Part two of our annual report card on QPR’s squad of the past season focuses on an injury plagued defence and includes our only two A ratings.

If you want to hear the LFW panel, including stats man Jack Supple, debate the marks for this year’s report you can do so via all three subscription tiers in our Patreon. Part one, keepers and defenders, is live now.

3 – Jimmy Dunne A

Supporters’ Player of the Year, Players’ Player of the Year (always telling that one) and, spoiler alert, LFW’s Player of the Year as well. No need to read the next 25,000 words, it’s Jimmy.

The heartbeat of this team, a talisman for this club, the embodiment of the support base out there on the pitch. That’s how you and I would approach playing for this club – with all our heart, a scant regard for our own safety and welfare, chucking ourselves into everything, throwing our body on the line and doing everything physically possible to win the game for Queens Park Rangers. Jimmy Dunne celebrates as we celebrate, and fumes in defeat as we fume ourselves. As a football supporter what more do you want, than this guy, in your team?

A better footballer? It’s been said by his critics it’s a sad indictment of where the club and team are that somebody with such obvious limitations is being carried aloft from a 15th placed Championship finish like King Julien in Madagascar. Fine, I get that. There have been times during Jimmy’s four seasons with us when he couldn’t find his own arse with both hands. In January last year, after personal debacles at Millwall and home to Bournemouth, there were rumours of us shovelling him off to Blackburn for a few hundred thousand and seeing if we could get another Isaac Hayden or Lucas Andersen type in. A lot of us weren’t against that at the time. The way Dunne is able to repeatedly bounce back from these setbacks and personal troughs and come back stronger still only adds to his appeal.

Dunne signed for us from Premier League Burnley at a time we were spending money and pushing for the top flight ourselves. In his first interview with us he said simply the aim was promotion and nothing else would do. He’s endured four years of club turmoil since, five different managers, two relegation scraps, absolute clown school. He’s turned up regardless, and whether it went well or not he’s taken a big, wholehearted, full-throated swing at everything he’s ever done for us. Fans love a player like that. He played every second of his 45 games this year, just one match short of the ultimate ever present record.

He came to epitomise the Marti Cifuentes reign more than any other player. An auxiliary right back, tried more in desperation than anything after Reggie Cannon had shit the bed at Stoke last Valentine’s Day, he was ropey as hell for the first 20 minutes of his debut there at Bristol City, but his tormenter Sam Bell pulled his hamstring and Dunne has never looked back. He makes the WhoScored.com team of the season this year, the only player from outside a promoted club to be recognised. He’s quickly become key to the team in both boxes. Four assists from right back may not be much to write home about – he’s never going to strip somebody for pace and deliver a David Bardsley cross is he? – but five goals from your full back is a lovely return. A last-minute back post winner at home to Preston chief among them. I can’t imagine a Johann Cruyff acolyte ever saw himself picking Jimmy Dunne as his right back, but such has been the Irishman’s impact he’s become the first name on Cifuentes’ team sheet.

The one blot on his appearance copybook this year was Millwall away when we were all invited to collude in the illusion that our every-minute ever-present was injured, just as he was also in discussions with Sheff Utd about a move there. QPR subsequently lost that game, getting battered down both flanks, at a point when the play-offs were a possibility. Dunne’s move to Bramall Lane fell through, and he walked back into the team a week later to something not far short of a hero’s reception. Some players are better at playing the crowd, better at the PR game, than others. One wonders whether Chris Willock would have been welcomed back so warmly had he sat a key away game out to try and get himself a move to another club, only to return giving it waves and love hearts to the Loft a week later. Then again, that’s the value of the other 3.9 years of Dunne’s behaviour and approach coming back to him isn’t it? When his father passed away after a long illness at the start of December Dunne went home for the week, attended Mass on the Friday, flew back in time for Saturday, was magnificent in a 3-0 win against Norwich and scored the first goal. My dad died 20 years ago and I’ve never got over it, he goes to the funeral on Friday and then plays like that 24 hours later? I’m in awe. Mentality monster. I’ll never forget that from him, bollocks to a poxy game at Millwall.

On the final day, possibly his final appearance for the club, he heaved himself into battle against Sunderland. Didn’t need to. Didn’t even need to play, potentially jeopardising whatever lies ahead this summer by getting injured – Grant Hall certainly wouldn’t have fucking bothered. He was incredible. Won every header, every tackle. Dead rubber? Doesn’t know the meaning. He wanted that win. Seven tackles won, one interception, 13 clearances, one blocked shot and a clean sheet. If you don’t watch the stats, let me tell you, those are big numbers. Ronnie Edwards was outstanding, his maraud across to cover Liam Morrison with a tackle that shook the foundations of the stadium in the second half part of another immaculate performance. That guy will be in the England squad three years from now. His numbers? Two tackles, no interceptions, nine clearances, one block. Liam Morrison? Two tackles, four interceptions, seven clearances, one block. Jimmy Dunne, at right back, off the charts again.

