A fourth defeat to nil in a row for hapless Queens Park Rangers at Birmingham on Wednesday, and like the three that went before the only positive to take was the final score not being significantly worse.

Such is Queens Park Rangers’ present propensity to take to the field twice a week and spray liquified human shit through the sprinkler system, it’s becoming harder and harder to sit here and describe it.

One, because living Southampton 5 QPR 0 once is quite enough without re-living in print the following day. Two, because even my powers of swearing and graphic sexual imagery are being stretched by the sheer stench of unrelenting fuckwittery being given off by this team at the moment. Only so many metaphors, only so many jokes from The Thick Of It, only so many episodes of Air Crash Investigation, only so many drop intros. I fear the day I simply write “cunts” and move straight to the player ratings is drawing ever closer.

Over the last week alone I’ve had to describe to you 12 different opposition goals. Will there be a cross into the box? You bet. Is their striker completely unmarked? Oh yes. Feel like you could do better yourself? Of course.

All conquering, freewheeling, high scoring, unplayable Middlesbrough nil, Charlton Athletic one, and they could have beaten us 8-0 at the weekend. Sheff Utd, won in second gear at Loftus Road, drawn with West Brom and lost to Norwich since. Southampton got guaranteed next day delivery on a 5-0 gob bumming, they needed a 90th minute equaliser at West Brom last night. We make these teams look like world beaters.

So, I confess, it’s with some degree of relief that at St Andrew’s on Wednesday night Rangers, for the first 45 minutes at least, curled out a footballing steamer so rancid that I can literally just sit here and post the numbers. Lies, damn lies, statistics and all that, but the figures the team kicked out in the first half against Birmingham City give a totally full, fair and accurate picture of what we saw on the field of play.

By half time Birmingham City had used 70.3% of the possession to have 14 shots on goal of which ten came from inside the penalty box, five were on target, one came back into play off the post and three were blocked – one of the latter could easily have been given as a penalty for a Ronnie Edwards handball by referee Anthony Backhouse. That is something in the region of a shot on goal every three minutes for a whole half of football. Birmingham attempted 19 crosses into the box to QPR’s two, five corners to the R’s nought, 273 completed passes to Rangers’ 94. Once again our heroes seemed to be labouring under some misapprehension that the aim of the sport is to kick the ball into the main stand – stop watching the Six Nations lads, it’s bad for your health. QPR had zero shots on target, zero shots off target, zero blocked shots, 0.0 xG, zero corners, zero big chances. Have we thought about putting ourselves up as a UK entry for Eurovision?

Julien Stéphan, as we’d wondered aloud in the match preview, went with all the experience and stodge he could muster – two centre backs at centre back, two centre backs at full back, a centre back in the centre of midfield and a defensive central midfielder alongside him. One would presume the idea was to 0-0 his way to a rot stopper against a midtable side that had also lost its three prior games. That lasted only as long as it took Amadou Mbengue and Richard Kone to take a QPR throw in and present it straight to the nearest Birmingham player. A totally free run into the box for Ibrahim Osman and low cross later and there was Patrick Roberts scoring a goal which you’d be right to feel like you’ve seen before, not only because QPR concede this goal all the fucking time from both sides of the pitch, but also because Roberts scored exactly the same one at Loftus Road in the first meeting. Congratulations to all involved. Truly, virtuoso work with the blowlamp there.

Take a deep breath… Blues had been allowed to load the QPR box and stick a high ball in there are ten seconds, literally from the kick off. They were in behind Mbengue for a low cross, identical to the one that led to the goal, after a minute and 30 seconds. Roberts’ opener was followed by a huge appeal for handball in the box after Edwards (I hear you’re a midfielder now, father) blocked and fell on the ball. When Backhouse did then penalise Varane for handling, it allowed the home side another attacking free kick (I guess Varane would only have passed it back to Walsh in any case so may as well let them do it) from which a back post header was hacked wildly towards his own goal by Mbengue and he’s fortunate Walsh was in the right place to claim. Osman cut in unchallenged from the left for a shot from the edge of the box which took a deflection and required an improvised Walsh save. Another hit from Jay Stansfield, deflected over. From that corner Mbengue cleared a header, that had beaten the goalkeeper, off the line. Roberts cut in from the right and shot low to the near post for a further save. Iwata struck over from long range (we’re not at half an hour yet, by the way). Stansfield repeated the Osman routine from the opposite flank, but Ducksch wasn’t as pristine as Roberts in his finishing. The towering penalty box presence of Ethan Laird headed a 32nd minute corner off the base of the post. Jimmy Dunne’s suicidally short back pass had Walsh scampering from his line into a Hail Mary sliding tackle.

