Cifuentes placed on garden leave as reign that promised so much unravels Tuesday, 29th Apr 2025 23:50 by Clive Whittingham The Marti Cifuentes reign at QPR, which for so long promised so much, has ended in bitter fashion with the club placing the Spanish coach on garden leave. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of thingsHabit. Addiction. Loyalty. Friendship. Family. Belonging. Pubs. Just having something to do on a weekend that isn’t watching Saturday Kitchen and then standing in a long line to buy tat from Homebase. All of this and more. We know, we get it, we’re living it every damn Saturday and occasional Tuesdays. So much of following a club like Queens Park Rangers though is about a desperate reach and grab back into a fast diminishing and disappearing past. Look around the away end on Saturday. Look at the faces there. Ask those people what brought them here and you’ll get all sorts of variations on that list above. Soon, though, they’ll start talking about promotions, and Wembley, and Marsh, in the 1960s; Bowles, Thomas, Francis, Dave Sexton, and total QPR football in the 70s; Venables, Guinness tops, cup finals and European campaigns, in the 80s; Francis, Ferdinand, Wilkins and the what could have beens in the 90s; or Warnock, Taarabt, Faurlin, Hill, Derry and the gang from the 2000s. Those are the people and places and times that hooked 95% of our support. And now we sit there, through literally years of drek and dross, waiting, praying for it to happen again. Leeds. Leeds is the obvious place to start. Because for a child of the 1990s, one of the most vivid memories we’re forever grabbing at as it disappears back over the horizon is an annihilation of Howard Wilkinson’s champions elect. Fresh and buoyant and bouncing around after a weekend 4-0 against Man City – just the sort of thing we used to do back then – Gerry’s Rangers recovered from an early headed goal by Gary Speed to unleash the fires of footballing hell on the self-declared champions of their own lunch hour. It was all smoke in the air, floodlight pylons and Brooks tops. It was the Goldhawk jukebox, Chubby’s pie and grill, and Daphne’s box office window. It was Andy Sinton orphaning Chris Whyte’s children on national television. Andy Impey’s electricity. Bradley Allen’s 90’s curtains. And Les. All about Les. It was Ray Wilkins playing the game as it was meant to be played, at the speed he wanted it played at. Calmly choosing a club from the bag and playing a chipped approach shot with such immaculate backspin it both drew John Lukic and stranded him at the same time, good enough for this or any other Open Championship. Brian Moore on commentary so enraptured he called the younger Allen sibling “Clive” throughout the sequence. “Lukic has lost it a moooooommmmmmenttttttt”. And as Loftus Road exalted in this euphoric beauty, QPR scored again straight away from the kick off. Andy Sinton. And Leeds are rocking. Whyte, a tortured soul, in the end got deliberately sent off to avoid any further punishment. Clive Wilson converted the penalty. For one glorious Friday night last April we were back there. Same ground, same lights, same opposition, same crackle. It was all about Ilias Chair cutting in for that jump shot he loves so much. Lucas Andersen, a flaxen haired swashbuckling ten in the highest of QPR traditions. Jimmy Dunne right back at the other end of ‘shouldn’t work but does’ spectrum this club has form for pulling off when it’s running hot. Steve Cook and Jake Clarke-Salter, the classic reasonable-man-violent-man nightclub doorman combo. And goals. Goal after goal after goal. Gary Weaver and his hackneyed nonsense about how the Championship “changes lives” certainly not a patch on Moore, but when Sam Field is making it QPR 4 Leeds 0 you’re not really listening to what anybody’s saying. You’re just there, living it, on a high that can be matched by no chemical. And it wasn’t even our best performance. Rangers didn’t win in the one that was - of course they didn’t win, this is QPR we’re talking about - but the crowd for the 2-2 draw with West Brom stayed to a man and the applause at full time was thunderous. It’s not necessarily about winning. It’s about aspiration. It’s about playing like that; it’s about taking us all back to when QPR played like that all the time. It’s about sitting on the edge of those bloody seats in South Africa Road absolutely engrossed and gripped by what you’re being served. It’s about a style and an image and a culture. It’s about playing in such a way that those present can close their eyes, breathe the whole thing in very slowly, exhale and listen to the electricity around them, and they’re back there. Back here. At Loftus Road. With Rodney, or Stan, or Gerry, or Stainrod, or Byrne and Bannister, or Devon White. For a brief moment, under enormous pressure, having inherited a total shit show, with no money to do anything