In a week where the club is required to submit its retained list to the league, we wait to see whether Jimmy is on it or not. The anxious wait for some social media white smoke. Every wannabe ITK account reckoning they’ve got an inside track. Every Instagram post pored over – is this a farewell, or a signing tease? I’ve said it already, I think you let characters like this leave your club at your peril. You’re going to replace Jimmy Dunne, everything he brings to this club, this dressing room, this team, on our budget are you? Good luck with that. Darnell Furlong or no Darnell Furlong. But as fans we do have to be careful about getting carried away, and the club have to approach it with a cool head and budget in mind. Dunne has had some absolutely rotten runs of form in the past and he wouldn’t be the first to play out of his skin and produce his best football just as his contract is up tempting QPR to go all hot and heavy with a big offer only to regress thereafter – there’s a Jake Clarke-Salter write up to come in this section, remember. Rangers are nearly as bad at retainment as they are at recruitment. We frequently get these calls wrong.

I don’t think Dunne is good enough for the Premier League, and had the move to Sheff Utd gone through I expect he’d have played half a dozen times, sat out the first ten next season, and ended up back on loan in this division at Ipswich or somewhere like that next January. Lots of players who engineered their supposed big, dream move away from QPR just lately have regretted it – look at Sinclair Armstrong, whose agent repeatedly touted as a target for Liverpool and Celtic, now out of the team and hated by the crowd at Bristol City; or Chris Willock, planning his trips to Port Vale, cheers dad. Walk away from a place you love, and are loved, very carefully. But I guess he’s got to give it a go, at this stage of his career, if that opportunity is available. To that extent it’s rather out of the club’s hands. You can’t force a player to sign a contract, though you do get the slight impression they’d rather taken for granted that he was happy and settled here and would probably sign whatever they offered him whenever they got around to it only for the player to hit form with a contract expiring moving himself out of our reach in the process.

That’s something else we do a lot. If he does walk, it’s another development prospect we brought here to grow and sell leaving for buttons or less. Once okay, twice unlucky, three times extremely unfortunate, but the amount of times this happens to us is becoming a damaging pattern. You cannot aspire to be a development club if so many of the prospects you do get right then end up walking away because you’ve mismanaged their contracts. Charlie Austin, Ryan Manning, Bright Osayi-Samuel, Seny Dieng, Rob Dickie, Chris Willock, Jimmy Dunne, all players we’ve had here that at one time or another were hot property, and we’ve barely taken £5m for the lot of them. On individual basis, there’s explanations for all of them. This guy’s dad, that guy’s agent, can’t force a player to sign, did all we could... Altogether though, a catalogue of failure. Failure of timing in offers, failure to recognise what we had until it was too late, failure to renew contracts of players who we knew were good and wanted to sign but the manager for that 20 minute period didn’t fancy them, failure to cash in and sell players at the peak of their value because of some promotion pipe dream, letting Mick Beale dictate that players wouldn’t be sold right at the moment we desperately needed to just to get him through the door only for him to walk out three months later. And now your player of the year potentially about to walk away for free, when he’d have signed new terms at almost every point of the three and a half years leading up to this January. Let’s hope vague rumours of talks restarting hold some water.

There were one or two bits in the numbers below that surprised me. Only one star man award all season – Koki Saito got eight, Michi Frey four, Paul Nardi six, Ronnie Edwards five. An average rating below 6. I asked on our end season review whether all these awards were based more on feels and narrative, rather than facts. Thom Gibbs came straight back – of course, but what’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong with that indeed. Football is about stories, characters, and yes narrative. Jimmy deserves everything that comes his way, awards and then some.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 6.26

5 – Steve Cook C

Gareth Ainsworth didn’t get much right as QPR boss, but pinpointing the need for more characters and players like Steve Cook was certainly one in the plus column. It didn’t necessarily have to be Steve Cook himself, but a few more experienced, older players who knew the division, knew what it took to survive in the division, refused to be bullied away from home, and could guide the younger players was definitely necessary. In signing Steve Cook himself, we found ourselves with the actual El Guapo, and he was so good in his first season you couldn’t help but hark back to the January of 2021 when Nottingham Forest hijacked our move for him while we were third in the league and we had to go with Dion Sanderson instead. He subsequently won promotion with Forest, of course. What might have been.

