 Friday, 21st Mar 2008 09:58 QPR travel to an unhappy hunting ground to face bogey side Wolves on Easter Saturday Wolverhampton Wanderers (8th) v Queens Park Rangers (12th) You can never get too far ahead of yourself in the Championship. One minute you’re flicking between your club’s millionaire owner racing Formula One cars in Australia and a former World Player of the Year currently playing for Inter Milan who may be wearing your club’s shirt next season if the Sunday papers are right. The next your shelling out £38 for a return train ticket to Ipswich and preparing to visit Wolverhampton. It’s a league full of teams in Premiership stadiums with sub standard sides in third world surroundings. There’s no better example of this than Wolves who look all set, once again, for another near miss and summer of preparing for life in the second tier. Molineux is a stadium fit for the Premiership, with a team which is in all likelihood not good enough for anything more than a play off semi final, and it’s all based in what is essentially a large public toilet. From watching Inter v Perugia and wondering if we could actually sign Luis Figo, to picking our way through the subways of Wolverhampton in six days. Like I say, impossible to get too far ahead of yourself in this league. It’ll be interesting to see just where we go in it over the remaining seven games. With just one point required for the recognised 52 point safety mark we’ve ostensibly got nothing to play for and while that’s a welcome relief from the past few seasons of relegation calculators and frantically trying to get hold of results from elsewhere at ten to three I wouldn’t like us to just put the cue on the rack and cruise through. There’s no sign of us doing that in fairness, certainly if some of the football we produced against Blackpool and Scunthorpe last week is anything to go by. We’ve got it within ourselves to upset the teams above us in the league, and we’ve already run ten goals through and taken nine points from Watford, Bristol City and Stoke since the turn of the year. Every one of our last seven matches, apart from possibly Preston at home, is against a team with something to play for at one end of the table or the other. They won’t be relishing facing us, and it’s up to our players to go out and fulfil their potential to realise those fears. We start this Saturday against Wolves – a team struggling to make the six, but a side that does normally find a way to take points from us regardless of circumstance. They’ve taken draws from Loftus Road in recent years when we’ve murdered them, and they’ve beaten us at Molineux in all manner of circumstances – just about all of which have resulted in the home fans spitting on us from the upper tier of the side stand. With the pressure on McCarthy’s side and the weather forecast looking awful I’d pack an umbrella and be prepared for spit and storms in equal measure. Five minutes on Wolves Mark McGhee, Graham Taylor and Colin Lee all had a go at getting Wolves into the Premiership without success before Dave Jones arrived and finally accomplished it – beating Sheff Utd 3-0 in a one sided play off final. When you lose your first two matches 5-1 and 4-0 against Blackburn and Charlton you know an uphill battle lies ahead and despite winning two of the last five matches Wolves were relegated in bottom spot – six points clear of safety. Interestingly David Moyes’ Everton were fourth bottom that season. Jones was sacked when their attempts to bounce back went the same way as just about every other team’s attempts to bounce back to the Premiership and in came Glenn Hoddle to blow their parachute payments on similarly ill-fated bids for the Premiership. All Hoddle succeeded in doing was giving pools players a guaranteed tick in the box every week by drawing every match they played. When current manager Mick McCarthy took over expectations were low. Hoddle had spent the parachute money and under achieved, and that meant a fire sale with the likes of Joleon Lescott, Kenny Miller, Seol Ki-Kyeon, Carl Cort, Paul Ince, Darren Anderton, Lee Naylor and Colin Cameron all leaving Glenda’s expensively assembled and handsomely paid squad at the end of another mid table season. McCarthy arrived late in the day during the pre-season with precious little of the transfer money received available to spend and a tiny squad to work with. Wolves were actually, incredibly, a good outside bet for relegation to the third tier as the season began. It’s at a team with low expectations where McCarthy thrives though. He did it with Millwall, Ireland and Sunderland – over achieving against the odds and making the fans believe he’s some kind of silver haired miracle worker. This is a man remember who took an Irish team to the World