about it, behind the eight ball on the league table, Marti Cifuentes gave us that. He gave us all of that. It certainly wasn’t all brilliant, all the time. There were several beer shits along the way – often at Stoke - but this was a team that started its season playing non-league standard football on a village Power League pitch, getting taken apart by Slavia Prague’s third team while the local men folk peered through a fence behind the goal from the municipal swimming pool. To keep that team up, never mind in the style in which it was achieved, was nothing short of a sporting miracle. Shed the baggage of what had gone before, spend wisely a new chunk of FFP headroom, back this manager. It was a recipe that promised so much. We went into a summer for the first time in a long time with optimism, with excitement, with joy. We were looking forward to coming back. Looking forward to seeing what Marti Cifuentes’ QPR would look like once he really got started. We were hopeful. We had hope, again, at last. In the end it is the hope that kills The Tango De La MuerteAs part of the carefully stage-managed fan forum in September, a video clip was played announcing Cifuentes and his assistant Xavi Calm had signed new contracts. This has been held up as a sign that all in the garden was rosy at this stage and everybody was happy with the situation. It’s highly likely that contract was simply what the coaching team were entitled to having achieved the goal they were hired for – keeping a team adrift at the bottom of the table after two wins in the first 16 games in the Championship. In reality Rangers had already started to lose games again and would be beaten 3-1 at home by a dreadful Hull City side the following evening. The signs that all was not well in the Rangers world were there for anybody who cared to look. QPR are never shy of swinging a dick when they think they’ve got a dick to swing. This the club that printed t-shirts when Emmanuel Ledesma scored a hat trick in a League Cup tie against Carlisle. Kieran Morgan plays well for half a dozen games and gets 2,000 words in The Athletic. Koki Saito scores one goal at Hull, at the 30th time of asking, and we’re printing replica shirts in Japanese lettering. There isn’t much to shout about at Loftus Road, there hasn’t been for a long time – when there is, boy do they shout. Last season ended brilliantly, we stayed up in fine style having looked dead and buried, we played some fantastic football against the division’s best teams Leicester and Leeds, and we stormed the final two months with last minute goals and televised 4-0 home wins. The manager was the most popular we’ve had here since Neil Warnock and was getting national attention for his achievements. Yet you never heard him speak beyond the pre- and post-match press briefings mandated by the league. A regular summer date with this website, of ten-years standing (and there were some bad years/managers among them let me tell you) was kicked down the road and then cancelled. We were told we could have any member of the coaching staff we liked, but not the manager. At the fans forum the manager did not appear. They didn’t even want him in that tightly controlled environment, where 90% of the questions were pre-approved and asked by either Andy Sinton or the head of supporter services. That night we were told another forum with the “people on the football side of the business” would happen later in the season. At a meeting with Christian Nourry in January we were told an announcement on that was “a week away”. In March the club invited questions via email for a Q&A with members of the coaching staff, to be recorded at the training ground, edited, and then put out. Even that, even that, never surfaced. QPR’s approach to coms under Nourry is controlling to the point of paranoia, but if you think that’s a sound relationship with the manager, I’d love to sell you a used car. Somebody, somewhere, was concerned about what he might say. The denial among the fanbase about this which has persisted throughout the season, even right up to the point last week where local journo Ian McCullough published a story effectively saying the relationship between Cifuentes and his superiors had collapsed and people refused to listen because “it’s The Sun” or “Ian’s a grumpy sod”, has been tantamount to the children of divorced parents sticking fingers in their ears and refusing to countenance that mummy and daddy don’t love each other anymore. As in any messy divorce, both parties will have a tale to tell, and all associated hangers on will pick a side depending on who they believe more or like best. Already this week, like so many things at QPR, you can see opinion dividing pretty clearly along demographic lines. On Twitter, where the younger element of the fanbase tend to hang out, Cifuentes is a snake in the Mick Beale mould. On our message board, more of