The narrative by the end of last season was that the team really needs Steve Cook to win. The pitch was he’d been brought here to guard culture as much as his own goal, but Cook wasn’t here as the social secretary and formed a formidable centre back pairing with Jake Clarke-Salter – even more necessary when the goalkeeper behind them seemed to be actively working against the team’s survival chances. QPR had conceded 71 goals the year before, the fourth time in six seasons they’d conceded 70 or more across their 46 games. A year ago we wrote…

With Cook though, you can boil it down to a very simple numbers game. The Joni Mitchell centre back – you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. With him QPR won 15, drew 11 and lost ten – only two regular starters better his 41.667% win average (Colback, Hayden). Without him Rangers lost 11 of their 12 league and cup games. He played in 12 of the team’s 13 clean sheets, without him they conceded in every game bar one (Preston A is the anomaly in both cases). The team averaged 2.0833 goals against in the games Cook missed – a collection of fixtures that includes the season’s biblical lows away at Watford (4-0), at home to Blackburn (4-0 again) and away at Millwall (2-0). With him they conceded at less than a goal a game (0.91). With him QPR conceded a goal every 93 minutes, without they would let in one every 46.5 minutes.

As the team turned its season around through November and December it looked like more of the same. His man of the match captain’s knock in the 0-0 draw at a Burnley side that would end the year promoted, and stuck five through us in the return fixture, really rolled back the years. His deep, tight and narrow combination with Liam Morrison was key to four straight clean sheets around that time which belatedly got the R’s up and running. When he subsequently blew out his planta fasciitis chasing Milutin Osmajic back in vain for Preston’s opener at Loftus Road it felt like the world had fallen out of my arse, and the bottom out of our season all over again. With Morrison injured again around the same time that fragile recovery felt doomed.

The numbers, this time, don’t support his cause as much. Rangers won only seven of his 33 starts, a 21.21% win percentage which is a good 10% lower than the team average overall. They concede 1.33 a game and a goal every 63 minutes with him on the pitch, both worse stats than without him. Those stats are probably skewed somewhat by the games he played through the spring after the injury, when he very obviously came back too soon and unfit. If you like to think the best in people then that was the captain of the side putting his body on the line to help his team in an hour of need. If you want to be a horrible, cynical bastard you could say he knew he was still short of the appearances needed to trigger a third year at the club – Kevin Gallen told the west London Sport podcast he passed that threshold in February and we didn’t see him again after March 15. He did, however, sign off with two goals in two games against Leeds and Boro.

The club’s announcement Cook will indeed be staying for next season had a real “my captor’s are treating me well” vibe. It felt very much like Christian Nourry distancing himself from decisions that were made before his time here, that he disagrees with, and resents being left with. Turns out we can disclose contract lengths and details when it suits us. The fact Cook has triggered the extension by meeting appearance clauses rather than it being the club’s choice was even included in the headline. May as well have just headed it “Club captain refuses to leave”.

That felt a bit small minded and poor for somebody who has given us mostly terrific service for two very difficult years, and if we are going to bleed out experience and dressing room presence like Jack Colback, Jimmy Dunne and Morgan Fox this summer then keeping a few gnarly Championship types around is a good thing – particularly if we’re intending to replace the departures with the same profile of signing we made last summer. I like a player with the build and haircut of a guy who would have retired to run a pub in the 1980s. Nevertheless, with a really nasty injury carrying over, and our other first choice centre back also terminally unavailable, you can see why the club might be rolling their eyes a little bit at heading into 2025/26 with a big chunk of salary tied up in two key members of the defence neither of whom, it seems, are likely to play very much.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 6.17

6 – Jake Clarke-Salter D

Speaking of which…

Player who has been unreliable and largely unavailable for two-and-half-years suddenly has a hot run of form and appearances just as his contract is about to expire – Jake Clarke-Salter was, indeed, magnificent in 23/24 run in. Club rushes in hot and heavy with a new deal, using the announcement as one of its Fans Forum Easter eggs to distract attention from it not being a Fans Forum at all. Player described as a “wonderful human being”. Steady on, vicar. Player then immediately regresses to what he was before – unreliable, and unavailable. Very, very QPR indeed.

We’ve seen Dave Thomas’ dog on the pitch more than Clarke-Salter this season but the good news is he does seem to alternate these seasons. In the last four years his league appearances have gone 29, 16, 33, 11, so hopefully we’re due a good run from him in 25/26. The bad news is 30 appearances a season isn’t really good enough for your centre backs either and he’s only been able to get near that number twice in his career. Ideally you want somebody able to do 40+ games in that position, and QPR are now staring down the barrel of having a good chunk of wage tied up in two centre backs who are going to spend more of next season in the stand than they are on the pitch. A centre back with a 30-game ceiling on his season is a liability, not an asset.

