Part three of our annual report card into each individual performance at QPR last season focuses on a midfield where there’s a recruitment success story, and a significant failure.

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 two, midfield and attack, is live now.

4 – Jack Colback C

Jack Colback started the season by getting sent off for dissent. Aye yai yai. Should have just shaken hands and released him then - Jack Colback has peaked, there’ll be no more. Booked twice in a minute by referee Anthony Backhouse for angrily disputing the correct decision to award Sheff Utd a free kick for an obvious foul. Sprinting across to the touchline to spray the fourth official, sadly nobody with a butterfly net or a blow dart gun within range. Gentle Ben, heading for the craft services table once again. NO BEN!

It’s the sort of behaviour you’d bollock a 17-year-old rookie for but, now 35, Colback just cannot help himself. Penultimate game, 4-0 down at home to Burnley, one of the league’s better referees James Linington trying to do you a favour with a quiet word on the run, response so prolonged and vehement that he eventually cards you as well. Another nine yellows and a red to throw on the pile this year, worse than a card every other start. It’s the ginger in him.

Nevertheless, I quite like Jack Colback. I think he’s been quite a canny addition. A repeat theme of this section is going to be how much better this team is with a midblock midfield three than when we open up and try to go with a two, and we’re a better, stronger, more effective, more cohesive team with Colback in it for me although the win percentage doesn’t really back that up. He has the best pass completion record in the team for the second season running, though as we’ll come onto Kieran Morgan passes the ball forwards twice as often as him.

I’m trying not to place too much stock in either Oxford game, our correspondent there tells me their worst two performances of this first Championship season were QPR home and away by quite a distance and I had them and Cardiff down as the two worst sides we played, but in the away game at theirs when the club really needed a victory you saw the value of that Colback-Varane-Field midfield trio. All of them were terrific that night and Colback's exasperation that we'd willingly played with ten men when Field got injured, conceded a goal immediately, and then taken a quick kick off while still a man light, was there for all to see. In more challenging circumstances we also gave him a chunky eight rating at home to champions Leeds where his makeshift midfield combo with Ronnie Edwards was key to a great point. Jack also scored a valuable winner late in the day at home to Blackburn, until the final day of the season the only team in the top ten Rangers beat all year.

Availability is an obvious issue, and not just because of his four separate suspensions in two seasons. Once again, September 14 at Sheff Wed where I thought he played quite well, he picked up a knee injury that, for the second season in a row, chewed up most of his winter. He wasn’t seen again until New Year’s Day and that means, 36 in October, you probably shake hands at this point. Age, wage, availability probably make that inevitable.

He will need replacing though, and much as idealistically we’d love a team made up entirely of development prospects under the age of 25 the club should really have learned this year that the Championship requires a mix. We should be very wary of letting too much experience bleed out of this squad this summer, particularly if we think we can replace it with the same profile of signing as last year. We need some experience of the division in there. Personally, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Isaac Hayden in a QPR shirt.

Marti Cifuentes was asked in one of his press conferences whether his team needed an “angry rat bastard” and although he was all facial expressions and careful sidesteps, it does, and he knew it. When the going was tough through the final weeks of the season Colback started every game, played 90% of the minutes over the last dozen matches and was very effective – both his star man awards came in that period at home to Leeds and away at Preston. Like Sam Field to come, he’s a manager’s player - they love blokes like this. When he was fit and free of suspension he got picked, and that tells you something.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.84

8 – Sam Field B

If you want to condemn your Twitter feed to death by a thousand replies then saying nice things about Sam Field is second only to saying Paul Smyth isn’t all that bad really in sure fire methods. There’s a real dislike for players like this among the younger football supporter demographics, and when you’ve got a central midfield player finishing up with zero assists perhaps they have a point – Sam Field is far too backwards and sideways in his passing, far too keen to just shuffle the ball back to the goalkeeper rather than get on the turn and get us moving forwards.