a sort of convalescence home for retired taxi drivers (I love you all, well most of you), the blame is very firmly being directed at Christian Nourry. In a divorce, there is often going to be fault on both sides. Cifuentes and his reps have clearly been on manoeuvres for the last few weeks for several attractive Championship jobs that are coming up. West Brom is the one that’s made the press, but there will be others – Norwich most likely. This was happening last summer too and was a key starting point in the decay of relations at QPR. Pitches were certainly made to Sunderland and Burnley. This stuff isn’t uncommon. Mick Beale takes it in the throat because QPR gave him everything he wanted to get him here, including the promise that our three most sellable assets wouldn’t be sold just as we really needed to sell at least one of them, he then gave a big speech about loyalty only to bugger off a month later leading to the collapse of our season. But even he, really, you couldn’t blame for wanting to swap a Championship club hemmed in by FFP for Glasgow Rangers. Mark Warburton had a little flirt with Bristol City one year into his reign in W12. It’s actually good that other clubs want our managers, rather than us having to sack and pay them off all the time. A perverse sort of progress. Still, chasing after Burnley is not a particularly smart move given QPR’s chairman Lee Hoos worked there for many years and still has numerous contacts and friends behind the scenes. Again, I’ve found the naivety about this among our online fanbase a bit surprising really. It’s football, guys. We were also the beneficiaries of this when Cifuentes moved here in the first place from Hammarby – not a small, insignificant, or poorly supported club in their own right. His career path is pretty clear, he’s ambitious and he’s like a monkey who doesn’t let go of one branch until it’s holding another QPR are extremely restricted in what they can spend in transfer fees and wages and therefore only ever going to be able to move so far bar another Ebere Eze-style sale, or miracle. If any manager does well here, he’s going to want to go somewhere else to progress – Norwich spent £30m on players this season. While I think his achievement in keeping this club, this squad and this set up in the Championship two seasons in a row is not to be underestimated (more later) he has been far from faultless. The decision to send Hevertton Santos to the lions against Ben Doak in the Boro home game was cruel – and having got away with it for half an hour at 0-0 to let it persist to half time was piss poor (by then the game was lost). At Oxford, against a dreadful opponent, a 2-0 lead and comfortable night was needlessly turned into a nail-biting trauma by the failure to get a substitution made resulting in us willingly playing with ten men and conceding a goal. At Portsmouth a style and plan that was obviously not working against an aggressive, high press team was persisted with right up to and including the moment it cost us the game killing second goal. But there have been other tactical moments of genius as well, such as the Leicester away game, the decision to go with Jimmy Dunne at right back, and the pragmatic move to a midblock, less possession-based game which turned both seasons around. No manager is going to be perfect, you’re going to hate the next one’s substitutions, selections and interviews as well, otherwise they wouldn’t be managing QPR. From Cifuentes’ side, the things that are coming up in his concerns are valid and justified. Other than discussed career progression, why is a manager who liked it here and felt genuine connection with the fans so adamant that he wants to leave and cannot work with the people here anymore? It should concern you as a supporter of the club. The situation with head of performance Ben Williams being allowed to do the job remotely from Dubai, while working for several other organisations at the same time, is a joke. Les Ferdinand was frequently accused of “jobs for the boys” for employing people like Chris Ramsey, here we’ve got somebody the CEO/DOF is tight with literally being allowed to phone in a key role from the other side of the world. When last season went well for injuries, and even Jake Clarke-Salter was seen from week-to-week, the club were only too happy to let Williams take the credit for that, giving him out for interviews and rolling him out for a presentation at the fan forum. If you then let that guy work from Dubai and at the same time your squad collapses into the Casualty Christmas Special not only are you going to get stick for that and deserve it, but your manager is going to be pissed off and he’s going to be right. This should never have been allowed in the first place and it shouldn’t sustain into the future. Clint Hill’s reaction to this on a recent Open All R’s Podcast was telling. “Best job in the world.”
