Jonathan Varane pulled out in the warmup, Paul Smyth and Koki Saito were badly missed, the team selection without them was all over the shop, and form team Swansea City were thoroughly good value for their subsequent win at Loftus Road on Easter Monday.

On a day when the teams threatened most by relegation belatedly recognised the gravity of their situation and started to win, QPR lost 2-1 at home to Swansea City in a game that played out like a botched wisdom tooth extraction.

It’s a seventh defeat of the season on this ground for the R’s, the 15th time in 22 attempts they’ve failed to win at home in the league, and the only real, genuine positives you could take from it were a) the game’s over now so we don’t have to look at it any more, b) the season’s nearly over so we don’t have to think about it anymore and c) Rangers cobbled together enough points not to be involved in an increasingly chaotic picture at the bottom and render this game largely meaningless.

Afterwards, manager Marti Cifuentes was in reflective mood. “I need to sit with Christian and decide what is the plan. What does he want? And what is the idea? Obviously, I have my thoughts and my ideas on how we can improve. What we have achieved this season is remarkable. It’s a big achievement, especially given how difficult it has been, but I think the foundation for next season is good. It’s just about taking the right decisions.”

So begins another week of message board debate and conjecture about whether Cifuentes will be sticking around to take part in that decision process, and whether you’d stick or twist if you were in the club’s position.

There was plenty to chew on for both sides of the argument in an Easter Monday clash which was won by Swansea far more comfortably than the scoreline suggests – a fifth successive win for the Swans who will surely now let caretaker manager Alan Sheehan have a crack at 2025/26 on his own terms, or risk losing him to somebody else who will.

QPR were poor. There was mitigation spilling out of their ears, which we’ll come onto in detail later, and this was an end of season dead rubber involving somewhere in the region of seven starters who likely won’t be at QPR in three games’ time including three Premier League loanees, but Rangers were rank all the same. And it’s not the first time. The team began with a club record run of nine league games and 11 in all comps without a win on their own ground and have won just seven of 22 here in total. Even in some of the games they’ve not been beaten in – Oxford, Cardiff – the match has been dire, the football has been turgid, and the business of sitting through it for 90 minutes a real chore. Too much backwards and sideways. No situation that cannot be turned into a pass back to Paul Nardi. More 12.30 kick offs than any team bar Coventry. Season ticket prices for the new year were released this week, I’ll be paying more than £600 for mine.

It’s a tough sell, rooted entirely in loyalty, habit and friendship, and very little sense or logic. I’d give it my usual “what else you going to do, go to B&Q?”, but I’ve had better 90 minutes in B&Q than this one.

An eighth minute free kick pumped straight at the nearest defender by Nicolas Madsen, returned to Harrison Ashby who then stuck it straight back on the same nearest defender, received the ball back, panicked, gave away a free kick and ran off holding the ball really set the tone. Ronnie Edwards, pressganged back into midfield action, had already intercepted one dangerous cross at the near post when the hastily recalled Morgan Fox attempted to do the same to Josh Tymon’s threatening cross and put through his own goal. Thank you grandad, thank you for fighting the war.

He’s an odd one Fox – you can spend several games at a time thinking he’s perfectly adequate backup to our main defenders, but when it goes it really bloody goes and this was up there with his previous debacles against Portsmouth and away to the Swans at Christmas. He spent much of the afternoon bizarrely heading the ball straight up into the air. When he came charging out of position to smash a bloke on halfway a minute before halftime and missed altogether, it set up an enormous Swans overload and a Liam Cullen shot again blocked behind by the overworked Edwards. I reckon half a dozen more games on this season and he would have swept the board at the player of the year prizegiving. Handsome Ron, that is. Not you Morgan. Sit down Morgan.

