Mark Hughes in The Telegraph

I like this bit in the guaridan

"Hopes are receding of Hughes landing Bobby Zamora"

Now maybe we can get someone who scores.

 

Yeah what is this infatuation with Zamora, he has been a waste of space since he left Brighton.

 

Hughes will know a lot more about the scale of the job ahead of him by the time the game is over. There is going to be some hard work at Rangers’ Harlington training ground between now and the end of the season if they are to avoid slipping back into the Championship. Hughes is confident he is the man to help them avoid relegation.

“The way I like things done, the way my team’s play has helped me have an impact in the past,” Hughes said. “You have to be organised and consistent in your message and your discipline.

"It’s about creating an environment for a team to prosper. I think players want structure to understand what we are doing is geared towards winning.

“My values and standards are quite high. I find that when I have gone into places in the past people have need to raise their game somewhat. Maybe that’s the case here. The benefit of that is that you can make an immediate impact.”

How will he make that impact? Here we break down the areas in which Hughes will be seeking to make an impression at Loftus Road.

Coaching

You do not just appoint Hughes as manager, you appoint his team, too. Mark Bowen is his closest confidant, a friend he has known since they were 13, and now his assistant.
Together they will plot a strategy for getting QPR up the table. In his approach to coaching, Hughes has obviously drawn a lot from Sir Alex Ferguson.

He takes the role of a supervisor, allowing his trusted coach, Eddie Niedzwiecki, to take most of the sessions. The whole management team meets every morning and plot what they need to do that day.

“To put it simply, Eddie is the best I have seen at taking a training session,” said Bowen. “Both Mark and I are Pro licensed coaches but Eddie is the one who implements our ideas.” Kevin Hitchcock looks after the goalkeepers.

The priority for Hughes at Rangers will be to get the players up to his standards in terms of fitness.

“At Blackburn we set ourselves the challenge of becoming the fittest team in the country and I think we achieved that,” Bowen said. Jason Roberts, who played for Hughes at Blackburn, thinks the QPR players will be feeling the benefit of that as they go into the run-in.

“Some of them might have never trained at such a high intensity,” said Roberts. “They make big demands of you. The good news is that within three or four weeks they will have never felt as fit.”

Tactics

In terms of formation, Hughes is relatively conservative. He tends to favour a 4-4-2, played with high intensity and pressing. Setting up this way can sometimes make it difficult to accommodate players who like to operate between the traditional lines – Adel Taraabt is the obvious example at QPR – but then for Hughes the emphasis is always on the team.

“So much of the tactics comes from Mark drawing on his well of experience and using his instincts,” Bowen said. “He then marries that with all the data we have assembled and prepares the players.”

This will be another challenge for Hughes at Harlington. At Fulham, City and Blackburn, he would use video footage put together with his data analysis department to show weaknesses in the opposition or areas that his own team could improve. In this he was very rigorous and impressed players with his command of the detail.

At QPR he needs to appoint an opposition scout and get the structure in place to do this.
A goal difference of minus 16 tells you that he has problems to resolve at both ends of the pitch.

Tightening the defence will be the first challenge but this is also a side scoring less than a goal a game — he will need to get the team playing with width as he did at Blackburn and Fulham to help generate chances.

Recruitment

This will be one of the most challenging areas for Hughes. There is effectively no scouting network at QPR and the squad is hugely bloated.

Until he gets scouts in he will have to rely on his own contacts and the help of his well-connected adviser Kia Joorabchian. While Tony Fernandes, the owner, has guaranteed there will be money available, what Hughes does in January will only be a short-term measure. He wants to improve the defence and is looking to sign defenders Alex and Nedum Onuoha. In the summer, though, there will be as much emphasis on selling as buying: they have 36 players in the first team squad with a further four out on loan.

At Blackburn, Hughes established a reputation for refreshing the careers of players who had fallen into a trough, players like Benni McCarthy and Roque Santa Cruz, and also for finding bargains like Ryan Nelsen (free) and Chris Samba (£400,000).

At Manchester City he was given massive financial backing and while some of his signings worked out very well (Gareth Barry, Nigel de Jong, Vincent Kompany) there were some that clearly did not meet expectations (Jo, Santa Cruz, Wayne Bridge).

What recurs at every club he has managed is that players who buy into Hughes’s methods become loyal to him and want to work with him again. It would not be a surprise to see Hughes sign players who are familiar with his methods.

Man Management

With Wales Hughes faced the challenge of changing from team-mate to manager but even in those formative years, John Hartson recalls him handling it calmly.

“He went from the back seat of the coach with myself, Chris Coleman, Gary Speed and Ryan Giggs, to the seat behind the driver,” Hartson said.

“You hardly noticed. He did it in his own inimitable way, without any real fuss. Still, you knew he was the boss. He had been a ferocious player, a man who would kick his granny to win a tackle.

"As a manager, he was every bit as determined, although quietly spoken, very thorough and quite calm much of the time. But if it needed saying, he would say it.”

Hughes has been criticised, even by himself, for his communication skills but these have improved as he has taken different jobs.

Roberts said that at Blackburn “dialogue with a player isn’t one of his main lookouts,” but with the more gregarious Bowen liaising between him and the players, Hughes can use the distance to his advantage.

At QPR, a club hardly short on egos, he will face specific challenges. He has an outspoken captain in Joey Barton, an erratic talent in Adel Taraabt and other recent signings whose salaries are wildly divergent from some of those who got the club promoted last season. He will need them all to pull in the same direction.
Innovation

It is in his curiosity about the cutting edge in coaching, management and sports science that Hughes is highly impressive.

“He mirrors Sir Alex in that respect,” said Bowen. “He is always open to new opinions, fresh ideas. He will read papers on the latest ideas and then source the best information on it.” One example is how he introduced Morten Gamst Pedersen to neuro-linguistic programming to help him with his set-pieces.

NLP is apparently used by Jonny Wilkinson (in his kicking) and Tiger Woods and is a technique of repeated visualisation. Pedersen saw massive improvement in his accuracy because of it.

A new training ground will provide the facilities Hughes, needs but in the mean time QPR’s players can expect increased use of ProZone data, to have their training tracked by GPS devices (sewn into vests they wear under their shirts) and to be subject to diet and dehydration tests borrowed from Bayern Munich.

“You are getting feedback on your performance every day,” Roberts said.

Hughes must have been doing something right because United poached his leading sports scientist and ProZone analyst off him when he was in charge at Blackburn.

“It’s all about looking for that tiny edge over your opponent,” Bowen said. “Trying to improve a player by that one per cent.”

 

Nice find Nines. Very informative - and guess what? The man does tactics!

 

As I mentioned on another thread, I can just see Adel at his first training session back from Africa, it may not be a pretty sight! The attention to detail is something that I'm sure impressed TF in their pursuit of Hughes, our club has gone in the opposite direction since we dropped out of the PL in 1996 and we are now light years behind the top sides, however, with the largesse of the Mittals as well as TF we now have the opportunity to build a structure and facilities at the club which will be better than many of those top clubs and underwrite our future, if MH can get it right on the pitch as well as off it the future really will be bright, 17th place will never have had more significance...