Into the Lions’ Den — Preview Wednesday, 14th Sep 2022 10:01 by Clive Whittingham QPR get a belated chance to right the wrongs of their loss at Swansea tonight with another tough away trip to Millwall — oh how they could have done with that home game against struggling Huddersfield in between. Millwall (3-1-4 WDLLLW 14th) v QPR (3-2-3 DLDWWL 9th)Lancashire and District Senior League >>> Wednesday September 14, 2022 >>> Kick off 19.45 >>> Weather — Rain overnight clearing to leave a dry night in the cage >>> The Den, Zampa Road, London SE16 There’s a famous Mitchell and Webb sketch, filmed at Loftus Road, mocking the ceaseless relentlessness of The Football and its coverage. “Every football team will be playing football several times and in various combinations. You can catch all of that football here where we’ll be showing all of the football all of the time. Watch all of the constantly happening football here. It’s all here and it’s all football all the time. It is impossible to keep track of all the constantly happening football, but your best chance is here. Thousands and thousands of hours of football each more climactic than the last. Constant, dizzying, year-long, endless football, every kick of it massively mattering to someone, somewhere, presumably. Watch it all here, all the time, forever, it will never stop.” Until it did. And I guess as reasons go the death of the country’s longest serving monarch, somebody who has been on the throne for 30% of the time the United States has existed as a country, is a pretty good one. Certainly makes a poxy home game with Huddersfield Town pale into something approaching insignificance. Except that, almost as soon as the decision was made to wipe the weekend’s football calendar, right down to U8s and beyond, it felt like the wrong call. The sort of wrong call football makes all too often through a mixture of terror at being seen to do the wrong thing and take another public flogging with Dacre splashing it all over the front of the Daily Heil, and its rush to embrace empty gestures. As deaths go, living until you’re 96, a life more wonderful and lavish than the rest of the entire world could dream of, and dying peacefully in your castle surrounded by family sounds about the best death you can have to me. Particularly with the potential loneliness after the loss of a dearly beloved partner a year prior, and the brutal experience of that Covid funeral with the world watching. We’ve all got to go sometime, I’d take that innings on that wicket if offered. It felt like a life worth celebrating, not mourning. It was ridiculous anyway that all other sports went ahead as planned, including an England cricket test, but when you then saw how the crowds at those events reacted and were able to come together and pay respects it felt like football had missed the point entirely. That they doubled down on the decision and forced all youth football and Sunday Leagues to cancel as well, and are now pursuing amateur teams like Sheffield International who dared to meet up and get a friendly game in anyway, a “disrespectful and despicable” act according to the local FA which is now pursuing the club in “the strongest possible terms”, only exacerbates the original error of judgement. What are we doing here? Of all the things, good and bad, you could say about the Queen, she did always seem to be a “show must go on” sort in times of crisis and grief. Cancelling all the fun stuff, but you still have to go to work? Very Britain 2022, but not very fitting of her attitude from what little I know about it. The sport’s reasoning/excuse, briefed to friendly journos, is it “only had an hour to decide” after a meeting with government on Friday where they were told there was no problem with going ahead. Rugby, cricket etc had that same hour, and came up with a much better plan, and let’s be honest here that’s a crock of shit anyway. At 96, the Queen passing was not an unforeseen event. Operation ‘London Bridge is down’ has been in place, rehearsed, planned for literally decades. There’s been a widely shared Guardian Long Read on how the whole thing would pan out online for the last four years. I work in a publishing and events business of 30 people, and we had a plan for this. It’s inconceivable to me that nobody at the FA, Premier League or EFL had ever thought to sit down and map out ‘if it happens on a Monday this happens… if it happens on a Tuesday… if it happens Saturday at 3pm…’. You’re just not running your organisation or competition professionally if that genuinely wasn't the case. I saw a suggestion on Twitter that football, and everything else, was called off for two weeks after the death of Princess Diana, and therefore would be again. Not true. Diana died in the early hours of Sunday, August 31, 1997. You, I, both regular readers, were on a packed terrace at Elm Park on the Tuesday night to see John ‘I’m the fucking man’ Spencer and Mike Sheron (went down as an own goal but let’s fucking give him it because he didn’t have much go his way in our colours) score in a 2-1 win at Reading. Well, I guess the Royals were in mourning (sorry). After the 9/11 terror attacks, with the country on a state of alert whatever the hotter version of red is/was, within four days QPR were beating Port Vale 4-1 at Loftus Road with an Andy Thomson hat trick. Two years later, when that attack contributed to the planned