All the usual caveats about how little I know about the game, but the team selection felt wrong here to me, quickly draining away any momentum and positive vibes from Friday’s late show at Preston. Missing Jonathan Varane and Sam Field from midfield was always going to be difficult to compensate for, but breaking up the Edwards and Morrison combination at centre back to cover for it was a move that didn’t work – this Morrison’s first defeat in 14 QPR appearances, Fox alongside him was arguably Swansea’s best player for the second time in as many meetings. Paul Smyth’s controversial retrospective suspension for an incident at Deepdale the referee apparently didn’t see while at the same time awarding a free kick for removed one of the few quick players this team has, so why leave Kaddy Dembele out as well? There won’t be a slower starting 11 fielded in the Championship this season. Lucas Andersen was better than he has been at Deepdale and scored a worldie winner, Nicolas Madsen appears to slowly be turning a corner and has at least started to create chances, but picking those two together is a recipe for chronic loss of midfield. Rayan Kolli often struggles when picked as a lone striker, he doesn’t yet have the hold up and lay game for it and the team refuse to knock the occasional channel ball which might play to his strengths a bit more and isolate a few defenders one on one with him - Ben Cabango and Harry Darling made light work of the task as it was presented to them.

In short, too many strollers, not enough doers. Not strong enough, not quick enough.

We pissed away another ten minutes at the start of the second half labouring on with this before making substitutions, then they were rendered largely irrelevant by a second Swansea goal bundled into an empty net from close range by, allegedly, Harry Darling. QPR really didn’t start playing at all until there was 20 minutes left and a two-goal deficit to chase. Rangers were lucky it wasn’t three immediately after the second had been scored too.

Once again, a total failure to play against and cope with a team with any kind of effective press. Once again well beaten through midfield, where on loan Lewis O’Brien should be high on the shopping list at QPR and any other club in this division in need of surgery in the middle of the park. With him dominating the middle of the park and Tymon and Key flying forwards from full back the Swans looked slick, and Cullen’s diving header down at the School End wasn’t a million miles away from being a spectacular counter attacking third to really put the tin hat on it all for Rangers.

With Frey added to give the attack a much-needed focal point, Dembele brought on to solve the pace drought, and Emmerson Sutton given a welcome debut to lift the crowd, the game did at least move back in the direction of watchable. Frey was rendered largely ineffective by referee Tom Nield whistling every time he went near the ball for being a bald guy on a Monday afternoon. But Madsen was rewarded for his recent improvement with another assist, playing through Dembele for a beautiful flashed finish in off both posts to make it 2-1. Fine goal.

The persistent, at times needlessly vicious, criticism Paul Smyth has taken from a certain corner of the support base has ramped up a notch over the weekend since his ban was confirmed, prompting a plea from his wife on social media to tone it down. How on God’s green earth has it come to that? Some of the absolute outright scum we’ve had play for our club, and at times hero worshipped, and we’re going for Paul bloody Smyth? Get into the sea and stay there. Good club man, played every game this season until now, gets up and down the line, offers pace to a slow team, committed and hardworking, sound lad off the pitch, manager picks him when he’s available. Not the greatest player, sure, but cheap on the wage bill, reliable in the squad, available far more often than most others and valuable out of possession for a team that regularly gets exposed down his side when he’s not playing. With the ball though, Kaddy Dembele has scored three times in the league this year in less than half the starts it’s taken Smyth to get one. Not enough to warrant sliding into his wife’s DMs, but significant all the same.

Rangers tossed a few set pieces and throws into the Swansea box thereafter. Vigouroux commanded his box annoyingly well. Emmerson Sutton almost got chipped clean through on goal for an equaliser that would have brought the house down. Paul Nardi journeyed forwards for a free kick to get the blood flowing a bit on an artery hardening afternoon. Did an equaliser ever look or feel likely? Not really. Dembele’s was QPR goal 31 on this ground this year, bottom placed Plymouth have scored 39 at home. Having gone from August to December without a home win, QPR are now without one since February 14 and that will prevail all the way through until August unless they somehow beat promoted and title-chasing Burnley on Saturday morning.

Not a lot there for Marti Cifuentes to take into his big sit down.