The other bit of bad news is that even on the odd occasions Clarke-Salter did play last season, he really wasn’t very good. We conceded 19 times in his 14 appearances and 976 minutes on the pitch, won only three times and kept only three clean sheets. You can perhaps give him the pass of assuming he was never fully fit to play, but his performance in the cup at Leicester in particular was a shambles.

His absence has been particularly unhelpful to the club off the pitch as well. When he strung together the best form and appearance record of his career last season Rangers were only too happy to wheel head of performance Ben Williams out for a quick ten-minute presentation at the fans forum and give him out for interview at the end of the season, to tell you all how he’d done it. This year Williams was allowed to work remotely from Dubai, while also performing the same function for the Brooklyn Nets and Ineos (Marti Cifuentes, meanwhile, put on garden leave for his agent daring to sound out West Brom about their job). Clarke-Salter’s fitness collapsed along with the rest of the squad. It’s a dreadful look, totally hypocritical, and naïve decision making from the club.

Both the Williams and Clarke-Salter situations need rectifying urgently this summer. We can’t have another season like the one we’ve just sat through.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.94

15 – Morgan Fox D

The first problem with Morgan Fox, similar to Paul Smyth, is not something he can help or be blamed for. Both are just decent squad players for a club operating on a tight budget, however both end up being used far more than you would ideally like because our strength, conditioning and fitness is so poor. There have been times this season when QPR have been missing Jake Clarke-Salter, Steve Cook and Liam Morrison all at the same time. With Jimmy Dunne seconded to right back, that’s all four of the centre backs you envisaged being your first choice back in August. Fox is fifth on that list, and can also cover left back. In that role, he’s a pretty steady option. How many other clubs at this level have a brilliant fifth choice centre back? It’s not financially viable without a parachute payment.

Experienced, levelheaded, good bloke in the dressing room. Bring him on for the final 20 minutes of games you’re winning to shore things up – a hefty 40.91% win percentage suggests he’s quite good at that. An improvised backheeled goal to make it three wins from three games against Luton bastard Town, results that condemned the Hatters to a second successive relegation, worthy of a full grade mark on its own.

The second problem with Fox, however, comes when you do have to rely on him for any period of time. He can be fine, for weeks on end. A calm, lucid, not particularly noticeable, steady six (we only gave him more than that once all season) placeholder while you wait for the cavalry to return. When it goes though, boy does it go. His cliff edge is more severe than any player we’ve had here for a long time, and he heaves himself off the side of it like a drunk lemming far too often for you ever to feel totally at ease with him in the team. It’s like living on an oil rig. Everything’s fine until it’s not fine, and the moment it’s not fine it’s the farthest thing from fine. Except this one blows up four times a year. Morgan Fox doesn’t just have bad games, he has enormous explosions of piss and shit, spraying all around and coating anybody within range.

Against Portsmouth at home QPR had a good chance to stop the early season rot, get a much-needed win on the board, steady the ship. The visitors hadn’t won a game at all, and Rangers went 1-0 up early through Karamoko Dembele. Fox, admittedly rushed back from injury for the game and playing in an unfamiliar back three system Cifuentes had switched to that day, cost his team two goals and Rangers went dead last in the league. The combination of Fox and Paal on the left side of the defence for the Boxing Day massacre at Swansea had to be seen to be believed, a gap big enough to sail the Ark Royal through and still have space besides, and Fox was nearly as bad again for the return fixture at Loftus Road. His input into Millwall’s first minute opener at The Den was amateur hour. London derby, hostile crowd, keep it tight early lads, fuck me.

It's not saying much when the best-case scenario is he doesn’t go out there and unleash a faecal hurricane, but I don’t mind Fox as much as some. Depending on the cost I’d be tempted to do another year as jobbing cover, particularly if we’re going to bleed a lot of experience out of the squad this summer. That said, I also won’t be shedding many tears if we shake hands at this point.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.44

16 – Liam Morrison A/B

QPR’s recruitment this season left the team deficient in both full back positions, with a central midfield that refused to turn around, a collection of midgets who all want to play ‘ten’, and if not the four worst strikers in the league then pretty close to it. The team has no height, and no pace. Within that, however, there were individual success stories and along with Paul Nardi, Ronnie Edwards and Koki Saito you can surely include Liam Morrison’s name.

