As three more players arrive at QPR on long contracts LoftforWords cannot help but wonder if QPR are making the same Chris Wright mistakes all over again.

Fool me once...
I did afford myself a wry smile on the first morning of the latest transfer window. First deal completed, up at the crack of dawn on New Years Day, there he was again – Richard Graham, Dagenham and Redbridge to Kettering .

It is only a loan deal for Richard this time although he did play for the Rockingham Road club on a permanent basis between 2003 and 2004. The Northern Ireland winger has also spent time lower down the ladder with Chesham and Billericay, and a little higher with Barnet and Dagenham and Redbridge. His name always stands out for me whenever I see it on a team sheet or a scorers list or, more often than not, on the ‘deals done today’ transfer list.

Richard, you may or may not recall, started his career at Loftus Road. His picture would regularly appear in the programme, peering out eagerly from behind his blond curtains, with encouraging stories about how we may just have unearthed the next big thing. At about the same time Chris Wright had just bought Rangers and was lashing cash around here there and everywhere attempting to return the club to the Premiership. Rangers were to have an academy set up, of which Richard was part, and no expense would be spared on youth development.

No expense spared either, it turned out, on players’ contracts. According to board member and eventual chairman of the club Nick Blackburn in an interview with A Kick Up The R’s the club asked Chris Gieler, who ran the youth set up, and then Chief Executive Clive Berlin to identify the best young talent at the club so it could be signed up on long term contracts and not be lost to the new Bosman ruling. Consequently players like Graham were given three, four and five year contracts on escalating salaries with no way of QPR releasing them if they did not progress. Graham was a professional at QPR for three years – 1998 to 2001 – and according to the books made just two appearances in that time. I remember one, at Wolves midweek, but cannot recall another.

He was by no means the biggest problem, the biggest flop or the most highly paid academy graduate. Richard has at least gone on to enjoy a reasonable career in football. Coming back to the Blackburn interview again he mentions Mario Lusardi and Michael Currie who were picked out by Gieler and Berlin as the two with the best chance of making it. Both were apparently given five year, escalating contracts with no get out clause. QPR were paying youth team players anywhere between £35k a year and £80k at this time. Lusardi never made a first team appearance for QPR and if anybody knows what actually became of him I would be interested to know because I have been researching this article all week and found no trace anywhere, not even a Facebook profile - that is him pictured at the top by the way. All I can tell you is he was one of those players on the original Championship Manager games that wasn’t deemed good enough or important enough to warrant a permanent position at a club and therefore whenever you loaded up a new league he would be something different – a goalkeeper one week, centre forward the next. That means nothing really, I have just thrown it in for colour.

I have been told after this article was published, thanks to the hard working souls on our wonderful message board, that Mario is working as a PE teacher and coach of Middlesex Under 14s.

These contracts were all given out at the start of Wright’s reign and do not get me wrong I am not criticising the players here - as a footballer said to me last week 'if they put a great deal in front of you you sign it.' Nor am I really blaming Wright and the board at the time - Blackburn rightly says in the interview that it seemed like a sound thing to do. QPR fans would have been the first ones to howl with derision had Mario Lusardi gone on to win the World Cup for Italy after West Ham had nabbed him off us on a Bosman free transfer.

It was an exciting time at QPR where anything seemed possible and an imminent return to the Premiership was a case of when not if. By the time these massive contracts started coming to an end QPR were stony broke and heading for administration – Blackburn says when players like Leon Knight started arriving on loan from Chelsea on a fraction of the money earned by players of half the ability in QPR’s junior ranks the folly of the long contract on big money policy became clear.

‘What is the point of all this?’ I hear you cry. Why is this relevant? Well it is relevant, in my opinion, because we are once again at the start of an exciting new regime for the club and once again anything seems possible and we seem to be making similar decisions again. We have gone from rattling buckets at home matches to waking up to headline news on Wednesday morning that Roman Abramovic is no longer the richest man in English football despite a £7bn fortune because an Indian steal magnate has bought into QPR. Think you might be dreaming? Look three places further down the list and there’s another billionaire with QPR next to his name.

