This week - Basic football, Setanta Sports and what's happening to the pubs in Shepherds Bush?
Thursday, 21st Aug 2008 09:37

Further reflection on QPR's collapse at Sheffield United plus a look at what you get for your money with Setanta and the demise of another watering hole in W12.

Basics
As the dust has settled on the thrashing we took from Sheffield United on Saturday the gnashing of teeth and wailing has subsided and been replaced with the usual background grumbling that is the constant track by which QPR fans live their lives.

There certainly wasn’t a lot of pleasure in being at Bramall Lane on Saturday, other than the fantastic ground itself, and I have to admit that, sad as it is, I haven’t slept too well since running things over in my mind wondering just how it all unfolded in front of me.

The first thing I’ve noticed this week is a switch in the normal reaction across the message boards - normally it’s the people who didn’t go to the game who are the worst, straight onto the boards at a minute past five to point a finger or rant on about some culprit or other they picked out from the match commentary. Then slowly in dribs and drabs those that were at the game will arrive home and provide perspective and positives from even the most comprehensive of defeats.

This week though it’s been those that were at the game, myself included, more angry about the result rather than those that sensibly elected to stay at home. For me that’s down to the nature of the performance rather than the result itself which, coming against a team not long out of the Premiership and one I expect to be in the top two this season, wasn’t the massive disaster it might have appeared to be at 5pm on Saturday. Generally 3-0 defeats in August are long forgotten come May wherever you finish in the league.

People have rightly pointed out that we have a young team that is learning to play together and, in a few cases, in a new league in a new country. We cannot expect miracles, or big wins at Sheffield United, straight away and I appreciate that. As has been spotted on our message board I continue to wrestle myself over my own expectations for this season but to be honest I didn’t expect us to win on Saturday and it was the manner of the performance and the attitude of the players that upset me the most.

We clearly have some people in our team that can do special things with the ball. Even on Saturday in the most dire or dire performances Parejo was nutmegging opponents, Ledesma was pulling off the flicks and tricks and Cook was making some nice cut inside runs from the left wing. These are the kind of players that we’ve longed to see at QPR through the years that Palmer and Santos anchored our midfield but we have to build a platform on which these players can play, and they have to become part of a team rather than fancy individuals showing off.

It’s all very well our attackers nutmegging people and showing off, and Dowie talking about pro-zone statistics, but when you strip all that back football is a simple game and you have to get the basics right and build a platform upon which to add all these other things. That platform just wasn’t there on Saturday because we didn’t do the basics right and for all the young players and foreigners we had in the team at the weekend it was the senior three at the back, Cerny, Hall and Gorkss, that let us down the most.

Before you can even start to think about going to win a football match you have to have a few basics in place, and to be honest this was the kind of thing I thought we’d be really strong on with Dowie in charge - who knows, maybe we still will be. The first thing is you have to have a goalkeeper that communicates with his defence and inspires confidence in them, who commands his penalty area well and who you can rely on most of the time to give a mistake free performance. Blunders happen of course, and normally with keepers they end up in the back of the net and get noticed a lot more than an error by a striker for instance as I know only too well myself, but the best goalkeepers remain mistake free most of the time.

Now Lee Camp is far from perfect on crosses, command of penalty area, communication with defence and other things but only at Norwich away and possibly Bristol City last season can I recall him making a mistake as bad as Cerny made on Saturday for the third goal. The Czech didn’t so much drop that cross as miss it completely and then repeated the trick twice more in the half. Add that to his very, very shakey debut against Barnsley and a reluctance to leave his goal line for anything other than the half time change of ends and it’s clear to me at the moment we don’t have the basics right between the sticks.

Nor do we at centre half where Hall and Gorkss did their best Steve Morrow and Karl Ready impressions at the weekend. There are all manner of defensive systems, formations and techniques we could discuss here for hours on end but at the end of the day when the going is tough and you’re under pressure the safest thing to do as a centre half is mark your forward nice and tight, goal side and inside. Put yourself between him and the goal, no free headers allowed and if he gets running at you get him going away from the goal. Once you’ve mastered that then it’s time to start bringing in offside traps and the like. Quite what Hall and Gorkss thought they were doing with Henderson and Sharp at the weekend good God only knows - they weren’t marking them, in fact neither of them went within five yards of Sharp all afternoon, and they weren’t playing them offside with any degree of success, so who knows.

Another basic is the defending of set pieces. I ranted at length in the match report about the scandalous first goal United scored where one long throw and two free headers ended with the ball in the back of the net with barely a QPR player in the picture and Dowie has since said that the arrangements we had for that were pinned to the dressing room wall. If that’s the case then I sincerely hope the players have been running up some serious hills this week as punishment because that’s unforgivable. Matt Connolly has rightly held his hands up for the school boy like marking job he did with Sharp at the back post, but Henderson beat both our so called centre halves to the ball for the flick on at the near post before it even reached Sharp - goal side and inside? One in front and one behind? No free headers? To be honest Henderson need not have bothered changing out of his club suit before Saturday’s match such was the ease at which he dominated the game in our final third.