A Scot, signed from Bayern Munich B, via a loan spell with Wigan, he became something of a statistical freak in his first season in Hoops. Only Rayan Kolli has a better win percentage than Morrison’s 42.11% - the team wins about 30% of its matches overall this season, that goes up more than 10% when Morrison is one of its centre backs. He came on for the final nine minutes of the 2-0 loss at Leeds in October, not long enough to earn a mark, but apart from that remained unbeaten through ten appearances until he came on as a second half sub for the 1-0 loss at West Brom. Rangers didn’t lose a game Morrison started until Swansea on Easter Monday, his 19th appearance. Starting 13 games before suffering your first QPR defeat is the best record since Kyle Walker and Morrison finished the season with the best points per game average in the team.

This is that beautiful example of a player who passes both the eye and the numbers test. Looks a really good player as well. Schooled a bit in the Burnley game, like everybody else, but so far looks a proper defender, who likes defending, but can also play the sort of difficult, risky ball forward we desperately need – particularly with Jake Clarke-Salter having one of his sabbatical years. His performances alongside Steve Cook in a deep, low block while surrendering possession were key to the autumn turnaround – four clean sheets in a row for Morrison against Cardiff, Watford, Norwich and Oxford at the start of December. We had him as star man in a rearguard action at Bristol City, where Paul Smyth’s freaky goal earned a point that was tantamount to a robbery.

QPR conceded somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 goals a game on average last season. With Morrison on the field that drops dramatically to 0.71. The team kept just ten clean sheets all season, but eight of those were when Morrison played even though he only started 16 games and had five sub appearances. We only conceded 15 goals with him on the field, and five of those came in the one game against Burnley which really rather spoiled a remarkable set of numbers for the former Celtic centre back. Should pose more of a goal threat from set plays at the other end, a glaring miss at Watford cost us two points, but his 6.26 average mark from this site is the highest in the squad this year - 0.2 more than even Handsome Ronnie Edwards. Watching the two of them pair together at centre half was a rare highlight through the drag of the home straight.

Availability is an issue, hence no outright A grade. The last thing QPR needs right now is another fragile centre back. The begrudging announcement about Steve Cook triggering his contract extension, and his nasty foot injury, mean Morrison is likely to be a key figure in 2025/26 – less long-term replacement for Cook, more replacement for Cook right away. Morrison himself has had several injury problems this season, and struggled through the second half of his loan at Wigan as well.

A big summer coming up for him, and for us, but almost all of the signs are good at this point.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 6.39

17 – Ronnie Edwards A

Don’t fall in love with loan players, they told us. Then sent us one that looks like this. Fuck me. Anything else in the box, Pandora?

The quickfire medium term injuries to Steve Cook and Liam Morrison just as those two had formed a partnership and the team had started to keep clean sheets felt like a terrible body blow to the team’s fragile recovery leading into Christmas. I watched the Preston home game with the QPR NYC lot and when Cook collapsed to the floor as Osmajic opened the scoring remarks were made to the effect of ‘that’s the season done’. To go out immediately in the first week of January, no pissing about, and not only cover that issue but replace with somebody as good as this is certainly worthy of high praise. Credit where credit is due, this was an exceptional signing, and will go down in the pantheon of great QPR loans, perhaps only behind the likes of Kyle Walker and Mark Kennedy.

There was perhaps a little sliding doors moment at Millwall away. Jimmy Dunne was left out, seemingly Sheff Utd bound, and Edwards was picked at right back in his stead. Might that have been the plan had Dunne indeed departed that week? If it was, perhaps we wouldn’t be eulogising quite as much, because Rangers got run ragged down both flanks that day and it was Edwards’ worst performance in our colours. Back at centre back, the guy was an absolute dreamboat. Average rating second only to Liam Morrison. Man of the match in a quarter of the games he played. Win percentage a good 8% higher when he was in the team. Goals against Derby and Oxford, should really have been another against Plymouth.

This is a player not only too good for this team, and this league, but also the parent club he’s going back to. Southampton will almost inevitably beat this league up next season with another 98-point haul and immediate promotion. Edwards could slide into that team to replace whichever Taylor Harwood-Bellis type they get £20m for this summer with ease. Wouldn’t even need to change out of his club suit. Frankly, having watched him play this level for the last six months, that feels like a bit of a waste of his time. Feels like exactly the sort of signing Palace or Fulham make. Him and Marc Guehi as a centre back pairing? Christ I might start going to watch Palace myself. Welcome back to the Crystal Palace Patreon, thank you for your support…

Edwards won the club’s Young Player of the Year award, and had the season gone on another fortnight or so he would likely have won the main award too- he played the ninth most minutes in the team this year anyway despite only arriving in January. Cifuentes subbed him ten minutes from the end of the Burnley game, a 5-0 loss that would have been double figures without him, so he could receive a standing ovation from the home crowd, and they duly delivered. You don’t see love and adulation for loan players like this very often, but then we don’t loan in players as good as this much either.

