thread after thread of deep disappointment. Even those who don't think he was the right man to keep Rangers in the Premier League aren't gloating, for in less than two years Warnock had done enough to be regarded by virtually all Loftus Road regulars as little short of a hero. "I'd just like to thank you for all you done for QPR. You put the pride back into our club when we were the biggest laughing stock in football. You were responsible for giving us one of the best seasons we're likely to have. That's all. I'm too gutted to write anymore," wrote Snipper at Loft For Words. "This is a knee jerk reaction made by a man who has spent millions on a few 'household name' players and wanted instant success," said GaryT at qprdot.org. "Thanks a million Neil Warnock you will be a hard act to follow," said NorfolkHoop at We Are the Rangers Boys. Or, as RorytheRanger put it at QPR Report: "We love you Neil Warnock." There was more â much, much more â along the same lines on all the boards. I started questioning how long Warnock would last in W12 before the Hoops' current dismal run of two points from eight games began. By chance, I spent a large chunk of an evening out in November talking to an old pro â not a QPR player â who'd played for Warnock and was full of praise for him. "But," he said, "he doesn't do tactics. He admits that. He's a motivator." That made me wonder how the players QPR brought in at the end of the summer would respond to him. After all, many of them had worked with managers for whom screaming "Up and at 'em!" took a very distant second place to constructing playing methods based on planning and tactics. It also made me wonder if it is possible to succeed in the top flight without having tactical know-how. Certainly, many of those summer signings do not seem to have been giving their best for Warnock since that blissful early run that saw Newcastle United played off the park and Wolves beaten: Joey Barton's performances have prompted far more grumbling than anything Warnock's done, and the only unqualified success has been Luke Young. The best answer to the tactical query came from Rangers' two games against Norwich City, in November and January, when in both cases QPR lost after Paul Lambert made substitutions and reconfigured his team, with almost immediate results, while Warnock failed to respond. In the game at Loftus Road, Norwich's substitutions were followed almost immediately by Clint Hill, the Rangers left-back, bellowing to the dug-out: "You've got to change it! It's ****ing five against four! They've got wing backs! You've got to change it." Change came there none, and moments later Norwich scored their winner. That rabbit-in-the-headlights approach to strategy had become a feature at QPR. Why was Warnock picking only one striker at home, for a team struggling to score? Why were players being used out of position? Why was the willing but limited Jamie Mackie being used on the right wing instead of Shaun Wright-Phillips? Why was Adel Taarabt frozen out of the team for much of late autumn, when â for all the problems with him â he was the only midfielder capable of offering creativity to the team? Rangers' owner, Tony Fernandes, knew that despite all Warnock's shortcomings he was adored by the fans. And so his tweets last night had the slightly self-pitying tone of a man who doesn't want to be unpopular: "I apologise to the fans I have upset by this decision," he said at one point. But, even so, he may well have felt the same as Warnock did on his arrival in west London: you only deserve to be called a winner if you're actually winning. And so we bid farewell to Neil Warnock from W12 with some words posted on the web last night: "Neil Warnock is a legend for what he's done at QPR." They're not from Snipper or RorytheRanger. They're from Twitter, from â and I think you saw this coming â Tony Fernandes.
This article could have been written by me, its sums up exactly what I think. Im sat watching the game wondering why he negates SWP by putting him on the left, why he doesnt make subs when the game is crying out for it and when they are made, its too late. If myself and everyone around me can see it, why cant a manager see it? I just hope the new manager isnt as frustrating as Warnock was. You cant survive in the PL without doing tactics. The Norwich game with the triple sub proved how a manager can win a game by changing things and lose a game by doing nothing.
Did any one there hear Clint Hill shout that? Great read otherwise and perhaps makes the bitter pill slightly easier to swallow (if true).
And you don't always want to change your formation just to defend one aspect of your opposition's offensive strategy! Have seen that done with disastrous results.
Theres a poster on LFW who sits in the paddocks and he confirmed it. Looks like the truth and lets face it, anyone whos watched us this season knows he doesnt do tactics and doesnt have a plan b.
If he was that tactically naive we wouldn't have won the Championship and got promoted - Christ, we've had enough clowns in the last ten years to know what clueless managers look like. I just hope we don't get to see a few more in the coming year!
Tooting - you can also include clueless owners as well as managers. The changes made by Lambert after Barton's dismissal did win the game for them....Hindsight being a wonderful thing, I wonder whether any changes would have made a difference anyway.
Blimey, is it really such a Warnock love in on these other sites? People who couldn't see this coming are deluding themselves. And yes, Tooting there were signs that he was limited in his choice of tactics (and subs) even in the Championship. We were helped by several players having the season of their career (Taarabt, Derry, Faurlin, Kenny and Mackie until he was injured) and a couple of really astute acquisitions in last January's window (Routledge and ****tu). I know that NW was responsible for inspiring all those players and there can be no doubt about his abilities in that area - just look at the time we turned in a battling second half performance this season - but his inability to adapt tactics to meet the situation was becoming embarrasing by the end.
That article hopefully opens the eyes of some on here who are wailing in sorrow at NW leaving. I like the guy, but he was out of his depth and getting out-witted too regularly!!