What we’re finding as we go through these reviews, and as we progressed through the season, is a mix of players, personalities and profiles is vital. Not everybody can be a development prospect, not everybody can be under 25, not everybody can be under 5ft 5ins tall. You need players like Sam Field. You need people like Sam Field. Once again, third most minutes in the team this year behind only Nardi and Dunne, and even when he did eventually succumb to injury away at Portsmouth he initially played on through the pain of a serious ankle injury. One thing the disparate collection of recent QPR managers do all have in common is they've all picked Sam Field for every minute they possibly could - Neil Critchley played him right wing, mind, but still.

The absence that followed really showed you what you miss when Field isn’t there. Those blocks, duels, aerial fights, ball recoveries – nitty, gritty stuff you don’t necessarily see, but you desperately need. 49 blocks this year, 20 shots blocked and 29 pass interceptions – Varane is on almost identical figures, Dunne is streets ahead, but nobody else is close. He gets his body in the way, adds steel to the team, and is very underrated. Having gone onto lose at Fratton Park without him, Rangers then lost four and drew one of the next five, only halting that run with a win at Oxford where Field returned, was magnificent in a more advanced role than usual, won man of the match and effectively scored a crucial goal (although it went down as an OG). A win at Preston without him a week later is one of only five victories QPR have achieved without Field in the team in four years – Norwich at home before Christmas the other one this season. Since the start of last season the team’s points per game doubles with him in the line up versus when he’s not.

At just 27 he’s coming into his prime, with growth still potentially ahead of him, and he’s already a leader in this team. No surprise he’s previously been recognised by his team mates in the Players’ Player of the Year category – they love playing with him, they see his value, just as every manager we’ve had since he got here does. He brings standards and leadership. Forced into action as an auxiliary left centre back at home to Premier League Crystal Palace in the League Cup, he was our best player that night. Twice, against Oxford home and away, he stood up with performances of real quality in dreadful games just when the team really needed him to do so.

He scored twice in that home game, forced the own goal in the away match, and also bagged against Palace and Watford to finish on four for the season. I talk a lot in the Jonathan Varane section about how we need one of these central midfielders to grow into a box-to-box type and add more goals – we’ve got too many midfielders where their ten best traits are all without the ball. While Varane seems the much more likely candidate, I did like Field in that advanced pressing role at Oxford away with Colback and Varane behind. Cifuentes has been closer to unlocking that in Field than any of his predecessors – he’s scored 11 goals for the club and eight of those have come in the last 18 months. Field could and should still do more though. He loves that whipped left foot finish that goes looking for the far bottom corner but doesn’t find it. Against Preston at home and Plymouth away he produced identical misses that looked in all the way, and should have been scored. I was already off and away down the steps at Home Park, looked in all the way. Bugger.

I’ll die on the Sam Field hill. I think he’s vital to this team, and a great clubman. Not perfect by any means, but then wouldn’t be here if he was. Ignore social media mate, come with me we’ll go cardigan shopping together at Next.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 6.03

21 – Kieran Morgan B

A free transfer from Spurs’ academy initially recruited for our development team, who subsequently got 30+ games and 1,600+ minutes of Championship football at just 19 years of age, Kieran Morgan was the pleasant surprise of QPR’s 2024/25 campaign.

As we look to the future he contributed to the team giving more minutes to teenagers than in any season since 2008. Clocking up 30 senior QPR appearances that young puts him in the Frank Sibley, Martyn Busby, Gerry Francis-type categories. I doubt even he, in his wildest dreams, expected to travel so far, so fast, this year.

That's a real positive. Christian Nourry's approach to the development squad has been welcome - no point keeping Shodipo, Owens, Pedder, Hamalainen types hanging around deep into their 20s when it's blatantly obvious they're never going to be Championship players as long as they live. That team should be 17-18 year olds because by 19 or 20 they need to be first team players or moving on. Morgan is a great early success story in this.

The negative, of course, is that 30 games for a teenage rookie was a necessity, rather than a nice thing to do. For their first team QPR put together a midfield that couldn’t progress the ball or physically compete in the league it plays in. Once again manager Marti Cifuentes worked with what he had and found a pragmatic solution for the team.