All the defensive stuff was there, as you’d expect, but his ability on the ball was most eye catching. That glide out of defence with the ball at feet, past the initial press, taking a couple of opponents out of the game, repeatedly changed the whole dynamic of the pitch for the team. Only Ilias Chair carried the ball forwards a greater distance this season. This was most apparent in the Blackburn home game, where he was terrific, and man of the match by several streets. He did give the ball away doing it at Sunderland on the final day and to be honest I was pleased about that, I was starting to wonder if this was some sort of bionic boy they’d grown in a lab. Do you think we’ve gone too much on the cheekbones? Too much on the cheekbones?! My dear, is there such a thing?

Pressed into midfield action against Leeds, the division’s outstanding team and worthy champions, he was our best player there as well. I’ll just go play midfield today, don’t worry about it. Can you cook? Would you like to move in?

The only negative in the whole thing is this kid played non-league football eight miles away at non-league Barnet, got picked up by Peterborough where he played three times against us in 2020/21 as a teenager, scoring 7/10 in our match ratings in both league games. Peterborough, despite being the worst team in the league, beat us three times that year in league and cup, and yet never once did our recruitment operation look at that and ask ‘who’s that handsome bastard back there?’ Too busy watching Lugano highlights on bloody WyScout to see what was right under their nose. Edwards went and did another full year in League One before being picked up, now we’ve heard of him and we’re just grateful to beg a loan for a bit. There have been far, far, far too many of these Jack Rudoni, Jamal Lowe, Albert Adomah type stories of players existing right under our noses, available for a pittance, who we’ve only noticed later on once everybody else has heard of them.

Edwards, like Walker before him, looks a potential England footballer to me. Don’t be sad it’s over, be pleased it’s happened at all I guess, but I am hard, ugly crying that he’s leaving us.

We’re only giving three A grades this year, and he gets two of them.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 6.40

20 – Harrison Ashby D

Once it became clear what we’d got ourselves in Hevertton Santos it also became obvious that we’d be needing another right back double lively. Attempt number two saw us use that mate’s rate Newcastle deal we get every year through Amit’s friendship with Jamie Reuben on Harrison Ashby rather than Isaac Hayden as had been originally planned.

I’ll declare my prejudice upfront – I hate players like this. Or, rather, I hate the way this sport produces players like this. Harrison Ashby was signed by West Ham at the age of nine, and even before that had been on the books at Chelsea. He will have had his education substantially disrupted by travel, training and matches by a club that will have chucked money and platitudes at him with very little intention of ever actually using him in a match – lo, he made four starts and three sub appearances for West Ham. He was then bought, presumably on little more than vibes, for £3m by Newcastle, with all the signing on fee and wage increase that will have brought. God only knows what he’s on at St James’ Park, but two years after he went there he has made zero starts and zero sub appearances. Everything about him screams far more money than he could ever possibly know what to do with, and far too much time on his hands. Harrison Cashby. Jealous? You bet. Course I am, I’m sitting here writing this rubbish for a living. But even a season long loan at Swansea brought only 14 starts and two sub outings. Eventually you do plan to have football in your football career, right?

This is probably all ridiculously harsh. Like I say, I declare my prejudice against academy “ballers” up front. He seems well integrated and quite popular within our playing group, he’s very good and personable with the fans, probably a lovely lad. Unfortunately, his performances also too often smelt of somebody who’s been ponsing about on pristine academy pitches in games that don’t matter for too long. He’d only ever started 18 games of professional football before he got here and it showed – his brain frequently writing cheques his ability couldn’t cash. Leicester was the headline failure, when his ridiculous step over trick while last man cost QPR a goal just after they’d equalised and got back into the game, but there was a similar bit of cavalier charging off down the line punished by Watford at Loftus Road around the same time. Sent on at Hull for a bit of a run out while 2-0 up against one of the worst teams in the league, it was quickly 2-1 and Ashby’s performance so horrendous Cifuentes had to sub him back off again. He averaged the most tackles per 90 of any of our players but also registered the most errors leading to goals – a stat that definitely passes the eye test.

To recover from those Leicester and Hull blows in quick succession showed decent character from the lad. He’s also spent much of the season playing out of position at left back because of further recruitment failures on that side of the pitch as well. He’s quick, which not many of our players are, and gets him out of a lot of the trouble he puts himself in. But the air-headed nature of his play was perhaps best summed up in the final home match when, 4-0 down to Burnley with ten minutes left, he decided to start going round headbutting people and had to be subbed off before he got sent off.

