There was a small piece of news from Queens Park Rangers on Wednesday that was barely news – but the reaction it provoked spoke volumes about the tense mood around the club.
Josh Laurent, a 19-year-old midfielder, joined Brentford for an undisclosed fee. But QPR supporters reacted as if Charlie Austin had been sold rather than a young prospect who had not kicked on as everyone hoped.
It was a sign, for the fans, that the club was failing to be committed to its young players. The only homegrown talent to feature this season was a mere 12 minutes from Max Ehmer in September. For the QPR fans it was another gripe.
The over-the-top reaction to the Laurent sale did not go unnoticed at the club as they head for a home game against Manchester United on Saturday and with serious doubts over whether manager Harry Redknapp will remain in charge.
These are difficult times at QPR. Again. The focus has once more switched to Redknapp. It always does switch to the manager in football, which is not always a good thing or fair. The manager is the one who carries the can, becomes the focus of the discontent, needs to be sacked.
QPR have not won enough games. They sit in the bottom three but there is one game that Redknapp has been adept at which has grated – the blame game. Clubs do grow weary of managers not shouldering the blame. Just see what happened to Neil Warnock at Crystal Palace. It was always someone else’s fault. It wore the club down.
Redknapp needs to be aware of this. But can he change? He has continually talked about the deficiencies of his squad. But it is his squad and it is one that would appear to have received enough investment to avoid relegation this season.
So it could be that Redknapp loses his job should QPR lose to United but, if he does, the tipping point was surely reached last weekend. Defeat away to Burnley after an FA Cup exit to League One Sheffield United was a 10th in a row on the road for QPR – an unwanted Premier League record – and afterwards Redknapp, again, was full of excuses.
He spoke of “seven or eight players playing in the Championship last year” and having finished that season “miles behind Burnley and 20 points behind Leicester”.
But whose fault is that? Redknapp was in charge last season and QPR scraped promotion, fortunately, via the play-offs when they were probably the best-resourced club in the division. And Burnley were the worst.
It was no-one else but Redknapp who decided to sign Rio Ferdinand in the summer, indicate he would be the defensive lynchpin in a new 3-5-2 formation, and then dump him. It was Redknapp who signed Jordon Mutch – and does not play him – the injury-prone Sandro and it was the manager who has chosen to play Eduardo Vargas, Mauricio Isla and Leroy Fer out of position. Around £40million was spent in transfer and loan fees. A lot more than Burnley. A lot more than Leicester.
Redknapp has claimed he only has two strikers – in Austin and Bobby Zamora – but there is also Vargas and now Mauro Zarate. Redknapp has brought in 21 players since he succeeded Mark Hughes.
There is disgruntlement among the supporters at the manager’s tactics and team selections and formations and that, too, has filtered itself through to the club.
And it is a club that knows the financial implications of being relegated back to the Championship – with the threat of fines and not complying with Football League rules – are horrendous.
Chairman Tony Fernandes weighed up making a change last month but stuck with Redknapp. As the chief executive of the airline Air Asia he is, of course, and rightly, completely pre-occupied in dealing with the crash of Flight 8501 in the Java Sea off Singapore with the loss of 162 lives. But he is not the only decision-maker at QPR. There are other owners - Ruben Emir Gnanalingam, Kamarudin Bin Meranun and Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.
Between them they have to decide one thing: is Redknapp the man to keep QPR up? They have to decide if his heart is still in it. He said he would have quit had they not got promoted and gives the impression of a man eyeing the exit door. Maybe that is unfair. But it is how he looks.
It is not all his fault. His coaching staff is large and experienced – Glenn Hoddle, Joe Jordan, Kevin Bond – but the chemistry does not look right. The owners are also to blame. They have talked up the team’s prospects, promised a new training ground – but not a sod has been turned yet – and highlighted the desire to promote the academy.
Will Redknapp survive this weekend? No-one can say for sure. And that speaks volumes. Tim Sherwood is waiting-in-the-wings and already has Chris Ramsey and Les Ferdinand, his assistants at Tottenham Hotspur, at QPR. Ferdinand is the Head of Football Operations (a title Redknapp has claimed is “stupid” by the way).
QPR want Redknapp to turn it around. Of course they do. But they also want him to stop the blame game – and start winning some games instead. He is a good talker. Now is the time for him to talk a good game and get a team that plays one.
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It has been a curious week for Roy Hodgson who returned from holiday in the United States to be lampooned for selecting Javier Mascherano as the player who should have won the Ballon d’Or and then had to abandon his plan for a get-together of the England squad.
The Mascherano story was a side-show, a bit of fancy-that, even if it could be argued it was illuminating as to the way the England manager thinks. But the second story was far more embarrassing.
It may not seem a big deal. But consider it for a minute. For an England manager to announce on the Football Association’s website, on December 29, that “we’ve all agreed that we are going to get together at the end of January” and then to have to scrap that because it has been vetoed by Premier League managers is more than a little humiliating.
“We’ll meet somewhere, hopefully very centrally in the country, so we can at least have some chance to review the game that we played last,” Hodgson enthused. No, you will not, the managers said.
Maybe it is not a great club-versus-country row, maybe it is simply a case of not being able to fit the meeting in with the fixture list – but did no-one at the FA think of that before Hodgson announced it? Did Hodgson himself not look at which date was feasible and check with the clubs involved as to whether it was okay to release the players to go to St George’s Park? Why the lack of communication? No-one is that busy not to check.
What is also embarrassing is that certain people at the FA knew the meeting was off at the end of last week – as revealed by The Sunday Telegraph last Sunday – but Hodgson himself was unaware until he returned from holiday last Saturday, still insisted it was on and eventually called some managers on Tuesday. Who told him it was not possible. It has not been a good week for him.
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