QPR went to crisis club Sheff Wed on Saturday and, for the first half at least, were very QPR indeed, before a second half rally rescued a point.

Saturday’s trip to the beleaguered blue side of Sheffield provided Queens Park Rangers with a chance to engage in two of their favourite pastimes: charitable donations to needy causes, and making Barry Bannan look like Ares, Greek God of war and courage, son of Zeus and one of the 12 original Olympians.

The Owls are football’s crisis club of the moment. Lisa Nandy says she's intervening any moment now. But this is a a financial meltdown, precipitated by the ego and mismanagement of one lunatic owner, that has coming from the moment they overspent trying to reach the Premier League and lost a play-off final to Hull even the Tigers didn’t want to win back in 2016. It's in full, ruinous, swing now, but this has been on the cards for years. Years.

Manager Danny Rohl and 14 first team players departed this summer, several of them able to walk away for free after wages went unpaid. The club is currently under five separate transfer embargoes (five transfer embargoes, Jeremy) and will almost certainly make that a dirty half dozen this week when September’s payroll becomes due. If an £8m loan secured against the stadium - one of several Chansiri has taken out with the club as security to prop up his collapsing business empire - is called in at the end of the month it might finally be end game for the man who once delayed this fixture for five minutes and made everybody stand and listen to the “royal anthem of Thailand” before kick off because the Thai king had died.

In the meantime, fans protest. Still 20,000 willing to come through the gates, but most voicing their displeasure and wearing orange and gold scarves. One of those was also wrapped around the neck of the club’s official mascot – a man in a large owl costume with giant football boots. ‘Barney’, it turns out, has the keys to his social media account and used it to put out an official statement after the game far more eloquent than anything Chansiri has ever managed during his years of disturbing rambles and outbursts that would have had any normal person, in any standard walk of life, taken into care by a man in a white coat clutching a large butterfly net.

Barney the Owl says it’s difficult watching people he’s roosted alongside for 20 years “demoralised by silence”. “Like many others, I believe a change in ownership is the only way to safeguard the long-term future of the club — and the immediate short-term stability of the staff who work here,” he/she/it said. And if you think it’s a bit weird for a giant cartoon owl to be issuing official statements demanding regime change, well, this isn’t a normal football club, and it's not a normal situation.

With what is left, firefighter Henrik Pedersen’s team came into this without a home win in the league. Wednesday were pretty lousy at Hillsborough even before the club collapsed – just six home victories last year despite finishing 12th, only Hull won fewer on their own patch and all three relegated teams managed more – and had yet to even score a Championship goal here in comfortable defeats to nil against Stoke, Swansea and Bristol City.

QPR, on the other hand, arrived in South Yorkshire in good form, high on confidence, with three straight wins under their belt, and an unchanged team for three games in a row (something they were unable to do once last season). Rangers won four league games in a row in January, but those matches sandwiched a damaging FA Cup loss at Leicester. The last time they won four in a row uninterrupted was the lockdown season 2020/21 against Watford, Blackburn, Brentford and Bournemouth, and the last time they did it in front of crowds was Neil Warnock’s promotion winners of 2010/11.

What an opportunity for the Londoners here then, and when Rumarn Burrell planted an early header towards the goal at the Alfie Lloyd end of Hillsborough and forced an unorthodox save from Cardiff’s fourth choice keeper Ethan Horvath – loaned in to cover injured Pierce Charles – it looked like Julien Stéphan's men were in the mood to press home their advantage.

QPR hadn’t beaten Wednesday for two seasons prior to this and, as we know, can come over very charitable indeed in such circumstances. That early purpose and poise was not sustained. Bailey Cadamarteri fired a warning cross shot through the six yard box after seven minutes and QPR didn’t heed that advance. With every minute of the first half thereafter their performance declined, and Wednesday grew in confidence and dominance. QPR, shitty in pink.

Tough tackling Danish midfielder Nicolas Madsen had to sweep in and rescue Amadou Mbengue from his latest brain fartnado. Liam Morrison was booked for a silly foul and then deflected the resulting free kick just wide of his own near post. It took 27 minutes for Rangers to pass the ball properly – Mbengue getting his team on the front foot, Harvey Vale feeding Burrell through the middle, the Jamaican seeing a shot deflected to rather than away from Horvath – but that improvement was fleeting. Two minutes later Rangers fell behind.

The free kick that led to the opening goal was a nonsense. For the second week in a row QPR suffered a Premier League referee who’d spent August on VAR duty and was now being sent to slum it in the Championship to get his eye back in. John Brooks, who has refereed games between these two sides three times previously, was a suffocating presence on an already low quality game that needed all the help it could get. Absolutely every single little piece of contact was immediately whistled for to the point the ball was out of play more than it was in. Leave it alone, LEAVE IT ALONE, LEAVE IT.