Cup, qualified from a group that included Germany, took Spain to penalties when La Liga was widely recognised as the greatest league in the world, and did it all with his star player on an early plane home and the team apparently split in two behind the scenes. It’s when the expectation levels start to rise that McCarthy begins to struggle. So last season at Molineux he was in his element – a rebuilding operation with unprecedented low hopes from the Wolves regulars was right up McCarthy’s street. In came Andy Keogh from Scunthorpe and Michael Kightly from Grays as well as crusty old Gary Breen from McCarthy’s aborted Sunderland mission. Signings that would have had previous crowds at Wolves screaming about lack of ambition, but signings that added pace, enthusiasm, youth and ability to the line up (none of that provided by Breen you understand but you see the point I’m making). After a low key start to the season the arrival of Keogh and Kightly in January really helped them to kick on and by the time we travelled to Molineux in April they needed a win against us to seal a play off spot – which they managed comfortably in front of a big and passionate crowd. They’d started the season wondering where 52 points for survival might come from, they finished it with 76 and in with a shout of promotion. Fifth place meant a home tie with fierce local rivals West Brom in the first leg and with McCarthy’s new look side in fine form they were very unlucky to go down 3-2. The second leg was exactly the opposite of the frantic, entertaining, free flowing first leg and Wolves barely turned up in a 1-0 defeat. So hard luck, lots of credit, McCarthy a hero but, lethally, expectations raised. Wolves spent relatively big in the summer bringing in Southend’s Freddy Eastwood for £1.5m and supplementing him with Sylvain Ebanks Blake (£1.5m from Plymouth) David Edwards (£700k Luton) and the highly rated Matt Jarvis on a free transfer from Gillingham. Add into that Darren Ward, Stephen Elliott, Michael Gray and George Elokobi and suddenly the pressure was on. Wolves have spent more than just about anybody else in this league, have a more impressive looking squad than just about anybody in this league, and consequently were returned to their traditional summer tag of promotion favourites and ‘sleeping giants’. They haven’t lived up to it. They’re outside the play off zone with six games remaining and while the gap is only two points they’re not showing form capable of getting there and staying there and automatic promotion has never even been threatened. The Wolves fans are now back to what they know best – grumbling and calling for the manager’s head with increasing volume. It struck me as Keogh, Jarvis, Kightly, Edwards, Ebanks Blake, Kyle and others arrived that Mick McCarthy seems to only sign right wingers or centre forwards and weaknesses elsewhere in the side have been exposed with alarming frequency. McCarthy is said to have fallen out with captain Gary Breen and inconsistency is costing them a place in the top six at the moment. Two wins from their last two games proceeds a defeat against Preston and a narrow escape against struggling Southampton. When they’re good they’re good, when they’re bad they’re awful and it’s hard to see them being anywhere other than the Championship come August regardless of whether they make the play offs or not. Don’t bet on McCarthy being the manager this time next season either. Who to watch out for Darren Potter initially joined on loan from Liverpool and has gained international recognition from Ireland since the move to Molineux. It’s Jarvis that frightens me most out of those three though, he was a very good player for Gillingham in the division below and while he’s struggled to adapt to the Championship so far I still feel he’s able to make it in this league, and his introduction for Potter after half an hour of the game against Scunthorpe on Tuesday hints that a start could be in the offing. Still, better than Kightly playing against us – two goals in two games against QPR hints that he could be the new Carl Cort, who also scored every time we pitched up against Wolves for a game. As well as signing wide players McCarthy also has quite a collection of strikers at his disposal. Andy Keogh was always a player I liked the look of at Scunthorpe when Billy Sharp was getting all the headlines – Sharp scored twice as many goals but did little outside the penalty box compared to Keogh who worked tremendously hard and had a terrific all round game even then. He has ten goals to his name this season, he never was very prolific, but is a real threat to any team he plays against. A really good footballer with the ball at feet, well worth keeping an eye out for. Sylvain Ebanks Blake is the latest addition