Even allowing for all that we didn’t have any kind of meaningful possession with which to construct anything that might hurt our opponents ourselves. On the opening day against Barnsley one of our top men was Gavin Mahon who very calmly got it and gave it all afternoon. Mahon hasn’t played since and on Saturday we lacked somebody like him in the midfield - Mikele Leigertwood continues to frustrate me by hinting that he could do that job and looking like a super player before collapsing back into carefree Conference player mode and it was he that gave the ball away for the second goal at the weekend. There really is nothing wrong with keeping the ball for 30 passes without going anywhere, especially when being smacked about as we were in the first half on Saturday, but our ball retention was as bad as it’s ever been at the weekend. The lack of anybody in attack who could hold the ball up in the first half didn’t help with that and things did improve when Di Carmine came on for a tidy second half performance.

I keep coming back to Parejo’s four nutmegs. We have to earn the right to do that - the centre halves have to have the strikers under control, we need a presence in the middle of midfield, we need the strikers to be involved with keeping possession in the opposition half and our ball retention needs to be about 80% better than it was at any point on Saturday. Only then can people like Parejo, Ledesma and Cook play to their full potential.

On Saturday we face Doncaster who are a nice footballing side. If it comes down to a pass and move competition I’d back us to be better at it than them, however Doncaster have come from a league where passing sides don’t normally flourish and they’ll have the basics of defending, set pieces, possession and marking down to a fine art. They spent all of last season needing to build a platform to pass on in a tough and uncompromising league and on Saturday’s evidence they have a work rate and team work advantage over our team as well. It will be interesting to see what another week together on the training ground has done to improve our side.

A fool and his money are easily parted
I finally bit the bullet this week and fished out a moth eaten debit card from my wallet to pay for a Setanta Sports subscription. At first I was shocked and confused that the man on the other end of the phone didn’t want to rip me off for a £3.50 booking fee charge for the privilege of giving his company some money but then I realised it’s only QPR that thinks that’s an acceptable way to treat its customers so I was able to press on.

I’ve lasted without the extra channels for longer than I thought I would, but I went flicking through Sky looking for the Charity Shield match the other week only to find that I didn’t have it and when I got home on Monday I really fancied watching Torquay v Ebbsfleet (no seriously, I did) and thought that the irritation of not being able to watch England on Wednesday night would be even worse so I picked up the phone and went for it. The addition of FA Cup football to their line up later in the year pushed me over the edge, and I love ice hockey and baseball as well so NASN will come in handy.

It is of course the fault of the European Union that I’m forced to pay an extra £12 a month plus connection charge. Previously all the sport I wanted was on the one Sky platform and that was great but the EU decided it was unfair and against competition law so for the benefit of the viewer they made Sky share out some of the Premiership football and now here I am as a viewer paying £12 more every month. I hope the bloody clueless morons in Brussels can sleep soundly in their beds over that one - job well done boys, really well done, the viewer a clear winner I’m sure you’ll agree.

About half an hour after signing up the channel flickered into life just in time for Ebbsfleet to open the scoring at Plainmoor and I sat quite contentedly watching a reasonable match with a cold beer or two. Setanta’s coverage of games at that level is very in your face with cameras thrust under the noses of the manager’s at every possible opportunity during the match and some enthusiastic blonde lady quizzing them while they try to manage their team.

They probably go along with it because of the money they get from the channel but it was quite painful watching Liam Daish the Ebbsfleet manager trying to force his brain to compute what he was watching in front of him with what he wanted to say on the television at the same time. In the end by chance they stuck the camera and the blonde on him just as Ebbsfleet knocked in their second goal after a defensive error and as the ball rolled over the line the over stimulation was just too much for Daish and he literally just shut down in front of our eyes - no longer speaking to the camera, not celebrating the goal, not moving at all really. Presumably as we went back to the main commentary team somebody on the touchline turned him off and on again.

Still there were some nice ideas, many of them similar to those used by Sky in the 20:Twenty cricket and I enjoyed it overall. Bring on Wrexham v Oxford which I believe is my next offering on Thursday night. I’m pleased with my purchase, but I should be really should I?

There was a terrific article in the Guardian last week branding football fans idiots for going to the lengths they do to support their team when the sport in this country is so un-competitive at the top level and I agreed with just about every word (link) and then went out and spent some more money on a channel that shows the worst kind of Premiership matches - Sunderland v Liverpool, Fulham v Man Utd - where the outcome is decided long before it actually kicks off. An extra tenner a month to watch a league where the league winners have lost just one game between them in 95 matches? Yeh I’m mad, and I’m contributing to the problem by pouring money into the sport by ploughing more money in.