But you can’t be talking about referees when a standard delivery from wide sends your goalkeeper flying through the air like an intoxicated Superman tribute act, missing the ball entirely, and presenting Dominic Iorfa (not to be confused with his father of the same name, who spent two very happy years at QPR in the early 90s, much of it offside) with an open goal from six yards out. Wednesday’s first league goal of the season at Hillsborough in this their fourth home game. QPR doing the most QPR thing of all. C’etait une catastrophe.

Fiddling around with the goalkeeping position has not been one of the early success stories of the Stéphan era at Loftus Road. Whoever’s decision it was, and however it was reached, it initially dropped Joe Walsh, a man with two league starts in his whole life, into the deep end of the Championship without swimming lessons. After he suffered a broken wrist the club has now had to turn back to Paul Nardi, who returned from his summer break to find he was no longer wanted and free to find another club. Ben Hamer, a 37-year-old part of Sheff Wed’s summer exodus and a keeper who hasn’t played a minute at this level in nearly two years, has been shuffled in on an emergency short term deal.

The club’s recruitment and retainment this summer was a vast improvement on last, and showed important lessons learned from a year ago, but between the sticks things have quickly become messy. Nardi, like Walsh before him, looks all over the place. We’ve previously said you’d have to light that guy on fire to get him to come off his line for anything, and perhaps here we saw why. Within two minutes he was scuffing a nonsense Lumley-like clearance straight back to Wednesday in a lethal area with QPR as wide open as a fat whore’s bone hole. They got Man Utd loanee Harry Amass in on an hefty overlap for a low shot and, although Nardi saved with his feet, he didn’t look overly happy doing it. What’s the biggest room in Paul’s house? The room for improvement.

The simple, obvious, perhaps lazy, explanation for this is QPR had taken the task lightly. Sheff Wed circling the drain, protests all over the gaff, barely able to field a team, five separate transfer embargoes (Jeremy, etc). Rangers with three wins on the spin, strikers in form, confidence, depth on the bench, upwardly mobile. Turn up and win.

When Barry Bannan, all five feet of him, was able to beat first Richard Kone and then Rumarn Burrell to loose balls weighted 60/40 in QPR’s favour it had the Marge Simpson noises rolling down from the away end. Cadamarteri headed the resulting chance over at the far post, which is just as well because that would not have looked good at all on a highlights package. You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to commit. You’ve got to compete. We’re not good enough to phone things in and expect results to present themselves.

Kone and Burrell have been the big plus points of QPR’s recovery since the Coventry debacle, but were arguably our most ineffective players here. These things are nuanced, right? Very easy to say QPR’s attitude was wrong, as Portsmouth had stood accused in their defeat to this opponent a week ago, but this is a new-look team with a lot of signings still settling down with a new manager. Kone and Burrell are playing their first ever seasons at this level. The team has completely changed styles between games three and four. There’s going to be inconsistency.

And credit the opposition. Henrik Pedersen has taken on a thankless task here and is attacking it with great gusto. He’s found two local teenagers disguised as First World War veterans – Ernie Weaver and George Brown – who are playing with real freedom with their free hit. Pedersen had obviously seen tape. Saito was nullified. They defended Burrell very deep, denying him the space behind to run into, unlike Charlton, Stoke and particularly Wrexham. It neutered his pace well. Clever tactics. It actually reminded me a bit of the two 2023/24 games against the Owls where Marti Cifuentes tried twice to attack them with the pace of Sinclair Armstrong and Danny Rohl’s side twice stood with a hand on his forehead and let the Irish striker punch himself out. QPR have really struggled with this fixture in recent times, and that didn’t change here.

Kone, meanwhile, just looked off it. Not helped by the pernickety referee who penalised him every time he went near the ball, but also guilty of sticking the best chance of the game over the bar in the second half. Perhaps the decision to keep the same team for three games in a row, rather than freshen things up, wasn’t the right call after all. Easy stuff with hindsight. Beaten to two headers in quick succession in first half injury time, limp and listless Rangers were this time grateful to Nardi for some form of redemption with a one-handed camera save to keep out Palmer’s powerful attempt to double the host’s lead. Cadamarteri headed the resulting corner over when he should have done better and Rangers were grateful to hear the half time whistle. Double wank and shit chips. 95 degrees of poor.

One thing I really do like among my early impressions of Stéphan is he’s not one to piss about. If something isn’t working it gets changed double lively.