We should not, actually I should rephrase that because you are probably not, I should not be worried about how much we are paying Wayne Routledge. Who cares? £10k a week, £20k a week, what does it matter? When you have a board worth more than £20bn between them what is a few lousy quid a week on a winger? Especially when it upsets Cardiff and makes Peter Ridsdale look like a prat into the bargain and after he spent all last week assuring Cardiff fans that a deal for Routledge was close we have certainly succeeded on both counts there.

Well you see we all thought that a decade ago didn’t we? Nobody wanted to see West Ham pinching our best players, nobody wanted to stay in the First Division very long, we wanted to be able to attract the best young talent to our academy and the best proven players to our first team. We had a rich man in charge, a QPR fan at that, what could possibly go wrong? We all know what happened next. If it all goes tits up you don’t want to be stuck with youth team players on a four year 80k p/a contract and similarly you don’t want a winger on such a lucrative and long contract that it is not in his interest to leave and nobody else can afford him anyway.

It has been said about me, not entirely unfairly, that if there was nothing to worry about in my life I would purposely go out and find something. I am a grumpy old man before my time. I accept that and if you want to write this all off as a miserable northern git fretting about nothing then please feel free. However I am seeing many similarities in our current situation to the one Chris Wright walked into at Loftus Road . On the positive side we are not paying big transfer fees as we did under Wright who shelled out £10m or thereabouts on Spencer, Sheron, Morrow, Peacock, Rose, Harper and all of that lot but did not spend a thre’penny bit on Paulo Wanchope on Stewart Houston’s advice. Sound judgement that.

I am also not even sure I buy the somewhat bitter sounding claims by Cardiff City that we are paying Wayne Routledge £20k a week and £200k to sign and driving him to training every day in a Rolls Royce with little triangular QPR flags on the front (QPR Mega Store, £7.99 plus postage and credit card fee). However I bet he is on a good wedge and I bet he is not alone.

When we signed Patrick Agyemang from Preston , a 28 year old on a four year contract, Alan Irvine described the deal he was offered at Loftus Road as “out of their league” and something they could not get close to competing with. Kaspars Gorkss had his head turned in the summer, Ben Watson refused a deal at Crystal Palace on the strength of the money being offered at QPR and he may yet turn down Premiership clubs to sign for us. Dave Jones the Cardiff manager said this week: “QPR are throwing money around and not only can we not compete with that some Premiership clubs can’t either.”

Players like Radek Cerny, Peter Ramage, Fitz Hall, Kaspars Gorkss, Patrick Agyemang and Wayne Routledge will be earning money that no player has ever earned from QPR before in history is my guess. All on long term deals.

Not only are we giving out long contracts to new signings but existing players as well – Lee Camp has three and a half years left to run on a contract extension he signed in February, Damion Stewart is also apparently signed up to 2011 yet these deals were never announced. In the case of Camp here is the first example of a player on a huge deal that the club no longer, for whatever reason, wants. We might get lucky because Camp is a young man who wants to play first team football but Nottingham Forest have already baulked at the money he is on at Loftus Road and he may end up staying and kicking his heals here. Getting a player in on a four year contract at £10k a week is a lot easier than getting one out. A lot of mediocre players have made a lot of money out of this game simply by sitting on lucrative contracts even when not playing and never leaving a contract early without getting a hefty pay off - I will spare you the details of my Peter Thorne example again.

The club would argue that we want to attract players capable of getting us out of this league and players like Cerny, Gorkss, Hall and Routledge will certainly help us do that. They would also argue that to get players like this to a Championship club you have to pay them good money, probably more than you can afford, and give them the security of a long term deal. Routledge has turned us down one before remember. That is fine if it gets us into the Premiership where our current squad’s wage bill would be covered three or four times over by the money we would get for finishing even in last place. Sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate.

The wages and losses the club is currently making are being picked up by the rich men on the board, but I presume that is in the form of loans rather than as a gift. If, as happened with Wright, we don’t make the Premiership and the losses start mounting up and the board members start looking at what is going out and what they are likely to get in return then, well, like I say, I like to worry.