The club has briefed local journalists, fan sites after the fan forum, and in injury updates on the official website in November that we’re “midtable” for the number of absentees we’ve suffered. There’s a feeling we (nee Cifuentes) just like to talk about them more, as an excuse. That, to me, just feels like a distraction from the obvious elephant in the room of the head of performance you brought here not even being in the country. Having the Brooklyn Nets, who've also had a dire season for injuries by the way, announce they were hiring Williams while you remained silent was beyond dim. At Christmas, having already lost Clarke-Salter long term, Liam Morrison and Steve Cook were both ruled out at the same time which, with Jimmy Dunne at right back, robbed us of our four first choice centre backs and necessitated an emergency January run for Ronnie Edwards. Later an already lousy collection of strikers was entirely wiped out when Zan Celar, Michi Frey, Rayan Kolli and Alfie Lloyd were all missing at the same time. That meant we went into two tough, important away games against physical West Brom and Stoke sides with the farcical midget army playing up front – Paul Smyth at centre forward for one, Karamoko Dembele the other. Ridiculous. If that’s an average season for injuries I’d hate to see a bad one. Much of who’s to blame will come down to who was fundamentally in charge of last summer’s recruitment. Some of the signings have been popular with fans and done relatively well – Paul Nardi is in decline after a strong start but can be pleased with his season, Liam Morrison looks hugely promising albeit he’s had excellent partners in Cook and Edwards, Jonathan Varane has shown promise, Koki Saito and Karamoko Dembele flashes. That’s individually, though. Together, the squad is little short of a disaster. Dave McIntyre described it on a must-listen episode of the West London Sport Podcast as “crap”, “one of the worst QPR squads in our lifetimes” and “worse than the team that was relegated from this league in 2001”. It is deficient in both full back positions – no cover for Kenneth Paal on the left, centre back Jimmy Dunne having to play on the right because the two right backs you signed last summer are garbage. It has a midfield that point blank refuses to turn around and either play or run forwards – there is nothing this team cannot turn into a pass back to Paul Nardi. It has five midgets who all want to play ‘ten’ in a notoriously physically demanding league. It has a dreadful collection of strikers, the two senior ones mostly absent and a tough watch when they play, the two juniors mostly absent and just finding their way in the game. It has no pace at all, which means you have to pick Paul Smyth every week who is, at best, a squad player at this level. And it has no height, so you have to play a centre back at right back to occasionally win you a header up the field. It is entirely unsuited to the division it plays in. Whoever put that together has erred, badly. Cifuentes is right to be exasperated if it wasn’t, or only partially, him. Trying to pin down who is responsible is like knitting fog, and that’s almost certainly deliberate so people can then claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the disasters. Cifuentes has at times toed the party line and declared himself extremely happy with the squad and the recruitment, then at others (such as after the pre-season friendly at Reading) said: “Hevertton is a right full-back but we are using him as a right winger because that’s where we are. We need more there and hopefully, we can keep improving as well. We’ve got the players we’ve got, so I’m trying to get the best of all of them. I have a clear idea and the club knows very well my idea.” “A good question for Christian and the club” and “the club knows very well my idea” have become stock press conference answers. Again, coupled with results, does this sound like it’s going well to you? It was there all along, if you wanted to see it. For his part, Christian Nourry told South London Press “We don’t move forward on a player unless Marti, Xavi, Andy and myself are in agreement that it’s going to work… We worked in total lockstep over the course of the summer and everybody was unanimous on the players we brought in to the football club.” But then after the fan forum in September he also told the fan sites that “Marti doesn’t want to be a manager, he wants to be a head coach” and that Dembele and Saito had been signed last summer in part because “one of the things I wanted here this summer was some players who were fun for the fans”. We’ll know in time. If Cifuentes goes to another club and starts signing lots of tiny tots and 6ft 4ins Danes who can’t run, tackle or head a ball, while we soar off to sunlit uplands with a big, physical, fast squad of grizzled Championship bastards then it’ll speak for itself. Best case scenarioWe’ve had much of this article written since November, which was the first time they were going to part ways with Cifuentes before a freaky combination of Gavin Ward suddenly becoming the world’s biggest QPR fan, Zan Celar morphing into a Championship centre forward for a night, steadfast supporter backing for a manager who hadn’t won in 13 games, and perhaps some pointy finger from Ruben