Morgan appeared first of all as a sub at home to Portsmouth in the defeat that sent us bottom of the table, then scored with basically his first touch off the bench in a televised draw at home to Coventry, and made another sub outing at Burnley before getting a first start at home to Sunderland. Bar that goal, which the keeper very sportingly dived out of the way of, he didn’t do anything remarkable or outstanding. He passed forwards – statistically twice as often as Jack Colback – and he ran. And ran, and ran, and ran. I’m actually not convinced just yet, I’m intrigued to see his progression from here, but he got about the pitch, with legs and energy, good on the press, and he moved the ball progressively. A fairly damning indictment of the squad we’d put together that an 18-year-old boy doing that made such a stark difference to what was going on before, but difference it definitely made.

Morgan ran his blood to water in the New Year’s draw at Norwich where the home team scored a late equaliser only once the other workhorses like Field and Smyth had been removed and replaced by Madsen and Varane. You’ve got to run in this league, you’ve got run and compete, you’ve got to head and tackle, you’ve got to be brave on both sides of the ball. Morgan was all of that. He subsequently got both the LFW and the interactive star man prize in a home win against Luton – his cross for Michi Frey’s opener a good example of why the official assist statistics are such bollocks, not counted because Frey clashed with a defender at the back post and yet Koki Saito gets one for Alfie Lloyd’s goal at Sheff Wed. We’ve given Morgan the tick for that one.

Inevitably, with his age, experience and body shape, he waned. He’s gonna need a good feed at some point. We spoke in the Paul Nardi piece how useful it can be to come into the team with zero expectations and surprise everybody rather than the weight of a transfer fee/contract like Madsen or Zan Celar, and I also think there was a good deal of adrenaline and excitement getting Morgan through those early outings and he rode a bit of a crest of a wave. When that drained away into the dog days of a Championship slog he started to struggle. The last third of his season rated 5, 5, 6, -, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4. That’s to be expected, and fine, Cifuentes took him back out of the firing line and he was the best player on the pitch in the development squad’s cup final victory over Brentford by most accounts.

Even once he’d waned the team was always better this season when it had a midblock, three-man, tight and narrow midfield. A combination of Morgan, Field, Varane and/or Colback was when the team was at its best and picked up most points. Every time we tried to open it back up into more of a 4-2-3-1, add an extra ‘ten’ to the mix up front, reduce numbers in midfield, pretend we’re a good football team, we started to lose again.

It’s an awkward bugger this league. You’ve got to run the hard yards. Despite his tender years, Kieran Morgan felt like one of the only ones who got that.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.88

24 – Nicolas Madsen D/E

A QPR with money is a bit like a mule with a spinning wheel – no one knows where he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.

Welcome to this year’s Seal Clubbing World Championship. I’ll try and keep it brief(ish), and there is at least some light at the end to contrast the considerable shade of… well of every other fucking thing that happened until about 20 minutes before the end of the season.

Recurring theme klaxon – we talked in the Paul Nardi write up, and again more recently with Kieran Morgan, about the weight of expectation. Under hype, hopefully over deliver. Give the player room to breathe. If Christian Nourry thinks that’s one of the “competitive advantages” we’re trying to gain by revealing neither the transfer fee nor the contract length, then hopefully this season will encourage him to pack that in right away. Create an information vacuum, and information you don’t particularly like will fill that space. When you put a set of accounts out showing £5.96m post balance sheet spend offset by £3m in player sales pesky people who can add up start wondering just how much of that £9m went on a 6ft 4ins Danish bloke who can’t head the ball. You’re then forced to have a quick ring around to stress that both figures are worst case scenarios, based on all clauses being met, and it’s actually nowhere near that much. Just tell us that to start with. This policy of telling the supporters as little as possible, as late as possible, is killing the positive bits of Nourry’s reign people might otherwise be talking about, and in this instance it’s also killing your big summer import. Each new rumour says Madsen cost more than the last, every bit of scuttlebutt adds another year onto his contract. Just be upfront, tell us the truth. Unless, that is, they really did spend millions on him and gave him a five-year contract, in which case, yeh, fair enough, probably best keep that to yourself lads.