There will come a time where it’s all too much - Italian football has shot itself in the foot with too much television coverage and high prices and now the only people that actually go to games are the ones that go for a fight hence more than half the Serie A games on any given Sunday are now played in front of sub-10,000 crowds. There will come a time when people will realise that paying £50 to go and watch Chelsea v Portsmouth when you know what the result will be and you can watch it on television anyway is ridiculous, and there will come a time when I say bollocks to the idea of paying £12 a month to have the turgid stuff beamed into my living room. It hasn’t happened yet, but it draws closer and closer with each passing season. People will only pay big money to see a sport where the final league table can pretty much be written down before the season actually starts for so long.

Last orders
Get along to the Adelaide before the Doncaster game if you get a chance, it will be one of your last opportunities before yet another traditional pub in Shepherds Bush makes way for some trendy yuppie joint that looks at us football fans like something the landlord stepped in while sweeping his step.

I started my pre-match pub life in the corner of the Goldhawk with my Grandad. That was a super place, two big bars with a pool room at the back, Margaret as land lady and Tony behind the bar, the secret knock for early kick offs or games with Millwall - it was a sad day when they sold it and moved on and an even worse one when we went in the first game after the refit to be basically told that it was no longer a pub for football fans. Their attitude has relaxed over the years but I’d never been back in the old place until after the West Brom game on the final day of last season when I met some friends in there. It’s not a patch on what it used to be – in fact it’s a ghastly place now.

Not quite as bad as the Bush Ranger is these days. That too used to be a terrific match day boozer until its first revamp which turned it into an Ikea showroom. To be fair though I’d just about come round to the idea of going in there again by the start of last season - they had screens up with football on which is more than the poxy Goldhawk could manage, they did food including a cracking breakfast, they opened early, it wasn’t a totally unpleasant place to sit on a Saturday lunchtime and all in all while being far from perfect it wasn’t too bad a place in my opinion although I know I’m pretty much a lone voice on that front.

I wouldn’t bother with it now. It’s been redone again, and renamed ‘The Stinging Nettle’ and it looks like the Adams Family’s sitting room. Another bloody God awful yuppie pub. Gone are the early Saturday openings, the screens with the match on, the welcoming attitude to QPR fans (some land lords would know them as ‘customers’) and in their stead are wing back chairs and people who like to have a conversation about where to put furniture in their “apartments”.

And now the Adelaide is going the same way.

I don’t want very much from my matchday pub. I want somewhere to sit, I want Becks at a reasonable price and I want to watch the lunchtime football. That’s it. Food is a bonus but chances are I’ve had breakfast before arriving so it’s no big deal. Basically seat, beer, football and that’s it. Now surely I can’t be alone in this? I must be, because one by one these pubs are being replaced with gastro pubs serving soiled lettuce in gravy as a main for £15 a head.

Before the Barnsley game in my quest for a beer, a seat and Birmingham v Sheff Utd I started in the Walkabout on the Green. Kick off time came and went and despite the pub having the thick end of 20 television screens and fast filling up with Barnsley fans the land lord, an Aussie needless to say, refused to change even one of them over for the football because it would mean having to turn off the cricket (that nobody was watching), the swimming (that nobody was watching) or the bloody Australian rules football (that people were moaning about). Half the pub left when I did at that point, leaving the bar staff alone with their cricket and Aussie rules.

In the pouring rain we walked past the “Stinging Nettle” and tried the Prince which had one customer in at 1pm on a matchday watching the horse racing. There were eight of us wanting the Birmingham match but we were told in no uncertain terms that it was horse racing or nothing at all. So we left the bar staff and their one customer to it. In the end we settled for the Shepherd and Flock which is never likely to offer a seat but did at least recognise that football fans want to watch football and put the Birmingham game on.

Now you may have gathered from my outlandish spending on QPR as detailed in previous columns and decision to get Setanta Sports despite being skint and falling increasingly out of love with the sports I’ve bought it to watch that I’m not the shrewdest businessman around. Nevertheless the idea of owning a pub in an area where 15,000 people congregate 23 times a year at least and rather than target them and attempt to get them through the doors you alienate them and actively discourage their presence is, I’m afraid, lost on me.

The one pub going the other way is The Springbok which has been transformed from a complete dump into a proper home fans’ pub that we can be proud of. Sadly though, 10,000 people can’t all drink in The Springbok. There are one two decent pubs still kicking around the Bush, but it’s increasingly hard to find one showing the football and all the favourite old haunts seem to be getting swallowed up into a yuppie laced black hole.

It surely hasn’t escaped anybody’s notice that you cannot drive anywhere in Britain at the moment without passing pub after pub that’s closed down, up for sale or advertising an available lease. I’ve driven past 12 in my working day today alone. Sadly it seems that only these gastro pubs and big chains can survive at the moment and we’re losing some quality boozers from the Bush and elsewhere.