The manner of the defeat at Coventry probably forced his hand in a way a 3-1 or even 4-1 wouldn’t have done, but it still takes some stones to turn around three games into a season and tear up the game model that had been worked on all summer in the way he clearly has. Some might have been tempted to “give it more time to bed in” – remember last season QPR persisted with something that clearly wasn’t working deep into October by which time they were 13 without win and two victories in 17 games. Likewise, here, many managers would have given it ten minutes of the second half before making changes. Graham Taylor: “You got us into this mess, you get us out of it”. More often than not I feel like that just burns off another ten minutes you don’t really have, and QPR’s new French head coach seems to agree. The first half loitered somewhere between piss poor and abject, and certainly wasn’t good enough. Stéphan knew it, and wasted no time. Three substitutions immediately. Good on you mate, exactly what I would have done, exactly what I wanted to see standing behind the goal. I can feel that word ‘standards’ wanting to go down on my pad again.

The substitutes – certainly Hayden for Varane and Frey for Burrell – didn’t make much impact individually. In fact, Frey looked fairly bloody awful, creaking around like somebody on daytime TV offering me a free Parker pen if I take out this over-50’s life insurance policy. But the message it sent was strong, and the response it wrought was immediate.

QPR were level within three minutes. A corner to the back post headed down and fairly obviously handled on its way to goal by an upwardly outstretched arm. QPR have a 3-2-2 record with this referee, and all three of the wins have come against Sheff Wed. Nicolas Madsen divides opinion, but man that lad can take penalties, and this one was surely dispatched straight into the top corner.

(Pedantry was the theme of the refereeing, and I’ve learnt a new rule this weekend. No attacking player can be ahead of the ball when the penalty is struck. Karamoko Dembele and Koki Saito both stationed themselves wide of the penalty box and barely level with the ball before it was kicked. Referee Brooks warned them both. Dembele, on the still images, is ahead of the ball when it was hit, so it should have been… a retake. Sometimes we do come over a bit clever for our own good.)

Seconds later the third and best of the subs, Karamoko Dembele, was waltzing round Horvath in the penalty box and the keeper was lucky to recover. Even luckier still when Dembele’s fierce effort off a short corner flashed an inch wide of the bottom corner. Koki Saito, another who Wednesday had clearly done homework on and marshelled well, got away for this first and last time in the game, tiptoeing through the tulips of the Sheff Wed penalty box before horribly skewing his shot when it seemed the hard work had been done. With Wednesday appealing for play to be stopped, QPR counter attacked brilliantly through Norrington-Davies sparking a penalty box scramble in which the ball broke loose to Kone. It was the man you wanted on the end of the chance, and I was surprised it ended up in the upper tier of the away end.

Better though. Much better. And credit the manager for grabbing the thing by the bollocks at half time.

Sadly, the visitors had left themselves too much to do. The promising start faded. Chances dried up. Players tired. And a game already painfully short on quality descended still further into a sludgy, Championship swamp. Referee Brooks, again, did not help. The commander in queef awarded so many free kicks, for so little, so often, he seemed to lose complete track of what he was doing or what was going on around him. Twice Sheffield Wednesday found themselves on promising counter attacks with men up in support only to be brought back for free kicks in back play and neutral areas that they didn’t want. Somebody needed to take the fucking whistle off him for five minutes – extra points for jamming it up his arse. Just… stop… whistling… for… everything… all of the time. You never know, a football match might break out. Just… Leave it alone. LEAVE IT ALONE. Absolute danger.

Barry Bannon saw yellow for a bad foul on Norrington-Davies. Then, of course, when he committed another foul which, by all the standards of everything else that happened in this game was another yellow, the official came over all lenient and let him off with a warning. He then immediately returned to penalising everybody, for everything, all the time. Insufferable. Who is it that is overseeing and mandating refereeing like this? Into the sea with them.

Again, though, let’s credit the opponent here, and particularly Bannan. I’ve rarely seen a performance like this at this level. Not so much a one-man team, as a one-man club. Atlas, carrying the world around on his shoulders. No contract, hasn’t been paid, could have walked away as others have done, could have gone to much fancied Millwall in the summer, 35-years-old, team disintegrating around him, club collapsing... and he just carries on and on and on as if nothing is happening. He was man of the match here by a thousand country miles and more. I was actually in awe watching him. I think of the great individual performances against QPR in my time and I think of Arsenal’s Dennis Bergkamp, Man City’s Yaya Toure or Sergio Aguero. On our side, Les Ferdinand up at Newcastle, Kevin Keegan in a loud suit shaking his head on Match of the Day and muttering “won every header, he won every header”. In a game this lousy, this was obviously nowhere near those levels, but for influence on a game and a team you won’t see something like this very often.