Things actually didn’t start toooooo badly. A goal in an away win at Luton is always going to endear you to your new supporters at QPR. Right in front of the away end, a lovely night, a great moment. People started romanticising about “languid” ballplaying midfielders in the finest traditions of the club. Look at those early ratings – three consecutive 6’s. Heady times indeed - certainly versus what was to come.

The problems, sadly, surfaced almost immediately. There’s ‘languid’ and there’s ‘can’t fucking run’. Recurring theme number two – we grossly underestimated and undervalued the physical requirements of this league when shopping last summer. Kieran Morgan ended up being important because he ran about and tackled people, and he was important because your £REDACTEDm summer import does neither of those things. We should be celebrating Morgan as a success story; in fact it’s a bit of an embarrassment. Nicolas Madsen made just 17 tackles all season, winning 11 of them – some comparisons, Paul Smyth 44 tackles made 30 won, Koki Saito 72 made 41 won, Paal 52-29, Feld 61-35, Varane 75-41, Dunne 113-70. There felt like a real lack of desire and heart there, and Morgan became a breath of fresh air just by showing a bit of that himself.

At 6ft 4ins tall I hoped we’d finally added some much needed, box-to-box, forward thinking presence to our stodgy midfield. Then Madsen started showing short for every corner we got. His height is wasted on him. He’s the shortest 6ft 4ins tall bloke in the world. May as well be 5ft 5ins tall, like all our other bloody signings. Thought we’d signed the new Sande Berge, actually we’ve signed Sandy from Grease.

Given he got 16 goals in 74 appearances (13 of them last season) for a fairly crap Westerlo side I also thought/hoped that we’d finally added some goals to our central midfield, sadly lacking for basically all of the ten years we’ve been back in the Championship – you can read the stats into just how poor we’ve been at that in his signing article, here. Turns out a dozen of those were penalties but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, QPR do occasionally venture far enough forwards to win one of those (three this year, ambassador you’re really spoiling us) and both Michi Frey and Ilias Chair have missed important spot kicks for us in recent years so a penalty taker might be nice. First one, at home to Hull, right in the top corner. Lovely. Second one, at home to Stoke, a fairly crucial game for both our season and the manager’s future by this point, Madsen on the pitch… hands the ball to Zan Celar who bangs it very firmly wide of the post. Wallop, straight into the Loft. Fuck me dead.

I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m just going to spend a while now smashing my skull into the table. You’ve bought a goalscoring midfielder for £REDACTEDm and tied yourself into a REDACTED contract with the guy, essentially on the strength of his penalty taking. He’s calmly thumped the first penalty you got this season straight into the top corner, as he was hired to do. You then get a second penalty in desperate circumstances and he hands the ball over to a striker who hasn’t scored in 19 appearances, looks like he’s left a pretty serious pair of bifocals lying around somewhere, and gives the strong impression he needs a sat nav to find his own nipples. STOP IT. Stop being like this. Stop being so QPR. I’m sick of it now. School for the gifted.

Marti Cifuentes stuck up for Celar after Rangers rescued a point from that Stoke game, and whatever the club may plead he kept his job on the strength of the crowd’s reaction to him that day. The manager said of Celar “only the ones who have the guts to take the penalty can miss it”, which to me felt like a very pointed remark at those who didn’t step up instead.

Madsen looked increasingly timid and unhappy – a shambolic combination with Kenneth Paal saw Derby score a second goal at Pride Park immediately after their first, straight from QPR’s kick off. It was becoming increasingly apparent at this point he was living in his own head, more than any other player we’ve had since Rob Dickie’s form collapsed here. Fans close to the pitch can be a good thing; it can also be a tough place to play, though to be fair the supporters at games have been remarkably patient with this team and Madsen in particular. In the Middlesbrough home game we gave him the lesser spotted 1/10, something we’ve done possibly only half a dozen times in the 20-year history of this website – and most of those were the Blackpool away game under Ainsworth. That night he shrunk from the game to such an extent it became physical – he actually withdrew himself, deeper and deeper, wider and wider, until he was so deep and wide he was basically parked in the Paddocks. May as well have come and sat with me.