invasion of Iraq, 1m people took to the streets of London in the biggest protest march of its kind on record — QPR played the same afternoon, and beat Port Vale again, 4-0 this time. Fuck me, we’ve actually got quite a good record. We’ve finally found something QPR are good at — winning in times of national grief. By cancelling this time football has not only missed its chance to be part of the respect paying at the weekend, showed how out of touch the people running the sport are with the people who watch it and play it, highlight again how abysmally the sport in this country is run, but also given themselves a huge logistical problem. In a season already missing a month for a World Cup, losing a whole weekend like that unnecessarily was daft. Worse still, with the funeral scheduled for this weekend and the majority of the world’s leaders all coming to the same 50 square mile space in our country at the same time, there’s a police operation swinging into gear the likes of which the UK has rarely seen — and it’s coming at a time when the force is already chronically understaffed, underfunded, under pressure and unloved after years of cuts and criticism. You could have had Chelsea v Liverpool, Arsenal v PSV, Man Utd Leeds, last weekend, if you’d wanted to. You can’t have it this weekend, because there are no resources to police it. In the latest instalment of ‘football without fans is nothing’ Rangers had their game with Napoli moved back 24 hours and the away fans banned, which for “competitive fairness” means the Rangers fans, in a first Champions League campaign for a decade, now can’t go to the away game. Such a mess, so many knots to tie yourself into in such a short period of time for so little reason. Failure to prepare, preparing to fail. Given Huddersfield’s start to the season, another defeat last night at home to lowly Wigan, QPR couldn’t really have asked for a better fixture to recover from the lacklustre showing at Swansea. Stop press - the Terriers have just binned their manager too. Instead, now, it’s a trip to Millwall, which we never really enjoy on or off the field. Still, let me take you back a year, because here’s an interesting experiment in expectation, narrative and perception. Eight league games into last season, how do you remember we were doing, how do you recall feeling, what were your opinions of the team and the players and the strikers and the manager? How did you think the season would go at that point? Hold that thought. Eight league games into this season, as we are now, how do you think we are doing, how are we feeling, what are your opinions of the team and the players and the strikers and the manager? How do you think the season will go at this point? I suspect your recollections are similar to mine — of scorching wins at Boro and Hull, of last minute equaliser’s at Reading, and Yoann Barbet’s 40 yarder v Coventry. Of getting bullied out of a game at Bournemouth but, all benevolent with plastic pints from the seaside, packing the side stand and singing “2-1 down, who gives a fuck, we’re QPR and we’re going up”. I suspect your feelings towards this season might be similar to my own. That the team is short. That we spent so much on last season that there’s now no FFP room to do much needed surgery on a team that doesn’t have good enough midfielders or strikers. That we’re conceding too many. That we’ve already lost to nil against, really, pretty piss poor Blackpool, Swansea and Blackburn sides. That it’s a long hard winter ahead. Well watch this card trick. This time last year we were eight games in, we’d won three, drawn three including a couple of very late comebacks against Barnsley and Reading teams that would end up in the bottom four, and lost two that was about to become three when a rank performance at West Brom made it three losses in a week against them, Bournemouth and Bristol City. We’re here today with three league wins including another 3-2 against Middlesbrough, two draws including another unlikely late comeback to 2-2 against a team recently promoted from League One, and three defeats — 12 points versus 10. Win today against Millwall, we’re tracking ahead of last year. Supplementary point, this also highlights a thing I go on a lot about on here. Clubs, teams, managers, chairmen, directors of football… may not value the cup competitions, may see them as a distraction, may worry about burdens on squads, but compare the mood last year when exactly the same set of results was combined with a penalty shoot-out win at Orient, a victory over Oxford and then punting Premier League Everton out of the League Cup versus now and our limp dick nonsense at Charlton. Mind you, given the sport’s bad miscalculation at the weekend, and the World Cup break still to come, I suspect the Championship is collectively pretty glad it ditched out of that comp en masse at the first possible opportunity. Links >>> Barker and Wegerle on target — History >>> Below par Wawll — Interview >>> Robinson in charge — Referee >>> Millwall official website >>> South London Press — Local Paper >>> News at Den — Blog >>> North Stand Banter — Forum >>> News Shopper — Local Paper Below the foldTeam News: There’s some slightly better news on the injury front for QPR. Tyler Roberts is supposedly fit again and will start up front here, though whether it’s with or instead of Lyndon Dykes remains to be seen. Luke Amos