And yet, again, so much mitigation you have to wonder and ask exactly what else the Spaniard could do? How much of this can really be laid at his door? What hand, exactly, do you want him to play with these cards? He can’t pull a competent centre forward out of his arse.

It took until November for the manager to be able to name an unchanged team – perhaps no surprise that then resulted in the breakthrough win at Cardiff. He’s only been able to do it twice since - Watford H and Luton H in January, and then last week’s games against Bristol City and Preston. Again, no surprise those both also resulted in victories.

You want Michi Frey to start up front here after Friday? So do I. So does Cifuentes, I suspect. The medical team have apparently said he can only do x minutes. Same with Dembele. Same with a lot of them. Same every week. When he was criticised recently for heeding that advice and not starting Alfie Lloyd at Stoke, Lloyd started the next game and duly ended his season by blowing his groin out completely exactly as we’d been told he would if he was overused. Steve Cook’s injury is an over-use issue. Chris Willock’s career has never recovered since the manager at the time admitted playing him longer than the club’s medical team had advised. We’re not playing Championship Manager 98/99 here, lads.

Here, when Cifuentes would probably like to have built on Friday’s impressive second half, Jonathan Varane pulls up lame so late in the warmup that Paul Morrissey still announced him as playing even as the teams came out onto the field with Fox in defence and Edwards pushed forwards. That’s your two best central midfielders, Varane and Field, out, and a rejig of the team minutes before kick-off. Fox was abject, but at five minutes to curtain he wasn’t even meant to be on stage.

Afterwards the exasperated manager asked “What else? What else?!” Asked if he thought Rangers had simply been unlucky with a casualty list that has plagued them all season and once again had top earners like Steve Cook and Jake Clarke-Salter watching on from the director’s box, Cifuentes, not for the first time, hinted at something more to all this than simply misfortune. “Generally in life I don’t believe in luck or bad luck,” he said. “Obviously there is nothing you can do about Sam Field getting a tackle – that’s part of the game. Perhaps we need to review other areas. Definitely I think we are going to do that internally. It’s the first time in my career I’ve experienced something like this and definitely, as in all areas, we need to improve.”

A team already at a financial disadvantage. A squad already weak in both full back spots, midfield and particularly upfront after a questionable summer of recruitment. And a treatment room that has looked like Emergency Ward Ten from basically the first week of the season. What, exactly, do you want the manager to do? Train in faith healing? Get Felix Magath to roll out the cheese trolley? Given the scale of absentees this year from what is already one of the division’s weaker teams and squads it’s arguably amazing Cifuentes has got us as high and safe in the league as he has. Emmerson Sutton got a run here and that was an uplifting moment, but other than him are there really loads of Championship-quality players in that development squad ready to step in and do a job in these circumstances?

Neither team were helped here by referee Tom Nield, a man who took to the field and officiated this despite apparently suffering from some deep and lasting concussion. Leslie Nielsen as Enrico Pallazzo, real referee bound and gagged in the dressing room.

An early goal in QPR’s favour may have painted a different picture, and when Lucas Andersen ran clean through on goal after 20 minutes that opportunity certainly looked to have presented itself. Now, you may remember Nield a year or so ago on this ground missing Coventry goalkeeper Ben Wilson taking Sinclair Armstrong out at the knee in the penalty area because he was too busy making sure QPR had the free kick they really wanted in back play. Here, he did exactly the same thing - very generously halting the play to bring Rangers back and give them a free kick 20 yards back down the field. Part of a performance in which everything you thought was a free kick was ignored, and everything you thought wasn’t a foul was whistled for immediately.

Between him and the assistant on the Ellerslie Road side of the ground, whose grasp of offside was about as firm as mine on the plot lines from Made in Chelsea, it started to feel quite comically like the officials were part of some in-joke end of season game to see how many decisions they could award the opposite way round.