Gnanalingam kept Cifuentes in his job first time around. We’re posting it now because although it is being billed as “garden leave” there is, as with Ian Holloway when he suffered the same fate two decades ago, surely no way back from here. This is now a grim fight to try and claw the buy-out/compensation owed if he goes to another club, while on Cifuentes’ part there’s clearly been attempts to drive that down or get rid of it entirely to make him more attractive to potential suitors. There is more chance of me being the QPR manager next season than him, but then as I say that’s been the case for some time. The immediate general reaction will be to turn on the Spanish coach. Question his motives, call him a liar, brand him a snake. Say he’s overrated anyway, didn’t do that good a job, held the team back. You’ll see all of this. The PR battle is well underway, and the club will always win that because at the end of the day we’re QPR fans not Marti Cifuentes fans. To come back to the messy divorce analogy, regardless of what else has gone on the kids never side with the parent who’s been courting other partners. The key thing for those of us left with the pieces, is what’s next? What does next season look like? Recruit well, players and manager, move on up the league, Cifuentes scrabbles around for a job then doesn’t do very well in it… it’ll be ‘Marti who?' in no time. My concerns about this are threefold. Firstly, my opinion is Cifuentes saved this club from itself twice. We drove ourselves off a two-year cliff edge getting rid of Warburton and rattling through Beale, Neil Critchley and finally the Gareth Ainsworth catastrophe. He came into that situation, six points adrift at the bottom of the table, and kept us up. Kept us up in style – wins at Leicester, Leeds, Coventry – with games to spare. I stood behind the goal at West Brom last season and watched us lose a game 2-0 in which we didn’t even have a plan or ambition to cross the halfway line, while the manager ambled about in cowboy boots. That team finished the season beating Leeds 4-0. This season Cifuentes was presented with a squad wholly deficient in all areas, totally ill-equipped for the physical demands of the Championship, with no pace, no height, no goals. It won one of its first 16 games and once again he pragmatically, thoughtfully and skilfully found a way to get it performing and winning. Performing and winning to within four points of the play-offs at one stage. Again, safe with games to spare. I think that’s remarkable. I think with many, many other managers we’d have gone down both seasons. Now he’s gone, but the people who put is in that situation both times remain. Lee Hoos, who we were told was retiring after the meltdown of the 21/22 and 22/23 overspends, is still heavily involved. Increasingly, people disagree with me. And that’s fine, opinions are like arseholes. The football, even when we’ve been winning, has often been dreadful. Cardiff and Oxford at home, from which we took four points and two clean sheets, are two of the lowest quality games I’ve ever seen on that ground. We’ve failed to win 16 of our 23 home league games, including a club record run of nine to begin with. Bristol City away was a point, but it was a highway robbery. Cardiff away not far behind it. The first half at Swansea away, and everything that happened against Middlesbrough at home, are probably in the top ten worst performances in a couple of decades. My opinion is that’s what he was working with, and he takes little blame. It’s a poor team. But when you watch this nonsense goal kick routine they do for the thousandth time, even when it’s cost you goals against Portsmouth and Sheff Utd. And you watch us take a quick free kick on halfway only to five passes later have it back with Paul Nardi, you do wonder. If everything was well, if the recruitment was great, if everybody was fit, is that actually how he plays football? Is that how he wants us to look? Because if it is, then I’m checked out as well. It’s boring, and ineffective. The key thing for me though is he parred the course. The Championship is increasingly just a list from 1-24 of highest wage bill to lowest. Leeds and Burnley pay the most, they’re the top two. Plymouth pay the least, they’re dead last. There are anomalies along the way – Luton, Stoke – but there is no better indication of where you’ll be than wage bill. QPR, currently 15th, are exactly where they should be. Even parring that course has proved difficult for some. Critchley and Ainsworth couldn’t do it. Hasselbaink couldn’t do it. Steve McClaren, a former England manager, couldn’t do it. QPR is a tough gig, when you get a manager who is parring that course you lose him at your peril, and yet we’ve had one doing that here and the relationship has collapsed. Ian Holloway, while barmy, was doing as he was told – shifting high earners like Onuoha and Robinson, bedding in young talents like BOS, Eze, Manning and Smyth, cutting the wage bill, while maintaining Championship status. The club once again got taken in by somebody with good chat – Steve McClaren – and the following season was a catastrophe, and expensive. More recently and more pointedly, Mark Warburton was a very good manager here. Not brilliant, not excellent, and not without fault. He spent