By Glenn Moore - The Independent A fair yet brutal write up imo. Could of been written by one of our more eloquent posters on this site. QPR's performance at Loftus Road on Saturday underlined how hard it is to construct a team through the transfer window equivalent of trolley dashes. Fielding two players bought on the last day of the August window, and four in the last week of January's, Rangers looked a team of strangers despite a training camp in Portugal. Adding a last-minute signing to an already established unit is, though, a different matter. The transfer clock was ticking down when Fulham secured the loan acquisition of Stuttgart's Pavel Pogrebnyak. The Russian, who had scored once in 14 Bundesliga matches this season, has scored two in two for Fulham, both taken with confidence. "I thought he was worth a chance because he scored regularly in Russia, and he has 45 caps," said Martin Jol. The Fulham manager consulted compatriots Guus Hiddink and Dick Advocaat, both of whom had selected Pogrebnyak for Russia, but admitted: "it is a risk because players can take months to settle in England and you don't know how he will do. But in the first training session he scored a hat-trick in ten minutes, so he gave everyone a boost." Players of such quality, he added, were not usually available in the January window (as QPR have discovered) but Jol promised Pogrebnyak regular first-team action ahead of Euro 2012. The striker headed an enterprising Fulham line-up, Jol accurately predicting QPR would be defensively vulnerable. Both full-backs arrived in January, the central defensive pairing of Clint Hill and Anton Ferdinand had never played together before, and Samba Diakite, their midfield shield, was making his debut. That lasted 33 minutes, by which time half-a-dozen late tackles had earned two yellow cards. Diakite's unfamiliarity with the Premier League was cited in mitigation but he was born and brought up in a French environment which is hardly known for it's strong tackling. Nervousness, and a desire to impress, will have been factors, but it was as if he had heard about the English game's hurly-burly and was desperate to show he could mix it. After his first caution Rangers' captain Joey Barton should have counselled him to calm down, or Mark Hughes withdrawn him. QPR were a shambles with eleven men so had no prospect of winning with ten, though Fulham's strange decision to sit on their lead might have allowed them to level. A bad miss by Wright-Phillips, who is still to score this season, condemned them to a fourth defeat in six matches under Hughes, who has taken four points from 18 since replacing Neil Warnock. A tough run-in waits and everyone at the club is acutely aware that they need to win matches in this spell of fixtures but all is not well. Hughes is trying to blend a fractured dressing room. Last season's Championship winners, Barton's "gang", and a Francophone foreign group are in different camps and the new signings are uncertain of which clique will welcome them. In addition, Hughes and his own tightly knit coterie of staff are yet to bond with the ones he inherited. The word is last week's trip to sunnier climes did nothing to heal the divisions but a club fighting relegation needs everyone pulling together. "We have got a lot of players, they seem to be everywhere," said Hughes. "We try and integrate this on the periphery when we can. The spirit is fine, but in games you have to be aggressive in what you say to each other. The key is that you don't take exception to it, you just get on and try and affect the game in a positive way." Match details QPR: KENNY 6/10; ONUOHA 5; FERDINAND 4; HILL 6; TAIWO 5; MACKIE 5; WRIGHT PHILLIPS 6; DIAKITE 3; BARTON 4; TAARABT 5; ZAMORA 5 Fulham: SCHWARZER 7; J RIISE 6; HANGELAND 7 HUGHES 7; KELLY 6; MURPHY 8; DEMPSEY 6; JOHNSON 7; DEMBELE 8; RUIZ 8; POGREBNYAK 7 Scorer: Fulham Pogrebnyak 7. Substitutes: Queen's Park Rangers Traoré (Taiwo, 72), Buzsaky (Wright-Phillips, 83). Fulham Baird (Murphy, 75), Duff (Ruiz, 78), Etuhu (Johnson, 82). Booked: QPR Diakite. Fulham Pogrebnyak, J Riise, Dembele, Baird. Sent-off: QPR Diakite (33). Man of the match Dembele. Match rating 5/10. Possession: QPR 49% Fulham 51%. Attempts on target: QPR 8 Fulham 3. Referee P Dowd (Staffordshire) Attendance 18,015.
Nothing there we didn't already know,looking at those marks out of 10 that's pretty much how i saw it,apart from SWP getting a 6 instead of a 4.Dembele was a different class to anyone else on the pitch.
it was always going to be difficult to gel so many new players and so it is proving....not really MH's fault....but strange positional selections and formations are!!