When the inevitable injury feigning, time wasting and illusion the goalkeeper is about to die settled in through the second half, Nield’s action against the situation stretched only as far as the standard, meaningless yellow card in injury time (Josh Tymon now just eight cards short of a ban with two games to go, he’ll be awash with regret and remorse I’m sure) and the referee jogging 30 yards across the field to shake Liam Cullen’s hand as he walked off for his sub. Andy Woolmer levels of pig-headed contrariness, and if you can’t control QPR v Swansea in these circumstances then the Championship really isn’t for you.

It was Premier League assistant Dave Babski who did a lot of my referee training and mentorship back in the day. He now coaches Championship officials, but he certainly hasn’t been coaching this one because one of the first bits of advice I got was to master the art of running backwards. Don’t turn your back on things to get from A to B, keep them in view as you travel. Nield isn’t very good at adjudicating on things he has seen, so he’s always going to be lousy with the stuff he hasn’t. In the second half here Vigouroux and Darling went up for a cross, the keeper claimed cleanly, both fell to the floor and pretended to be injured, because that’s football in this country in 2025. Nield came across, ascertained (shock) there was nothing wrong and no trainer was required, waved play on, turned his back, and ran away. While he was doing so Vigouroux, who’d already put the ball down and picked it up once, picked it up illegally a second time and walked it across to the other side of the six-yard box where he put it down again as if a goal kick or free kick had been awarded. Neither had. There was no QPR player in the picture. Nield hadn’t signalled a goal kick, hadn’t given a free kick, hadn’t stopped the game, and hadn’t restarted it with a drop ball. Play was live, all the way through. He turned round just in time to see the keeper lump what he presumably thought was a goal kick up the pitch, none the wiser. I’d love to know what would have happened if a QPR player had chanced his arm by walking up and rolling the ball into the net. We’d then have been at the mercy of Mr fucking Jingles on the far side, who to this point had needed a sat nav to locate his own nipples.

A game already taking on water, holed fatally below the waterline by an official out of his depth. If you’d gone out there with the whistle intending to deliberately destroy it as a spectacle, you couldn’t have done it any better than this. It was unwatchable, and I couldn’t wait for it to end.

That has probably coloured this match report into a ridiculously over the top, negative diatribe and rant. I apologise.

It’s a product of sitting through too many games like this. Too many assaults on the senses. Too many goalkeepers pretending to be injured. Too many Championship referees officiating like they’ve been twatted in the face with a large, flat-bottomed frying pan. To both regular readers, I’m sorry. It’s been a long nine months.

It’s an end-of-season game, with nothing on the line, stacks of injuries against a form side. Who cares? Who cares? And besides, what’s really wrong with the season as a whole? From where we’ve come from, with everything we’ve had to face, it can be counted as reasonable progress. We’ve long been safe from relegation, when this time last year we were shitting bricks. Several of last summer’s signings have settled and look promising, a couple of others have made dreadful starts but might be slow burns.

Yet, as we draw to a close, it still to me doesn’t really feel like that. These semi-frequent Cifuentes “the club knows very well my ideas/thoughts/opinions on this” comments in press conferences. It feels like… something else. Something we don’t quite know yet. And, inevitably, another one of QPR’s rip it all up and start again summers. Another dozen in, another dozen out. More hype and hyperbole. More big words and grand promises. More inquisitive minds and apparently immaculate character references. More of me frantically phoning up Greg Spires to answer me “who the fuck is he when he’s at home?” And at the end of it all, four months from now, me writing “16th” in the season preview again and feeling that a bit optimistic.

When it comes to who the manager will be, I feel like Cifuentes has saved the club from itself twice over. First recovering them from the two-year cliff dive that started with the axing of Mark Warburton and culminated in the disastrous decision to appoint Gareth Ainsworth, and secondly from a high-risk summer of imbalanced recruitment followed by a season with a body count to rival Midsomer Murders. In my opinion, with a different manager, we’d have been relegated twice over, and the club are very fortunate not to be heading off to Port Vale for league games next year given the decisions they’ve made. I think he’s repeatedly had to deal with whatever wacky idea or trendy load of bollocks our accident prone club has thrown his way, and he’s done it successfully, professionally and largely without complaint. When you’ve got a manager fulfilling the brief, achieving league positions in line with the budget and wage bill we’ve got, be very careful about eyeing greener grass elsewhere, because they did that with Ian Holloway and ended up with Steve McClaren, and they did it with Mark Warburton and ended up with a two-year catastrofuck.