I’ve rarely seen a player so obviously trying not to get involved in a game in any way whatsoever as that game, and it was far from a one off. We used to call Jermaine Jenas ‘the friendly ghost’ – Madsen makes that guy look like Terry Hurlock. The Madsen Point has become a thing. You want your midfielders to want the ball, to demand the ball, give it to me I’ll get us going. Madsen spends entire games pointing to other people you might like to pass to rather than him. To be fair, for most of this season he’s been right. I’d have passed to them instead as well.

By Christmas he was complete baggage. His introduction, along with Jonathan Varane, to a hard yards midfield effort at Norwich turned a 1-0 advantage into a draw. You have to compete in this league, and he is uncompetitive. Things got worse still at Hull. This time Rangers were 2-0 up, against a far worse team than Norwich sporting the division’s worst home record. Madsen and Harrison Ashby were invited to get their eye in with a gentle substitute outing each. It was like putting a massive hairy Mento in a bucket of Coke. One of Rangers’ best away performances all season quickly melted away into a car crash last 20 minutes, clinging on at 2-1 and lucky to get that over the line. Ashby was so bad he was subbed back off, but Madsen could easily have suffered the same fate.

We’ve seen it a few times (Kakay, Dozzell, Dixon-Bonner), once Cifuentes loses faith and trust in you that’s the end of it and Madsen duly disappeared from view. Even as Sam Field joined Jack Colback on the treatment table, as Karamoko Dembele and Koki Saito were lost to injury and suspension, as all four strikers got injured at once, Madsen remained largely an unused sub. Cifuentes rather taking on physically obstinate West Brom and Stoke sides, away from home, with a farcical midget army up front (Dembele a lone striker at the Britannia Stadium – purlease) than stick the 6ft 4ins goalscoring midfielder we’d spent £REDACTEDm on up there. What a state of affairs. What a club.

As we move into a summer where, conservative estimate, the team needs up to a dozen signings in every position bar perhaps goalkeeper and defensive central midfield, it has raised serious questions about how we are identifying, scouting and picking our signings. There may yet be an Ebere Eze sell on clause coming our way after his sparkling end to the campaign, but where that should inspire joy and optimism it’s actually breeding more concern about what on earth we’d spend it on, and at whose behest? Kevin Gallen, who scouts Europe for that super soaraway Palace team, happy to stick the knife in pre-Christmas and say everybody had looked at Madsen because of his goals record and decided he wasn’t physically up to the cut and thrust of three-game weeks in the Championship. QPR, who have let vastly experienced old school scouts like Mel Johnson leave the club in favour of a more data led approach, go in all hot and heavy with a big offer. How often did we physically watch him play? Who did that physical scouting? It’s critical. Another Eze windfall could be a once in 5-10 year event. We largely wasted the last one, we cannot afford to do the same again. It would basically condemn us to another ten years in this league at best, or worse a trip into the one below.

Something, somewhere, happened about half a dozen games out from the end of the season. Like Jonathan Varane, perhaps you could say this was a player finally getting up to the rigours of the competition. You still saw in the Swansea home game what happened when you started with him and Andersen together in the same team, but Madsen, noticeably, started creating chances. Jack Supple used to dine out on stats like Madsen going six Championship games without making a tackle, but by the end of the campaign he was able to be much more positive – three chances created v Preston, three more v Bristol City, four against Oxford, all the highest totals on the pitch. The Dane finishes with three assists for the season, all since Oxford away, and a fine goal at Sunderland.

His mark of seven at The Stadium of Light was the only time he got over six in our ratings all season. It was also Harrison Ashby and Jonathan Varane’s best games and marks all year. Dead rubber, sun shining, pressure off, opposition saving themselves… or, hey, maybe the manager was the problem all along?