I ****ing hate player ratings and the **** that is chewed over them on this site he was rubbish he was good etc etc .... To build a team can take 6 months to sustain depth and character We have had three teams in six months ... Rubbish the players that have left who are no longer QPR Simple fact is ... The team are trying too hard and therefore there is no NATURAL flow to the team They are on a lose lose situation to some of fans I hope some can see exactly how the team spirit carried us last season yet most of here wanted and wished for that team to be blown up Bothroyd was welcomed to us by the fickle and now he is pants We can argue to the cows come home and become the true laughing stock of football or we get behind our team and support them
This we need to do! Most worrying thing for me from this weekend is what I have read on herwe about players getting jeered Saturday! If QPR fans do this then we will go down.
Just what I thought, its the old team v Barton+ and now hes bought in a bunch of foreigners, they hve their own group too. We have no chance unless this gets sorted unless Barton is gone.
Why? If arguing amongst themselves is more important than keeping us up, why should we even bother? I will be emotionally detached until Barton is gone. If that means going down then so be it, we will be better off in the long run.
The time to replace Barton was January FFS! There is no adequate replacement for him now! He's on board so MH needs to get the best out of him which is his running, which he does more of than anyone, and tackling, but get him to leave the dead balls to someone else and leave off Adel!
I belong to this forum to read them but I hate it as any rating will always put one or two or 11 of our players down. So unless all the players perform to your high scores they serve what purpose? We only had ten players because of yet another sending off did you build in that .. I doubt it and I think its serves nothing apart from chewing the fat. If there is a time to be positive then its now
Dave! Totally agree again! MH has got to sort this out. He's got to get us playing together as a team again, break up cliques if they exist, get Barton to lay off Adel, and get players to understand that getting sent off after only a quarter of the game is gone is not acceptable.
Good summary of stuff that is blatently obvious. The most useful thing from my perpsective is the unbiased player ratings (sorry Dave). A 4 for Barton (only 'bettered' by Diakite) says a lot about our so-called captain and leader. I agree he should have gone in January if possible but that was never going to happen with a new manager in place and, anyway, who would buy him at £80k a week? The point is that Hughes should make a statement about our desire to fight our way out of trouble by dropping him from here on in and using a combination of Derry, Mackie and Diakite as appropriate. At least the latter looked like he wanted to be involved even if he was ludicrously reckless. If Hughes is to come out of this with any credibility he needs to act now!
When it contains a trend and under current which is growing negatively at a wild rate then it needs to be checked and also disgusted. I have yet to ever see fans agree on any ratings that used to appear in newspapers ... My point is that there seems to be an option to tick all the players were rubbish in recent poles on here. I warned last year that we would become fickle and thats the case now and I find it very sad .. there are 36 points still to play for and yet people moan like **** if we lose next week then to me there is then 33 points ... It is such an interesting forum to see how we are all reacting to a poor from run ... On the whole most fans on here wanted a new team as we were not good enough and it has continued down the slippery slope to a point so all is left is criticism and nothing else ... it then makes it harder when success come our way and i believe that is coming to rejoice. There are two sides : Glass half empty Glass half full pick your side and stay on it and support your team
I love how everything is always Bartons fault and he's seen as this all powerful being. There are 24 other players in the squad that have been mostly **** for the whole season. Open your eyes.
What is going on behind the scenes in the dressing room at LR is a matter of speculation. I do have the sense that some of the players are intimidated by Barton. He has a tendency to be over critical of his players and not see his own faults. And he is right out of the Vinnie Jones school of diplomacy. A captain does have to call home truths sometimes, but he also has to be encouraging indeed inspirational. Hughes has to work with what he's got, and I hope he's as good a man manager as NW was. Warnock said before the start of our championship winning season that when he took his new team on a bonding session in Cornwall, and let them go off together for an hour or two at the end of the evening, they all came back together and NW thought that boded well, as indeed it did.
But the fringe players under NW were totally blanked,not involved in training or group discussions.Hardly great management skils either.
This is all Warnocks fault, hes the one who signed the players putting through the crap we have now. If he didnt panic at the end of the summer, we would be fine now.
You do talk some twaddle at times. You obviously didn't read my match report...most people thought i was a little generous with the ratings. I said all the defence played well and.............oh what's the point!! As I say....if you don't like the player ratings etc don't read them. Plenty on here like the reports as they can't get to the games!