He should be grateful to Cifuentes for rescuing him from himself that day because the subsequent performance at right wing at The Stadium of Light was easily his best of the season and featured a great assist for Nicolas Madsen’s winner. He also chipped the ball through for Zan Celar’s memorable second at Cardiff, and should have had another assist in the 0-0 at Watford but for lousy finishing. Perhaps with this pace, this brain, and this look it should have been obvious to use long before May – this is a winger. Too much of a defensive liability to play full back, push him up that line. He was excellent in the final game, borderline man of the match, but it was the only time all season we gave him more than a six.

Maybe that’s our fault, for misusing him. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.30

22 – Kenneth Paal C/D

For every Liam Morrison, Paul Nardi, Ronnie Edwards success story, there is at least one other example of this squad being put together in a way that has left it with a team physically and mentally unsuited to the division it plays in. Dave McIntyre, not somebody prone to hyperbole, recently described the squad as “complete crap” and “one of the worst QPR squads in our lifetime”.

The left back spot is a really good example of our incoherent, inconsistent recruitment and retainment. Although Mick Beale tried to claim credit with stories of how he’d breastfed the boy to the age of eight, Kenneth Paal was brought here initially as a development prospect favoured by our data and analytics operation headed up by head of recruitment Andy Belk. Paal had popped up frequently on the sort of recruitment documents and Twitter threads favoured by lads trying to make it in the sport for real as a trendy, underlapping, positive full back in the Dutch league. Quite nice to see us getting hold of somebody like that rather than them go elsewhere and, as we’ve always said with Paal, there is something to be said for somebody who consistently gives you 40 games a season at a steady 6/10 level so you don’t have to worry about him or his position. Sadly, though, he hasn’t developed, he’s pretty much the same player with the same strengths and weaknesses he had when he arrived and even if he was improving his contract is up anyway.

We spent the summer seemingly trying to offload him. Watford were heavily linked and Marti Cifuentes spoke openly in pre-season about the club not being in a position to have players hanging around in the last year of their contract. Gianluca Frabotta from Juventus was tipped as his replacement. Then Watford decided to loan Yasser Larouchi at left back, Frabotta went to West Brom (six substitute appearances and no starts suggests we may have had a lucky escape) and suddenly Paal was our starting left back for the season after all. Not only our starting left back, but our only left back. Ziyad Larkeche, who hadn’t been anything to write home about in 2023/24 but was decent cover on the bench, was loaned to Dundee. Vague Fans Forum suggestions Jack Colback could cover left back flawed by his frequent unavailability and not being a left back, Morgan Fox as another option too often required to cover for our collection of fragile centre backs and prone to colossal brain explosions when he does play.

So, you’ve gone from the guy being surplus to requirements, to being your only option in a key defensive position. That’s cackhanded decision making. I’m more of a Paal fan than a lot of people, but he’s played this season like his head and heart weren’t really in it – which if you’ve spent all summer being told you’re not wanted and now suddenly you’re playing 40 games through winter storms with a contract shortly to expire I guess yours wouldn’t really be either. The usual consistent level of somewhere between 6 and 7 each week has dropped to mostly 5s this year – 5.17 average.

He hasn’t been helped by another incredibly naïve bit of our recruitment strategy – the addition of Karamoko Dembele and Koki Saito to a team already swimming in players who want to play ‘ten’ and midgets under 5ft 5ins tall. Christian Nourry told fan sites after the fans forum he “wanted some players who were fun for the fans”, but even Sheff Utd rarely pick Gus Hamer and Callum O’Hare, two of the division’s best players, together at the same time because you cannot be that physically small as a team in this division. The much-criticised Smyth gets in the team because he’s the only one of our Oompa Loompas that can get back and defend. Paal has frequently been left exposed by the winger in front of him, never more so than in the final home game against Burnley where the combination of him and Dembele down the left was chop night at the butcher’s shop out there all afternoon – an absolute carve up. Still, you do have to take some personal responsibility, and he’s too ready to stand off wingers and let them cross for my liking.

There was a fairly vintage Paal goal arriving late in the box at Hull, and four assists including a nice delivery for the own goal at Norwich, and a peach of a cross for Rayan Kolli’s fabulous diving header at the Loft End against the same opposition. But his delivery from dead balls is unfortunately too poor, too often. If I had a quid for every time he’s hit the defender at the near post this season I could pay for a new left back myself. This came to a head in the away game at Coventry where Rangers had four corners in succession in injury time to try and win the game, butchered all of them, and Coventry then broke away and won the game themselves with their own set piece in the final seconds.