Ahead of a season in which two of the three teams promoted from League One arrive with serious money to spend and no intention of helping clubs like us out by filling one of the relegation spots it’s little things like that, and Madsen’s flurry of performances in the final half dozen games, that we have to cling to for optimism.

Other than that, this has been something of a footballing shuttle disaster so far.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 4.90

25 – Lucas Andersen E

Moving off into the lower reaches of midtable, well safe of relegation with multiple games to spare, if QPR had spaced the results out a bit this year rather than sandwiching a promotion winning winter with a League One autumn and spring you could have made an argument for reasonable progress on a challenging budget.

The problem, in addition to the first third and last third of the campaign, was for a while last season it felt like we’d cracked it. Get the 2020/21 overspend out of our rolling three-year calculations, get some fresh thinking in at executive level, recruit well, with this head coach we might soar as high as… tenth. I lost sleep at the back end of last season, cratered in mood when we blew two points at the death at Plymouth, because it felt like QPR were about to miss the boat again. Stay up, somehow, just stay up this time and it’ll all be fine.

The performances against West Brom and Leeds at Loftus Road were exactly how I want QPR to look, feel, and be. We didn’t even beat West Brom – missed penalty, handball on the line, remarkable goalline clearances – but it didn’t matter. I sat in the Crown & Sceptre after that match thoroughly contented with what I’d seen. Leeds a glorious throwback to the 1990s, Andy Sinton torching Chris Whyte.

Lucas Andersen felt absolutely central and pivotal to that. He’d scored a gorgeous goal in that rout of Daniel Farke’s side which cost them promotion. Cutting in from the right, beating a man in the area, launching an Exocet missile with pinpoint precision into the far corner. Keeper not even in the equation. Here, we thought, is the archetypal QPR player. A flaxen-haired ‘ten’ in the old school mode, all thoughtful passes and Jesus tribute act, scoring the hard chances and missing the sitters, commuting to training on a penny farthing. If you had to draw a QPR player it would look like this. This guy played for bloody Ajax you know, in the Champions league, in the Nou Camp. Where have we got him from? What is he doing here? More importantly, who cares? Can I keep you?

Gab Sutton’s season preview pinpointed Andersen as a key man, how he and others like him performed across a full season set to define what happened next. He was right, but not in the way we hoped.

To begin with, things still looked dreamy. He strode onto a world class Rayan Kolli cross a quarter of an hour into the opening game against West Brom and headed perfectly into the top corner to raise the roof on a packed out stadium. Here we go, the real deal. Rangers are back. Half an hour later we were 3-1 behind and a week down the line Andersen somehow booted the ground rather than the ball taking a corner at Sheffield United. Still wasn’t our worst set piece of the season, mind, but just when you think QPR can’t possibly get any more QPR one of your players breaks his leg taking a corner. Fucking div. Rangers may have recovered a 2-0 deficit that day, but it wasn’t a physical or mental blow Andersen ever looked remotely capable of coming back from. This creative midfielder would finish the season with zero assists.

At Norwich, in front of the away end, he set off on a 15-yard sprint for a loose ball that I’m surprised isn’t still going on now. He moved like your dad getting up for his third piss of the night, all creaking joints and dodgy prostate. I haven’t seen acceleration like it since Bob Malcolm turned and set off after Jermaine Johnson on his QPR debut all those years ago. I’ve used the hackneyed football cliché ‘legs have gone’ a few times in the past, but I didn’t realise it was possible to this extent without an amputation.

I guess the best recent comparison would be Stefan Johansen, who looked the best midfielder in the Championship during a six-month loan spell in lockdown prompting us to break the club’s entire spending structure to get him here on a whopping three-year deal only for him to drop off the side of a cliff. We’re very fortunate he was willing to do the decent thing and walk away from the third year of that contract. We signed all four of the loans we made that January having finished so strongly without crowds in the ground, and really only Sam Field was any sort of success. I guess the lesson is these six-month signings can be useful, if you’re struggling against relegation or pushing for promotion, but don’t then get carried away thinking them a long-term option.