returned to training last week and may have some involvement here, and certainly against Stoke at the weekend. Jake Clarke-Salter will be ready to go on the other side of the forthcoming international break with his return to training pencilled in for the end of this week — he’s been missing since the opening day at Blackburn. It means Taylor Richards is the only ongoing miss from Mick Beale’s squad. Elsewhere: More odd goings on at Boro where the perennial millstone of being LFW’s tip for the title weighs as heavy as ever. Three nil down at half time against a fairly rancid Cardiff side last night, they eventually rallied to 3-2 which, given how the game at Loftus Road went in August, means they should probably work on convincing themselves they’re 3-0 down to start with. Watford also continue to stutter and splutter. Manager apologising to an away end klaxon for Rob Edwards last night following a 2-0 loss at Blackburn. Few surprises in a draw between Preston and Burnley other than the home team managing to score an actual goal, Sheffield Red Stripe’s 1-0 win at Swanselona, or Wigan Warriors’ 2-1 win at Huddersfield Giants, but I’d be lying if I said I saw Stoke’s 3-0 win at Hullspor coming and that doesn’t exactly bode well for our game against the Potters in W12 on Saturday. Six more games tonight including our own, led aesthetically by Norwich’s home game with the league’s top scorers Bristol City. Two teams tipped for relegation but so far fairing rather better than that, Rotherham and Reading, could easily put more points on the board with home games against Blackpool and Sunderland respectively. Coventry are raising eyebrows for altogether different reasons, without a win and desperate for points on a trip to Lutown. West Brom are drawing at home to Birmingham. Referee: From one of the division’s most highly rated officials apparently pushing for promotion, to one of its also rans, the only thing that has remained consistent about Tim Robinson is his propensity to penalise the attacking team at their corners. Referee. FormMillwall: It’s been a frustrating start for Gary Rowett’s team with three wins, a draw and five defeats in all comps - a League Cup exit at Cambridge and 1-0 home loss to Reading probably the worst of those results. However, when you consider the fixtures presented them with promotion favourites Sheff Utd (1st), Norwich (2nd) and Burnley (5th) among their opening away games it perhaps adds a little context. Two nil defeats in each of those three games extend a winless run away from home to 11 games going all the way back to a win at Reading on the first Saturday of March. It’s been a different story at The Den where they finished last season losing only one of their last 11 home games and have continued that this term with three wins from four games, including a 2-0 against Cardiff last time out and a recovery from 2-0 down to win 3-2 against Coventry. Five of the Lions’ eight league games so far have finished 2-0 one way or the other, and one of the other three was 2-0 to Swansea until the Welsh side conceded a remarkable two own goals in injury time to let the Londoners away with an unlikely point. That’s the only draw on the list so far for a team that That’s the only draw on the list so far from nine played for a team that tied more than anybody bar Preston in the Championship last season - 15 draws in total, including four 0-0s and nine 1-1s. QPR: Won three, drawn two, lost three for QPR so far with 12 scored and 11 conceded. They have scored three goals in each of their three wins, arguably against the teams you wouldn’t have fancied them to beat — Boro and Watford both 3-2 and Hull 3-1. They also have three 1-0 defeats to their name, again perhaps in the games you might have expected them to do better in — Blackburn, Blackpool and Swansea. The 1-0 loss in South Wales last week ended Chris Willock’s run of four goals from four starts. Despite that spate of 1-0 losses, only three teams have scored more than QPR’s 12 goals in the league so far, and nobody in the whole Football League has more than our six from outside the area, which means we’re anywhere from 18th to 23rd on the xG league tables depending on how they’re put together — generally only Huddersfield doing significantly worse. Six of Ilias Chair’s last eight goals have been from outside the box. Nahki Wells’ double that secured a 2-1 win for QPR in this fixture in 2019 is their only victory at The New Den since Millwall moved here in 1994 — P9 W1 D5 L3. They were beaten 2-0 here on their last visit in February with second half goals from Mason Bennett and Tyler Burey. We still await our first QPR clean sheet of the season. Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Let’s see what last year’s champion Cheesy thinks this week… “I was surprised how poor Field and Dickie were last weekend. Maybe they felt the pressure of the two signings made that week. I would expect both Iroegbunam and Balogun to start this weekend. The former in my eyes looks class. Who they replace is anyone's guess.” Cheesy’s Prediction: Millwall 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Chris Willock LFW’s Prediction: Millwall 2-0 QPR. No scorer. 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 — Action Images The Twitter @loftforwords Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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