It seems likely that’s it for his three-year QPR career in which you could never accuse him of hiding, letting anybody down, or being unavailable – 130 appearances in three seasons is a terrific attendance record - but equally a bit underwhelming, forgettable, mediocre. Like this decade’s Ian Barraclough.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.55

23 – Hevertton Santos E

Having bashed the club’s recruitment and retainment throughout this piece, it may seem contrary to then defend it while talking about arguably the worst signing of the lot, but here we go anyway.

This is going to happen. They reckon only something like one in three or four signings work out successfully anyway, and when you’re working on a challenging budget and trying to pick up data-driven prospects on free transfers from round Europe you are, to a certain extent, going to have to kiss a few frogs. Santos had, by all accounts, impressed in Portugal previously, and having returned there on loan in January had a decent second half of the season including Europa Conference League football with Vitoria.

There was a brief sign, in the home cup tie against Luton where he combined his first and likely only goal for the club with a good showing up and down the right side and a goal saving tackle at the back post, that there might be something there. His performance in the previous round at Cambridge, unfortunately right in front of the away end where we watched with some alarm as Jimmy Dunne basically had to do the work of two men down that side while trying to drive Santos around like a remote-control car, was a real eye opener for both him and us. That night he looked like he’d won his place in the game in a giveaway from the matchday programme.

Didn’t settle, didn’t integrate, wasn’t happy, like I say, it happens. He was a free transfer, and there’s a suggestion we may get some money for him if he returns to Portugal this summer – though the celebrated €1.7m figure touted as the signing option on his loan is, to the surprise of nobody with half a brain, not being taken up. SHOCK.

What was a shame was the way things transpired against Middlesbrough at home. The club clearly knew they’d erred with the signing long before that game. Cifuentes was already making comments about having to play Santos right wing and the club needing to get their finger out on recruitment as far back as Reading away in pre-season. They’d already pivoted out of the Hayden deal to bring in Harrison Ashby instead so they knew Santos was probably dead on arrival. To then pick the guy out of position left back, against Ben Doak, was needlessly cruel. Rangers actually, somehow, got away with being torn to pieces down that side for half an hour with the score still 0-0. Get him off. Get him out of there. Get him some help. Do something. Don’t just leave it be. Another ten minutes later and it was 2-0, game over, and he looked absolutely destitute. We didn’t criticise Marti Cifuentes often, but that was either tactical numbskullery, or childishly trying to make a point to Christian Nourry et al about the team they’d furnished him with. Either way, not fair on the player, and not fair on those of us who had to sit through the resulting 4-1 slaughter – a game that’ll forever be mentioned in the pantheon of worst ever on our once proud home ground.

I don’t mind us taking these sorts of punts. They’re not all going to work. But I do think a lesson from this signing, and several others we’ll come onto in later write ups, is the importance of physicality at this level. Not just pace, height, strength, but also durability, three game weeks, 40-game seasons. Getting through 25 weekly games in the Portuguese league is very different to doing 40 matches through an English winter, often in bursts of three three-game weeks, and we appeared to completely ignore that when we went shopping last summer.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 4.86

Others >>> Ziyad Larkeche made 31 appearances for Dundee (29 starts and two sub apps) either side of a winter hamstring injury which robbed him of three months’ football on his loan spell. The reports seem positive, with their message board comparing him favourably with previous loanee Owen Beck, who QPR were in for last summer before he moved to Blackburn instead.

Esquerdinha arrived in January as a development squad signing and was key to their impressive Premier League Cup success. Perhaps on, or both, of he and Larkeche hold the key to that troublesome left back spot next season.

Links >>> Keepers >>> Defenders >>> Midfield >>> Attack

If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via PayPal

Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

cyprusmel added 12:27 - May 20 Ronnie Edwards like Jimmy Dunne is one you would be proud of to call your own, he knew it was unlikely he would be here next year but still gave us everything, body on the line full blooded tackles when he could have been thinking about next season. I agree with you Clive this young man must eventually play for England.
2

Jevlar added 13:37 - May 20 Enjoyed the pod immensely. Length perfect for my 1hr 15 drive. One note - Clive's comment about Jimmy Dunne - no interview for the POTY etc or a 'thanks and farewell' The level of contempt the club seem to be treating us loyal fans with their communication policy - just p*sses me off. My old man (I'm mid 40s) loves going to the games, if I didn't sit with him, I'd have cancelled my ST in protest. Just got to suck it up,

3

timcocking added 22:26 - May 20 ‘Morgan Fox doesn’t just have bad games, he has massive explosions of piss and shit, spraying all around, and coating anybody within range.’ Laughing my proverbial arse off.
1

CamberleyR added 12:42 - May 21 "We’ve seen Dave Thomas’ dog on the pitch more than Clarke-Salter this season" Nearly spat my coffee out.
0

Blogs 31 bloggers

Derby County Polls