But am I right? How much of what’s gone on this year is Cifuentes responsible for? How much influence did he have on that summer intake, in which we signed a dozen players while somehow remaining deficient in both full back positions, central midfield and particularly up front? What role has he played in a season decimated by soft tissue and muscle injuries? I suspect not much, and he might be a useful scapegoat. What I am increasingly interested in though, as we try and look forwards, perhaps most importantly of all to somebody who follows this team around for nine months… is this how he wants us to play football? It’s generally accepted that it’s not. We’ve heard him on podcasts, when he did those, talk about 4-3-3, high press, seven second recovery rule, Johan Cruyff. And yet more often than not we got what we got on Monday.

In the ideal world, if everything was fine, if everybody was fit, if the signings were better, if we had more money, if we had a bigger wage bill, if we had one midfielder who might like to occasionally turn around and progress the ball forwards, if we had Championship standard strikers, is this what our pattern and shape and approach would look like? Do we aspire to better than this, or is this us? Backwards and sideways, rainbowing around and immediately beaten by any team with a halfway decent press? Free kicks on halfway, chances to put balls into the opposition box, taken quickly, rolled to the side, and back and back and back again until they reach Paul Nardi who then largely just turfs the ball upfield anyway? There is nothing this team cannot turn into a pass back to its French goalkeeper. I’m starting to worry they might do it with a penalty, should we ever get far enough up the field for long enough to be awarded one. (Still wouldn’t be our worst penalty this season, mind). Is that the “game model” handed down from on high, or is it the manager? Is it circumstance, or Cifuentes? Are we instructed to do that, or simply not good enough to do anything else?

Two games to go, and then another one of those big QPR summers of multiple comings and goings, talk of transition and rebuild, and it’ll all be different next season. It’s been a long time between drinks for a team now going into an 11th straight Championship season. I’m sure there’ll be some jam along tomorrow.

Links >>> Photo Gallery >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread

QPR: Nardi 5; Dunne 6, Morrison 5, Fox 3, Ashby 5 (Frey 54, 5); Edwards 6, Colback 5; Min-Hyeok 5 (Sutton 67, 6), Andersen 4 (Paal 53, 6), Madsen 5 (Chair 74, 5); Kolli 5 (Dembele 66, 7)

Subs not used: Bennie, Morgan, Murphy, Walsh

Goals: Dembele 77 (assisted Madsen)

Yellow Cards: Ashby 40 (foul)

Swansea; Vigouroux 7; Key 7, Cabango 7 (Delcroix 86, -), Darling 7, Tymon 8; Franco 7 (Allen 87, -), Fulton 7; Ronald 7 (Christie 90+8, -), O’Brien 8, Ji-Sung 7 (Cooper 81, -); Cullen 7 (Vipotnik 81, -)

Subs not used: Bianchini, McLaughlin, Naughton, Parker

Goals: Fox og 29 (assisted Tymon), Darling 55 (assisted Cullen)

Yellow Cards: Tymon 90+1 (time wasting – sure he’s absolutely devastated)

QPR Star Man – Karamoko Dembele 7 Ran fast. Scored a goal.

Referee – Tom Nield (West Yorkshire) 3 Here, in the middle of the Championship, in an end-of-term dead rubber, a referee 20,000 leagues out of his depth.