The general consensus around Andersen, and Frey, was that we had to promise them a second year on good money to get them to agree to come in the first place on a peppercorn wage because we were so tight to the FFP threshold at that stage, so it’s fair enough he was here for another 12 months. He was a key figure in the 23/24 survival, and it was one of the moments of this season when, quite out of the blue, he drew a boot back on the last kick of the game at Preston and rocketed an absolute shitpinger into the top corner right in front of an ecstatic away end. Always useful for headline writers when a Jesus look-a-like does something like that on Good Friday too.

That was, thankfully, a proper send off for a very likeable character who seemingly just isn’t there physically anymore. Most of what had gone before was dreadful. A decline they will study in textbooks.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.02

40 – Jonathan Varane B

Singers, a few notes, if I may. Jonathan Varane fits into that song perfectly well. There’s no need to call him “Super Jon Varane” any more than there is to refer to him as “Jona” in official club press communications. It took us years to wheedle out and beat to death the heretics giving it “hi ho Super Rangers”, let’s not let ourselves down with a backward step now.

That wasn’t my only irritation with Varane for much of this season – a player I’ve had a much tougher time with than the rest of the LFW crew, and indeed most of our support.

This team, this style, this manager, has been absolutely desperate for a midfielder who can take the ball on the turn and progress us up the pitch, either through passing or running with the ball, for years. Sam Field, Jack Colback, for all they do bring to the team, are far too backwards and sideways in their play. Too often a pass out from defence lazily, timidly banged straight back from whence it came. No situation that cannot be turned into a pass back to the goalkeeper. In Jonathan Varane it seemed we’d just added another likeminded individual to that pile of stodge in the middle of the field. Unable and unwilling to turn on the ball and play forwards, halfway line treated like a forcefield. Turn around Jonathan. Turn around. Turn. Around. Like waiting for an errant Uber, staring at the map. Jonathan Varane is two minutes away. Turns left, turns left, turns left, turns left, turns left. Jonathan Varane is three minutes away. Turn around bright eyes. Turn around pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease. Mercy Jonathan, mercy. He’d never scored a goal in senior professional football in his life before he got here, and man alive could you see why.

In his defence, that’s all he’d ever been before. The attraction of him, allegedly, was the stats and data models made him a 99% match to Isaac Hayden who’d been important to the style and shape the previous year and it’s not like Hayden contributed much to the final third either.

It would have been okay if the defensive side of his game had been up to speed. Initially, it wasn’t. You can forgive a player new to the Championship struggling with the division’s overall Player of the Season Gus Hamer in game two, but that first quarter of an hour at Sheff Utd and all the running off the back of an apparently oblivious Varane was an excoriating experience for both him and any QPR fan in the away end. Rabbit in headlights stuff. He then got himself sent off in first half injury time at Blackburn, effectively sealing our fate in a game we’d already been struggling in at 0-0. Those were the headline failures, but there was a dreadful appearance off the bench at Norwich as well where we’d been winning the game and the midfield until Sam Field and Paul Smyth had to go off and surrendered two points thereafter with Varane pisballing about on the far touchline in the lead up to the equaliser.

Look, it’s recurring theme time. If Jonathan Varane did maraud forward, score half a dozen goals, dominate midfield, carry the ball up the pitch, in addition to everything else he does, he’d have been sold last summer for £10m+ and certainly not to QPR. We cannot buy finished products, if you’re coming here there’s something wrong with you. We have to accept that, swallow it, take a six-figure risk anyway, and work on the weaknesses. Varane’s actually the sort of profile of player I see other clubs in the Championship sign and get quite annoyed and jealous about us not being involved. It was nice to see us pick a player like this up and, for once, you’ve seen the steady development over the last year rather than a much more typical QPR stagnation or regression.