relatively big money in his last season and put his faith in certain people and players who let him down. But 13th, 9th and 11th is a solid performance no other manager has matched in a decade, and it was absolutely par for the course with what we were spending. We dismissed him, once again because relationships had collapsed and he's difficult and this and that and the other, and drove off a two-year cliff edge. Much of what they'd fallen out over it turned out Warburton was right about. This is my first fear, are we doing that again? I say it again, lose a manager who can par the course here at your peril. The last two times we’ve done it it’s been a disaster. My second worry is linked to that. What indication has our recruitment, data and analytics given you, what faith has Christian Nourry, Lee Hoos and our ownership inspired, that they’ll get you a better manager than this? The people who thought Nicolas Madsen was a £3m+, multi-year contract player. That thought Zan Celar is a Championship striker. The club that repeatedly, over and over again, gets taken in by no hopers with good chat… they’re going to find you another manager are they? They’re currently running at a rate of one passable bloke to every three shitshows. In a summer when they’re already going to need to make probably a dozen signings at least just to get this squad into shape after what they did to it in the last two transfer windows. All of that, in one summer, and that’s going to go well and we’ll be fine in August? God I hope we are. If QPR are winning I don’t care, I’ll be bouncing around that away end with a cock like the Pink Panther’s tail. It’s a huge risk. Huge risk.
Thirdly, and it’ll come as no surprise to both regular readers, I remain concerned about Christian Nourry's role. One of the fundamental differences that have caused this collapse in our season and now managership is the head coach wants more control, and the club aren’t willing to give him it. Having supported QPR through the debacle of the Hughes and Redknapp eras, where two managers were allowed to run riot and ruin the club by a hapless and clueless owner, I’ve been the biggest proponent of the director of football model where you have a grown up between the manager and the board overseeing long term strategy and saying ‘no you can’t have Julio Cesar for £120k a week when you’ve just brought Robert Green here for £50k’. But it seems to me very QPR indeed to finally accept and implement that just as you’ve got a reasonably good manager, and a director of football learning on the job. QPR is an incredibly difficult club to run. Its history and fan expectation say it should be pushing for the Premier League, every other metric from stadium to revenue says it’s lucky it isn’t already in League One. It’s a circle that many very experienced and senior people at exec and managerial level have been unable to square. I cannot wrap my head around the decision to take the director of football role that Les Ferdinand had done for eight years, and the CEO role held by a guy who (whatever you think of him) had held the same position at Southampton, Fulham, Leicester and Burnley (some big clubs), slam those together into one job and give it to a 27 year old who’d never done either job before but ran you an audit that concluded the best course of action would be to put himself in charge. There is no way in a million years our owners would do that in any of their other businesses, and it is reckless to have inflicted it on us here. This isn’t ageist, or classist, or whatever, it’s simply this is a very difficult job and the guy doing it has absolutely no experience in it whatsoever. There have been good things – clearing out some sacred cows from the academy, reducing the age of the development team, not having 22/23/24-year-olds kicking around on the remote chance they suddenly turn into Championship players, increasing revenues by waking the club up to various sponsorship workarounds. But there are multiple issues and problems, everywhere you look. What on earth, for instance, is going on in the School End, where people who bought season tickets in good faith are now crammed into the lower tier with away fans, with portaloos and temporary burger stands shoved into the concourse? Nourry is now not only overseeing another desperately needed revamp of our totally deficient squad, having already botched a summer recruitment drive once, but also has to find us another new manager too having had a relationship with a perfectly good one breakdown. It’s an enormous task, the likes of which he hasn’t faced anywhere before. And while Cifuentes is the snake and Beale MkII now, if you start next season badly those same fans will soon turn and start singing about paella and Estrella again while you’re getting your arse handed to you in away games. It will need to go well, and it will need to go well quickly. Links >>> Cifuentes best and worst If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures - Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
You need to login in order to post your comments |
   Blogs 31 bloggersDerby County Polls[ Vote here ] |
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.We in turn value your personal details in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
