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Reply | Transfer rumours 2024
at 09:47 19 May 2024
Yeah, it's pretty standard social media strategy. You get much better results by posting something small every 24-36 hours or so. |
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Reply | Players we should have got rid - way before we did
at 12:58 16 May 2024
Didn't someone at the club tell Clive that directly at one point - every time a new manager joined they'd see this brilliant Niko kid in training and wonder why the idiot before them never played him and then they'd try it and find out for themselves that he was crap? |
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Reply | Scottish Leagues
at 12:51 16 May 2024
If you think Scotland's bad, don't look into how Belgium does it... |
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Reply | Departures in the development squad
at 12:44 15 May 2024
Not really having a go at you but your post did make me think about development squads a bit so apologies for that!
I think it's honestly really difficult when you're talking about such young players and it's easy to accuse a club of getting it wrong when you have the benefit of knowing which ones didn't work out. To my view the club is getting it right by releasing them now at age 21 or so. The ones older than that are definitely where mistakes have been made - Hamalainen, Shodipo, Drewe, probably Duke-McKenna and Kelman as well - and we ought to avoid giving out such long contracts to such marginal players in the future, but the ones just released are a class or two behind those and it looks like they were basically signed up for long enough to see how they went and then were let go when it didn't work out. That feels about right - at 18 you're going to have a lot of lads who might come good or they might not; they have the ability but will they grow another 2 inches to have enough physicality, their work ethic is good but the raw talent just isn't there and they might overcome it or they might not, etc. etc. For fans wanting to see results it's easy to say X should have been binned off or Y was never going to be good enough but in reality you're talking about a couple of years from 18 to 20 or 21 where there's the biggest margin for error. We'd be equally upset if we were Millwall and let Eze go at 18 and then watched what he turned into later.
As has been repeatedly said elsewhere too, QPR aren't necessarily getting to bring through all their best youth players - by the time they get to 18 or 19 there's a good chance that the obvious best talents have been picked off by other, bigger academies in the area. If someone's good enough at 18 to be starting in a Championship first team they're probably not coming through our academy, they're on loan to us from a PL club. We're left with either the very rare ones that were desperate to stay at QPR or the ones that other clubs didn't think were worth paying compensation for and those are always going to be the bigger risks and you're going to end up releasing most of them. What we've arguably seen more success with recently isn't developing our own players from primary school age, it's bringing in young players from lower down the food chain, or picking up cast-offs from other academies - again Eze, but also BOS, Sincs, Paul Smyth, EDB, Larkeche, Chair. That's a lot of what the development squad is really for - your Deon Woodmans and Trent Rendalls make up the numbers in a team for your EDBs and Armstrongs and Kollis to play in. Since they're youth graduates coming through the academy rather than being picked up from the PL or from first teams in smaller leagues, you're probably paying them a lot less, and it's much easier to release them when they reach that critical point at age 21 or so (as long as you remember to actually release them, and don't QPR it and give them a new 4 year deal instead). Having the squad means you're not so reliant on sending players out on loan to develop them - you probably still want to do some of that so they get to play competitive men's football, but if you've got a player who's on the fringes of the first team squad that you want to actually play in the league, you need them to be available to do that, not spending the season at Stevenage.
Final thought is that when it comes to youth development player evaluation is very hard, especially if you're trying to bring them all the way through to your first team, and QPR are far from the only ones where most players don't make it. To pick one example just look at some of the players that have been on loan here over the years from the Man U academy who never made the slightest impression up there - Will Keane, Sean Goss, Ravel Morrison (via West Ham), Federico Macheda (sort of - he went there from Lazio in his teens), Ethan Laird in more recent history. Keane, Goss, and Macheda have made decent careers lower down the pyramid or in other countries, Morrison has the kind of apperance record that makes you wonder how he keeps getting signed, but none of them ever did anything at United. Our own Jake Clarke-Salter made a single league appearance for Chelsea in 6 years of technically being a senior player there. Arguably the model at that level is different and there's more of an angle of planning to pick up kids cheap that you can then loan out for a bit before selling on for modest fees (and also hoarding talent away from others), but you're still talking about a PL club investing potentially a decade or more in developing players whose level is no higher than getting sold on to Hull, and there's vastly more examples of those kinds of players than there are Classes of 92. |
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Reply | End of Season Review - Live Now On The Patreon
at 10:08 12 May 2024
Even for the free ones we're all really paying by listening to the same awkward ad reads for NordVPN or whatever slapped into the middle of every episode. |
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Reply | Chris Willock
at 18:10 4 May 2024
He totally ignored the fans while the entire rest of rhe squad was over applauding. Eventually wanderered over after the rest had gone and gave a cursory little clap before disappearing off. Clearly got one foot out the door already. |
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Reply | Richard’s awol ?