The Ten Commandments
It occurred to me on Saturday as I watched a QPR team similar to one fielded by Iain Dowie before his departure make the same mistakes and play the same boring football it did when Dowie was here that one of problems with constantly chopping and changing your manager is that the new one always has to spend time finding out what his predecessor and the fans already know. Sousa has been experimenting in the last three games but has tried things that anybody who has been watching QPR all season could have told him would not work. Therefore I am proposing we carve Ten Commandments into a breeze block currently being used to prop up a car on the White City Estate so that any future new managers will at least know the basics without having to waste time and matches finding out.

This is just a provisional, somewhat tongue in cheek, list so feel free to get in touch and add your own but for a kick off how about:

1. Thou shalt not play Mahon and Leigertwood together in the middle of midfield. If thou is intending to do so thou shall inform supporters via thy official website at least 24 hours in advance so they can either not bother coming or bring a good book with them.

2. Thou shalt spend at least one training session a week teaching the players that they are not obliged to return the ball to the opposition from every throw in, just the ones where an opponent kicked the ball out so somebody can receive treatment. Thou should tell thy players that they may like to keep possession from a throw in every now and again and perhaps even build an attack with it. Thou must be careful however not to try and teach the boys too much too soon - keeping it for more than two touches after a throw in would be a reasonable place to start.

3 - Thou shalt covet thy neighbours' full backs that can cross a ball and purchase them immediately.

4 - Thou shalt not rely heavily on young players loaned in on the strength of the quality of their parent club or relationship between our chairman and theirs.

5 - Thou is forbidden from playing long ball football by fans. Thou is also forbidden from playing passing football by fans if any of those passes happen to go backwards. There is a happy medium yet to be found whereby passes are short and accurate but at all times forwards. Fickle fans reserve the right to moan like hell until this is achieved and then moan about something else if it ever is.

6 - If points are dropped against poor teams thou is advised to praise opponents and mention a "false league position" when talking about them.

7 - Thou shalt never drop a striker who has three goals in his last two games. The reasoning may be sound but like waking a sleeping baby the result is rarely the desired one.

8 - Thou shalt not pissball about in games where a replay in the freezing cold arse end of the world is a potential reward. Thou should either lose it heavily deliberately or go all out for a win with at least six strikers.

9 - Thou shalt not upset and ostracise players who thou may later come to rely on. For further advice please get in touch with Gary Waddock c/o Aldershot FC.

10 - Thou shalt always play players in their correct positions. Centre halves are not for the middle of midfield whatever Ian Holloway tries to tell you.

Never meet your heroes
That is a bit of a misleading headline really because, technically, Graham Poll is not my hero, although he was a superb referee whatever anybody says, and I still have not met him.

We have recently started using The Green as our pre-match pub again. I was always under the impression that they did not show the live lunch time football in there before but it turns out they do so that is where the Northern R’s reside at the moment. We were down there for noon on Saturday, after a trip to the ground to buy our £21 ticket for the nice new, covered stand at Derby and our £27 tickets for the uncovered, grotty, unsafe, temporary stand at Blackpool.

Anyway we were two of the first people in the pub at that time and settled down on a table next to, unbeknown to us at the time, Mr Poll himself. All those rumours about him being a QPR fan were true it seems. I would like to tell you that I went up and said hello, spoke to him about Mr Attwell’s shortcomings and argued with him about his point of view on Steve Bennett’s cock up at Hull v Aston Villa on the Monday night – you may remember Graham felt the Aston Villa players should be punished for reacting angrily to a last minute penalty given against them for handball when the ball had in fact hit the top of the cross bar.

Sadly though I can’t because I didn’t. Not for the first time it must be said my second thought after happening upon somebody remotely famous after “Isn’t that…” was “Oh God I wrote something nasty about them last week.” With the rumour about him being a QPR fan apparently true there is a remote possibility that he is one of the three people that reads our referee news piece on a Thursday regularly and therefore he may well not have appreciated being approached in The Green by somebody who said he had a chip on his shoulder over the way the FA treated him after sending off John Terry at Tottenham.

Consequently the sum total of our interaction was a quick discussion about whether Hartlepool v Stoke was on the TV or not and I left it at that. Maybe I will try and strike up a conversation at the bar next time. Watch out for ‘Northern R’s seek new pre-match pub again’ or ‘former Premiership referee smacks QPR fan’ headlines in the near future.

Photo: Action Images via Reuters

Recent Stories