Cheers Sku. Must've missed it. Is he an R? Doubt it somehow but the geezer clearly knows more of what's been going on than a lot of us...
I was more commenting on the real buffoons we've had than Warnock so much. Along with the fickle nature of fans, we've not won for a few games therefore the man is clueless. For the record I don't think he has done that bad this year as we are prem newcomers and unlike some I expected us to be bottom half, however our ability at set pieces, both defending and attacking has been ****ing awful. However, he has obviously lost the confidence of the board so he has to go.
One "Old Pro" who like a lot on here like to stick a knife into Neil. Neil probably knows more about tactics than the old pro remembers how many players are on a football team. Neil discusses tactics with the Deeer in Richmond Park - makes him a bigger star for me than most of the old pro experts that I see prattling on about anything and nothing on the TV.
A bit of balance here with another article - this time from The Secret Footballer (also writing in the Guardian) but this one from January last year. This offers another insight into the 'chess like tactics' that TSF claims are widespread. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jan/29/secret-footballer-andy-gray-pundits What if Sky Sports offered me Andy Gray's job? Not a chance. Let me tell you something, football pundits are universally despised by players and not just because at some point in the past they would have been on the receiving end of criticism themselves. It doesn't matter what you've done in the game, where you've played, what you might have won or how much money you earned – pundits are held in the same regard by players as female assistant referees once were at Sky. And while on that subject, prepare to be disappointed. While I found the whole episode with Gray and Richard Keys at Molineux cringeworthy, inside the world of football nobody is particularly bothered. Don't interpret that as evidence that players are condoning Gray and Keys for their behaviour. It's more a case that most of my team-mates would have no interest in listening to anything pundits say in the first place. There's no obvious reason why those sat on the sofa are thought of in such low terms, but it may have something to do with a sense that they are going against the inner sanctum that we pretend we are a part of. Perhaps, subconsciously, it tugs at those still playing, who realise the ex-players know things about them that they probably wish they didn't. Their new position of influence over millions of people is a little uncomfortable for some, I'm sure, and their failure to go the extra mile when analysing matches can also grate. Switch to our world and the level of detail that goes into games still, to this day, amazes me. Every player has his own script, what to do, when to do it, information on the player he's up against, including weight, height, age, strengths, weaknesses, even what that opponent is likely to do when the ball comes to him in certain situations. We memorise every single set piece, where we have to stand, run and end up. We even memorise this for the other players so we know where everyone else will be at any given time. You know that pass when you say to yourself: "How did he spot that?" Often he didn't need to; he knew the player would be there because, the night before in the hotel, he read about the runs he would be making. It's exactly the same pass after which sometimes you might find yourself saying: "Who was that to?" The receiving player either forgot to be there or was taken out of the game by a tactical manoeuvre by his opposite number. Football at this level is very chess-like, maybe not to those outside of football but certainly to those inside. I sometimes wonder whether it's more enjoyable playing lower down the leagues. After all, who wants to play chess? With top-level football being so complex, it is very difficult to deconstruct a live game within a couple of minutes of it being over, and because of this the "analysis" is usually reduced to goals and individual performance. But the fact that many pundits don't even try to scratch beneath the surface, despite knowing what it takes to win a match at this level, annoys me. It's the trivialisation of what we do by people that we used to call our own and, more importantly, deprives the viewer of some very interesting tit-bits that would, I feel, add to the entertainment. Anyone can navigate a giant iPad, sliding faces of famous players around with their pinkie while throwing out phrases like "Third man run" and other such rubbish. What particularly riles me is when you hear a pundit or co-commentator say something like, "I can't understand, Martin, why Drogba is not on the post here. That header would have fallen to him and if I'm Petr Cech I'm saying: 'Go on son, clear that off the line for me!'" The fact is corners are routinely cleared by a man stationed on the six-yard line, exactly where Chelsea position Didier Drogba. If somebody scores inside that post it is for no other reason than a player having lost his man. That is the mistake. If there is a player on the post he will clear one, possibly two shots off the line a season. If that same player stands on the six-yard line he will probably clear 100 corners away over the course of the season. The worst thing, though, is when this dross gets into popular culture and my friends start saying stupid things to me like, "We should have a man on the post, our manager doesn't know what he's doing", just because it sounds like the right thing to say. It's such an easy way of analysing that it infuriates me. It's lazy and it takes you, the viewer, for a fool. But, then again, Sky is an expert in creating a villain.
Works in the Championship, not in the Premier League, proven over and over again. Why was it that we heard from Neil after almost every game "we had a chat at half time", "motivating" as the article calls it? Very good article that covers what we've been on about on this board for months. Doesn't make Neil's achievements with us any less credible, just stating a clear fact.
Honestly mate, i did hear Clint shout it. It was just in front of the West Paddock (Block CL) in front of where i sit. Me and my mate commented at the time that obviously our players weren't happy with the system and behold a few minutes later Norwich scored. Whoever wrote the article definately aint telling porkies.
Don't think NW did scripts. If he did the one that had SWP standing deep in his own half passing to Arshavin at the Emirates must be in the running for 'Best Comedy'