at 22:15 1 Feb 2024
Footballers are more like fixed term contractors than normal employees. You can't just fire them or hand them notice, as long as they're meeting the minimum performance terms in their contract you're contractually bound to see out the term you signed them up for even if you don't fancy them any more. The contract can only be terminated unilaterally if one side or the other breaches it - for players that usually means if they aren't training or physically fit enough to play (barring genuine injury). This is why you see players the club doesn't want around but who won't agree to an unfavourable transfer sent to train with the reserves - if the player is showing up to training every day, then they're holding up their end and you can't get rid of them, and stopping them doing so might be interpreted as you deliberately making their performance impossible, so the compromise is that they go and train away from the first team and you hope they decide they've had enough and agree to go on loan or be sold somewhere.
In Richards' case that might sound simple enough - apparently he isn't turning up to training, so great, terminate him, but it's not as straightforward as that. Obviously players want to be (and are) protected from contract termination in the case of genuine injury, and he might argue that. Also the clause might not be as blunt as "must attend training 5 days per week" but will be more open to interpretation, and anyway he does supposedly show up sometimes. If the club tried to terminate his contract then he'd likely immediately sue and they'd end up having to fight it out in court, which might drag on and cost as much if not more as just seeing out the time/wages he has left - and that's assuming the club wins.
As for why would the PFA object, and side with Richards - because it's in their interests to do so. It's much more tactically sound for them to have a blanket policy of supporting players any time a club tries to terminate, because it means that clubs stop thinking of termination as an option. From their point of view, it's much better if clubs see unilateral termination as a bad and difficult thing that they want to do as little as possible, because while you get the occasional Richards who exploits it to steal a living for a couple of years, you also protect the lads whose clubs might otherwise have messed them about or treated them unfairly. |
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Reply | Tillies v Lionesses match thread
at 10:46 16 Aug 2023
Ad campaigns are bought well in advance, a sending off three weeks into a tournament will have no impact on it at all. |
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Reply | Naughty boy Ivan Toney
at 16:15 19 May 2023
It's because it's not just betting, but illegal betting - and the organised crime element that comes with that. If you're trying to do a bit of match-fixing, then trying to approach a PL player or team is expensive and dangerous, since they're already well-paid and their games are typically televised. Paying off a group of lads playing in the Finnish 3rd division to get the result you want is much easier and safer.
Any teams anyone can think of that had a sudden massive collapse in form and looked determined to lose every game no matter the circumstances recently...?  |
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Reply | name and shame
at 09:47 15 Mar 2023
Drewe was getting totally overrun for the first 15, and the Kakay switch did a lot to shore that up - not much help when you're already 3-0 down though.
Not massively surprising for a 22 year old on his third ever Championship appearance, but hard to watch when it was so disastrous for us. |
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Reply | Chris Martin - That difficult second album
at 12:39 14 Mar 2023
I've been thinking the same. Always fit when needed, never had pace to begin with so he's not likely to lose it, made a clear difference when he came in - he's a communicator to the lads around him, and going the other way he clearly relishes getting up in people's faces and causing them problems. Very Ainsworth player in that way, someone you'd want on your side to slug it out in this division.
Also think he'd be good for Armstrong's development - Sinclair's already shown some fire and willingness to throw that weight of his around, Martin surely will be able to help with that side of his game. |
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Reply | We can go up
at 14:44 12 Jan 2023
I actually sat and worked this out, comparing points per game this season to the average since 2010-11. 1st/2nd are above average, as are Luton in 7th and everyone from 9th down - meanwhile the teams in the play-offs right now are massively underperforming. Which pretty much works out to what you said, the league is very tight - most years Blackpool and Huddersfield wouldn't be in the relegation zone and even Wigan would be very close to safety, and from 3rd-6th only Blackburn would be in touch with the play-off places.
Whether that carries on for the next 20 games is anyone's guess, but on the numbers so far it's really open. |
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Reply | Just back
at 09:21 3 Nov 2022
Agree - quite a sharp contrast between people at the game and people watching on TV on this one. I thought Amos did really well, and put a shift in at both ends of the pitch - not perfect by any means but still a solid performance for someone who's been in and out of the team a bit this season.
Also agreed on Tim. Thought he was pretty absent at Birmingham but he was huge for us all over the pitch last night. |
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Site Scores| Forum Votes: | 14 | | Comment Votes: | 0 | | Prediction League: | 0 | | TOTAL: | 14 |
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