to the squad, a £1.5m January signing from Plymouth. Presumably Wolves have found a pair of shorts big enough go round his arse (some achievement in itself) because he’s already got six goals from 12 starts including four in his last five. He scored twice against QPR for Plymouth on Boxing Day of course so hopefully we’ll do a better job with him this time. Add to those two Stephen Elliott who has struggled to recapture the 16 goal a season form he showed when Sunderland won promotion from this division in the 2004/05 season. Then there’s Freddy Eastwood of Southend fame and big Kevin Kyle on loan from Coventry who already has a last minute winner against QPR to his name this season. Little wonder they’ve found enough slack to loan Jay Bothroyd to Stoke City. Like I say though once you get past the nice looking creative wide players and the large collection of strikers there isn’t as much to this Wolves squad as there needs to be for a promotion push. Seyi Olofinjana is a massive force in the Patrick Viera mould in the middle of midfield and he really makes Wolves tick on his day. QPR did a good job of keeping him quiet at Loftus Road and they’ll need to do so again here. Karl Henry joins him in the midfield, and has been regularly linked with a move to QPR over the past three years. He’s a nice and tidy player who does a very good job without ever catching the eye. At the back Darren Ward, once of Watford and Millwall, needs no introduction after his time with QPR while George Elokobi is a decent full back who jumped the Colchester sinking ship early during January. Goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey kept nine consecutive clean sheets in his first nine professional starts while on loan at Stockport last season. He’s been thrust into the Championship full time this season after a long term injury to Matt Murray. Past Meetings QPR: Camp 7, Malcolm 7, Rehman 8, Stewart 7, Barker 7, Ainsworth 8, Leigertwood 7, Buzsaky 7, Rowlands 7, Blackstock 6 (Sinclair 83, -), Nygaard 6 Wolves: Hennessey 8, Foley 6, Darren Ward 7, Collins 5, Gray 5, Gibson 6, Olofinjana 7, Henry 7, Stephen Ward 7, Elliott 6, Bothroyd 6 (Keogh 88, -) Our last visit to Molineux came in the final away game of last season. For weeks QPR fans had looked at the run in, and the trip to the play off chasing Wolves in particular, with some apprehension as we battled to avoid the drop. In the end a win against Cardiff the week before sealed safety and so with the two star turns, Lee Cook and Dexter Blackstock, packed off on a rewarding holiday and QPR fielding a below strength side it was down to reserve keeper Jake Cole to repel Wolves as they chased a place in the top six. He didn’t do a bad job at all, but was eventually beaten twice in a fairly comfortable defeat – Andy Keogh and Michael Kightly got the goals but had Jimmy Smith’s volley dipped into the net instead of the underside of the bar just after half time with the scores still deadlocked. Wolves: Murray 7, Collins 7, Breen 7, Craddock 7, McNamara 7, Olofinjana 8, , Potter 7, McIndoe 6, Kightly 8 (Gleeson 83, -), Keogh 8 (Little 90) Bothroyd 5 (Ward 79, 6) QPR: Cole 8, Bignot 7, Kanyuka 6 (Timoska 59, 6), Stewart 6, Milanese 6, Rowlands 7, Bolder 6 (Bailey 76, 7), Lomas 6, Smith 6, Furlong 6 (R Jones 67, 6), Nygaard 6 Head to Head: Previous Wolves v QPR results: Team News Wolves will be without two of their most impressive players from this fixture last season with keeper Matt Murray and attacking midfielder Michael Kightly both long term injury victims. Jody Craddock has also been out for a while and is not fit to return. Referee What’s happening elsewhere? Form Wolves are in hugely inconsistent form and will need to string victories together if they’re to make the top six for the end of season lottery. They have won their last two games, at Burnley and against Scunthorpe at home, so maybe that final push of consecutive wins is just getting underway. Mick McCarthy’s men do have four wins from their last six matches, with victories at Palace and Colchester separated from the two latest successes by a defeat at Preston and a draw against Southampton. In their last six matches at home Wolves have won three, drawn one and lost two – the defeats coming against Palace (3-0) and Stoke (4-2). Wolves have only won half, nine, of all their games at Molineux in the league this season. Rangers have just one win from 14 attempts against Wolves and they’ve become something of a bogey side for us since our relegation from the Premiership. We haven't scored against Wolves in our last four meetings. Prediction Fancy the R’s for a win? Discuss this match on the Message Board Click here and be the first user to comment on this article
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