Attendance – 16,351 (1,800 Swansea approx.) Weird configuration of School End now permanent, it seems…

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Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

062259 added 20:27 - Apr 22 drained
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Myke added 20:54 - Apr 22 Thanks Clive, it's been a looong season and with the vast majority of them, your reports and previews have made the dross much more bearable. Not wishing to dig out any one player, because they were all poor, but I was particularly disappointed with Morrison. I guess he really missed Edwards beside him, because he looked very ordinary indeed. Anyway two to go and we ARE safe and have been for some time - unthinkable last November. Cheers again.

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Dorse added 22:24 - Apr 22 A quick warning about spending time in B&Q: I went in the other day and one of the staff asked if I wanted decking. Fortunately, I got the first punch in.
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Hoopstar added 08:09 - Apr 23 Thanks Clive - certainly mirrored my emotions. How can we show Paul Smyth support - is it overkill to go for a banner for him to show most of us love him despite his limitations?
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derbyhoop added 09:58 - Apr 23 IF we can get Cook, Dunne and Frey to sign new deals I don't think we'll need a major overhaul this Summer. That is a big IF, though. However, if Marti goes, and he's already the 5th longest serving Championship manager, then that would paint a different picture. I'm reasonably optimistic, for now. I did splutter at a body count like Midsomer Murders. Priceless.
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francisbowles added 10:33 - Apr 23 Thanks again Clive. Although he had very few options, that team selection had no shape and very little idea. I agree with Myke, Morrison had an unusually poor game. Error prone and only ever looking one way when bringing the ball out. Sutton, eager to get on the ball was largely starved of it, as we continually went down the right. The substitutions improved things but were far too late. 25 minutes of the first half should have been enough. Everything you said about the referee plus the repetitive fouling by Swansea and him leaving his cards in the dressing room. From his record, I was expecting a half decent referee, who wasn't afraid to enforce discipline. What I got was a whistle happy buffoon.

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HastingsRanger added 12:31 - Apr 23 Thanks Clive for a very fair report and couldn't argue with the result. I totally agree with your comments on Smyth, why an earth are people turning on him? Very frustrating watching the piss balling playing out from the back, which was sensibly closed down by Swansea every time! And if they are reliant on Nardi for the big boot, he needs to work on that too. As for the Vigouroux and Darling scam injuries, I do question why one of our team was not on the case regarding the handling of the ball / goal kick. Just shows the concentration of the players. If they were focused, they would have been all over it. Personally, I should have realised it would be a bad day, when I found the Crown & Sceptre closed for re-decorating before the game. Should have called it a day then! Assuming Swansea hang on to their manager, I can see them being a top 6 team. Sadly, they just looked better all round.

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Spanishal added 08:52 - Apr 24 Great analysis Clive, I have had a rant about our ridiculous injury situation on the Offy. Now about Smythy, I always enjoy his positivity and seems to be at times the only Rangers player who is unafraid to take on players, even though he sometimes gets it wrong. However his foolishness against Preston could have cost us dearly. A red card offence missed by the ref,and me for that matter, and at 1-0 down with 10 men could have lost that game and put us right back in the relegation mire again. Fortune or luck was on our side that day neither of which can be said for another pretty miserable season.

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hayd added 18:41 - Apr 24 “I need more money Steve” “We don’t have any more money” “I can’t compete with $120m payroll with $38m” “We’re not going to compete with these teams, we’re going to work within the constraints that we have, you’re going to get out a team doing the best job you can recruiting new players. We’re not going to pay $17m to players” “I’m not asking you for 10, 20, 30 million dollars, I’m just asking you for a little bit of help, get me that little bit closer and I’ll get you that Championship team…”

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Marshy added 20:54 - Apr 24 That referee should be struck off after that abomination. I did laugh though at some of the rubbish amateur dramatics of the Swansea players acting as if they’d almost died from a sudden seizure. As a club we must do everything we can to keep Marti! It would be very easy to throw criticism at his door after another dire performance, but the reality is with the injuries and suspect recruitment he’s had to endure, he’s performed miracles.

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Phil_i_P_Daddy added 14:48 - Apr 25 'jam tomorrow'? We'll have to scrape the mould off it first.
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