This is potentially not only a much needed one in the plus column for our much-maligned recruitment operation, but also a fillip for the coaching set up Christian Nourry is forcing through here. Kevin Betsy’s role as individual player development coach is exactly this sort of project so it was no surprise to hear him drop Varane’s name in the press conferences he took after Cifuentes’ departure, and perhaps no coincidence that Varane had his best game of the season at Sunderland with Betsy in caretaker charge.

There was a goal – a fabulous goal, arcing through the fog, true natural beauty – at Leicester in the cup. That day we gave him star man and said he was “the only player who looked up to the level of Premier League opposition”. If we’re just buying him as Hayden’s non-union Mexican equivalent then fine, but if this is an asset to grow and sell then he really needs to do that more. The technique and ability is there. Look at that strike, pure as mountain air. You get him contributing half a dozen of those a season, and putting in 15-20 performances like the one at Sunderland on the final day where he suddenly started carrying the ball past opponents, marauding into the opposition penalty area, and looking like a true physically dominant box-to-box midfielder, and you’ll get a serious wedge for this guy. Dan Neil, Jobe Bellingham and Chris Rigg are rated as three of the best young players in this country, likely to fetch serious transfer fees even if they’re not promoted to the Premier League with Sunderland next week – Varane was streets ahead of all of them at the Stadium of Light.

If you want an indication of his improvement, just look at the cards. One of only three red cards we got all year, and a team-leading nine yellows, but all of them bar one pre-middle of January. He’s only been booked once in the second half of the season. That’s a player getting up to speed with the level. Second only to Jimmy Dunne for tackles (113 v 75) and blocks (64 v 50). His totals of 50 blocks, 11 shots blocked and 39 passes intercepted is seriously impressive, right there with Sam Field and second only to Jimmy Dunne – in a first Championship season, after a really ropey start.

And this is what we want, right? Spend a modest £1mish on a 22-year-old with loads of growth in him, bite our tongue and support him through early failings in a new country and league, steadily see growth over the course of the season. Varane’s got 3,000 minutes of English football into his legs this season, is noticeably improved now from when he began, is still only 23 and now has a new contract of REDACTED length in the bag. That’s exactly how it should work. When you do good, I use the green pen.

There’s so much more left to do. He has to go forwards more, with his passing, with his dribbles. He has to score goals. Goals plural. The ability to do so is there. He’s one of the few signings we’ve made who is physically up to the league we play in. If he stays as he is now that’ll be fine, he’ll basically be this decade’s Mikele Leigertwood. Add half a dozen goals and 20 Sunderland-like performances to that though and you’ve got a goose with a golden egg as big as a house stuck up its bum.

In numbers:

Interactive Ratings — 5.97

Others >>> Elijah Dixon Bonner started the season well in the midfield picture but became the latest example of what happens when Marti Cifuentes loses faith with you. His weirdly casual, academy baller, showing at Cambridge in the cup where he missed two chances to put the game to bed didn’t do him many favours and then it was him switching off at a planned Crystal Palace set piece the team had been warned about allowing Eddie Nketiah to open the scoring in the third round. Subbed at half time in that game, he made just three more sub appearances totalling a paltry nine minutes and has since clocked up two starts and two sub appearances for Vasteras who play in Sweden’s second tier after relegation last year.

Friend of the site Taylor Richards was loaned to League One Cambridge at the start of the season, just 61 miles from West London and therefore too close to West London to the tune of about 500 miles. He’d been linked with Morecambe at one point, I liked that idea a lot better. The U’s were the worst team in League One last season bar Shrewsbury (still tore into us in the second half of the League Cup tie mind) and despite this Richards was only deemed worthy of five substitute appearances (they lost all five of those games, so big impact). Manager Garry Monk insisted this was nothing personal, great lad, terrific trainer, it’s just the team sitting second bottom of League One had changed tactics to something that didn’t fit him. They’d like to have returned him in January, but QPR left them on read. Just you keep right on driving. What a waste, in every sense of the word.

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

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Pictures - Reuters Connect, Ian Randall

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