I guess Walsh did at least survive more than 16 minutes, but by God that lad was busier than a two-twatted hooker.

In the minute and a half before the break former QPR treatment room botherer Laird had another shot inside the box blocked, Stansfield again cut in from the right unmarked and saw a shot beaten back, Osman followed up with the rebound and Walsh saved.

It’s not often I’m speechless.

That the half time score was only 1-0 was a mixture of poor finishing, pure dumb luck, and Birmingham being a bit Russell Martin about things – why have a shot on the goal when you can get another pass in there? Still, Blues were a thick four or five goals the better team here. An absolute pasting. QPR completely weighed in. And seemingly thrilled to death about it. A lot of players with a lot of credit in the bank with supporters, a lot of hype, doing absolutely fuck all. It’s not okay this. It is not okay.

Mbengue, at one stage physically manhandled into the position he was supposed to be occupying for a Brum set piece by Jimmy Dunne, spent most of the evening teetering on the brink of the yellow card that would have seen him banned for the next two matches – to be fair, if I was one yellow card away from missing Leicester away and Portsmouth at home I’d have brought a bloody crossbow.

Harvey Vale, running around all night in a strange galloping motion like he had a pole up his arse, took time out from hitting the first man with every set piece to take a free kick wide on the right and, instead of putting it in the Birmingham box, swing it wildly and hopelessly across the field and into the stand to our right.

Stéphan hooked Jonathan Varane and Koki Saito at half time. As he had to. More mercy killings than substitutions. If they’d come out for the second half I’d have taken up arms.

Saito looks utterly bereft. I spent five minutes just following him around to pass the time and it literally didn’t seem as though he even knew where he should be standing. The amount of time an unmarked Birmingham player collected possession (usually Solis, in the same 20 square yards of space Hayden Hackney ran amok in at the weekend) and he’d sort of jump, surprised, ten yards away, belatedly realising that was his man. We talk about pathways, development club, “fine tuning our player trading model”… here’s a guy we’ve spent millions and millions of pounds on absolutely cratering.

Varane… I think it’s best I don’t speak. If we’re picking him at the moment to try and put him in the shop window then the flaw in the plan is a potential buyer looking through the glass. No amount of newspaper puff pieces about his day out at the British Museum can cover performances like this. Another sales prospect who’s taken his fairly mediocre level of last season and chucked it off the side of a cliff.

Tell me the players who have improved this season. Show me the progress.

The second half started much as the first had ended. Osman cut in from the left and curled a shot wide of the far corner. Osman ran clean through on goal and Steve Cook rescued the situation with a big recovery challenge. Jay Stansfield in down the right over and over again. Over and over and over again. Over and over again. Jake Clarke-Salter’s fill in job at left back, facial expressions and body language did not immediately scream somebody who was happy to be there.

Has there been a non-contact injury? Oh God yes. Cook down and appealing for help, QPR deciding to play on with ten, nearly conceded again to a shot from Ducksch. School for the gifted. That slow burn approach to squad fitness is certainly taking its sweet time. This. Is. Not. Okay.

Things did, however, improve.

In a way, they couldn’t help but do so. The level produced in the first 45 minutes of this game was not befitting a professional football team. Stéphan called it “embarrassing”, and that was about the only thing he got right all night.

The introduction of Kieran Morgan to the midfield did at least add somebody who was interested in getting on the ball, passing it forwards, and running around. Did it work? Not often. But by the hour he’d clocked up better passing and involvement numbers in 15 minutes of field time than his predecessor had managed in the entire first half.

Rayan Kolli looked like he was interested in the final score, like it mattered to him whether QPR got beaten or not. He ran, he challenged, he got on the ball, he spread it around. He looked like he was bothered. Unused sub on Saturday, no start here, while Richard Kone is basically being wheeled out in an iron lung. You can’t do ‘in the land of the bald’ jokes with Rayan, but it was nice to see somebody out there who a) had noticed QPR were losing the game and b) was trying to do something about that. Very few of the others ticked either box.

Between him and Morgan, just by running about a bit really, they stemmed the bleeding.

Mbengue and another sub, Rhys Norrington Davies, both had shots (print them out for a frame) over the bar. To do list for Saturday – a shot on the opposition goal that the keeper has to save.