Madsen or Varane would try and through ball between the lines in the left channel, and Bannan would enter stage right to slide in an intercept. Two passes later, Wednesday would be away down the opposite side of the pitch, and it would be Bannan in possession dictating it. He read every pass, played every ball, he was everywhere. I had to keep double checking to make sure there wasn’t more than one of him. Five successful tackles and interceptions (more than anyone else on the pitch), six key passes (next best total is two), 12 crosses (next best total on either side is three), 48 passes (only Mbengue and Lowe with more) at 83% accuracy. He seemed to play a hybrid defensive midfielder/sweeper/third centre back role without the ball while also being Sheff Wed’s playmaker, attacking midfielder, chief provider, and goal threat. This guy hasn’t had a Scotland cap since 2017. I don’t watch a lot of Scotland, but really? Sometimes you just have to take your hat off, stand, and applaud. Fair fucking play mate. Hurry up and retire.

Jimmy Dunne, out of sorts and often exposed, saved his best contribution for stoppage time. A vast, sweeping ball from right to left, which took the whole Wednesday defence out of play and presented Karamoko Dembele with a chance to run clear on the goal. The ball hit him in the face, knocking him to the ground, and drifted out for a goal kick. It rather summed up the non-Bannan elements of a game destined for a draw long before the end and which even those present will struggle to remember beyond the end of the week.

If that week includes positive results against Oxford and Bristol City for QPR then this will look like a good point. If not, then you’re left asking how and why we can look like that at Stoke and Wrexham, and then like this a week later.

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

Sheff Wed: Horvath 6; Iorfa 6, Weaver 7 (Otegbayo 77, 6), Lowe 6; Palmer 6, Valery 6, Bannan 8, Ingelsson 6, Amass 7; Cadamarteri 5 (Lowe 86, -), Brown 7 (Igbo 77, 5)

Subs not used: Alao, Emery, Fusire, McNeill, Stretch, Thornton

Goals: Iorfa 30 (assisted Bannan)

Yellow Cards: Bannan 54 (foul), Ingelsson 86 (repetitive fouling)

QPR: Nardi 4; Dunne 5, Morrison 5, Mbengue 6 (Cook 87, -), Norrington-Davies 6; Vale 5 (Dembele 46, 6), Varane 5 (Hayden 46, 6), Madsen 6, Saito 5; Kone 5 (Smyth 74, 5), Burrell 5 (Frey 46, 5)

Subs not used: Field, Hamer, Esquerdinha, Morgan

Goals: Madsen 48 (penalty, handball)

Yellow Cards: Morrison 23 (foul), Dembele 88 (foul)

QPR Star Man – Rhys Norrington-Davies 6 Steady. Star man with a six says a lot about how this went. Probably would have given it to Dembele without that injury time howler.

Referee – John Brooks (Leicestershire) 5 A referee from the Premier League, where absolutely every tiny, little piece of contact is a free kick every single time it happens without exception, understanding, context or nuance.

Attendance – 20,132 (1,495 QPR) An afternoon of protests inside and outside a decaying stadium, and perhaps with another payroll due next week and a loan set to be called in against the stadium we are finally reaching end game with Derek Chansiri’s malignant ownership of this club. Still, you can’t help but think 20,000+ people still being willing to turn up here and pay some of the division’s highest ticket prices is only prolonging their own agony. Difficult to abandon your own club and not attend games when that’s all you’ve known, but as Blackpool showed previously sometimes that is the only way to properly starve these chancers out.

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nick_hammersmith added 13:15 - Sep 29 I'm getting fed up of Bannon being portrayed as some sort of her at Wednesday. 100% guaranteed the only reason he didn't leave in the summer to someone like Millwall is that the club owe him money in either wages or bonuses that he is not prepared to walk away from. Hero my arse
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PastCaringNW2 added 08:38 - Sep 30 Great report, given that both teams seemed to have started off pretty happy with the idea of ending the game 1-1 and conspired to make it so. The Bannan section is spot-on. There are two oppo outfield performances I witnessed that I would like to stand next to Bannan's. Both are from what is for most people of a certain age going to be their least favourite period of watching the Rs, There were brief ten game stretches of very decent performances from what was in essence a group of broken toys that no one else would give house room to (autumn of 99 and spring of 00 spring to mind) but overall we were witnessing the kind of grim that makes more recent humiliations seem over-flowing with good omens. If you can watch a football club embarrass itself through both laced fingers and gritted teeth then that pretty much sums up how those years felt. By the time we got to the Stockport humiliation I just wanted all concerned to be put out of their misery, myself included. Anyway ..... the clear winner for me by a country mile is Lomana Lua Lua's cup hat trick for Colchester in 2000. The problem with that performance is that there were hardly any of us there to actually witness it. If it wasn't the lowest home turn-out for a competitive game in the modern era then it must be down there. I also remember a game from the spring of 1999 when Bradford City came to Loftus Road and won 3-1. Stuart McCall ran that game, in true Barry B fashion, without either breaking into more than a trot or, as it seemed at the time, without actually ever leaving the centre circle. Never laid a glove on him.

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