With Birmingham only one goal to the good the game remained there for the taking. The home team even started to try and waste time, resulting in a yellow card for keeper James Beadle in what was his only meaningful action of the whole evening. Sub Demarai Gray picked up a moronic yellow for kicking the ball away with basically the last action of the game.

When one-time Blues transfer target Kwame Poku stepped off the bench it started to feel like Rangers, remarkably, might be able to do just that. Poku beat a man and set Vale up for a good chance deflected wide, then cut another dangerous cross into the six-yard box which took the defence and Beadle out of the game but nobody was on hand for a tap in. With two minutes left to play the former Peterborough winger widened the angle and went himself with a 20 yarder which looked for all money to have flown into the net from the away end at the other end of the ground. Celebrations cut short by cruel reality. A final humiliation for what little is left of our travelling support who’d spent the prior 88 minutes being yawped at by a three-toothed local with a gold chain which would double the ocean plastic problem if it ever fell into the sea.

The post-match interviews were far more interesting than the game itself.

Stéphan, who’d gone out to bat for his players at St Mary’s and taken the blame for the result himself, described the first half they turned out here as “embarrassing”. He was not wrong.

“A lack of intensity, a lack of quality, I think we lost the first seven or eight duels in the first two or three minutes,” the Frenchman said. “Coming on the pitch like this… … conceding so many situations all over the pitch was not the plan. The players who came on in the second half showed some quality, some intensity, some energy as well. If you want to get a result, especially away from home, you have to play for 90 minutes, not 45. We need to understand very, very quickly it’s not possible to drop performance like this for 45 minutes. Playing for only 45 minutes away from home it’s not impossible but it’s a miracle to get a result when you do that. We need to be aware of the situation. It’s four defeats in a row. No panic, but be very aware of the situation. Understand very well we need to win four points, and it’s very important to restart something positive.”

This is all starting to sound very much like Marti Cifuentes a year ago. We constantly say the manager is not the problem at QPR because we flip flop between them all the time and every March ends up looking like this one. I think it’s very clear who’s chiefly responsible for this mess, and it’s not Julien Stéphan. Nevertheless, it’s very difficult to defend how he’s going about an admittedly very difficult job at the moment. It’s his job to organise and motivate the team. To field a team made up almost entirely of centre backs, with the clear intention of getting another 0-0 away draw, and then concede after five minutes from your own throw, does not suggest an engaged playing group at one with their head coach.

Sack him, by all means. I think it’s more likely than not I’ll be sitting here next March writing this same match report.

Captain Jimmy Dunne was more pointed still: “Frustrating. I’d apologise to the support for the recent results, I hope they don’t feel it’s through lack of effort. We’re trying to rediscover ourselves through the last few weeks and it’s been difficult and frustrating. Going forwards the group have discussed blocking out the noise and focusing on what we can do better. Focus on what we can do better, try to be strategic, logical and not too emotional about things. We need to look at ourselves, individually, in the mirror. Myself and everyone included. We need to give more, do more and find better solutions. I’ve been in the position before at QPR. We will find a way to bring better results back to the supporters.

“Sometimes when you’re not clear on a few things it looks like a lack of effort. I don’t think it’s a collective lack of effort. As individuals we probably need to look at ourselves and as team mates we probably need to dig each other out more. I think it’s clarity for some people in some areas. They started with good intensity and we didn’t match that. In the Championship every team will start a game with that intensity and if we’re not up for that physically and mentally then it’s very difficult. At Leicester we have to start the game like our lives depend on it.”

This is all starting to sound very much like Chris Martin when he was here.

All feels like it’s about to go pop.

Saturday, at Leicester… absolutely fascinating.

Birmingham: Beadle N/A; Iwata 6, Klarer 6, Robinson 6, Laird 7 (Panzo 67, 6); Seung-ho 7, Solis 7; Roberts 7 (Vicente 76, 6), Ducksch 6 (Fujimoto 76, 6), Osman 8 (Gray 67, 7); Stansfield 7 (Furuhashi 90+2, -)

Subs not used: Allsopp, Neumann, Osayi-Samuel

Goals: Stansfield 5 (assisted Osman)

Yellow Cards: Osman 24 (foul), Laird 45 (foul), Beadle 81 (time wasting), Gray 90+7 (kicking the ball away)

QPR: Walsh 6; Mbengue 4, Dunne 5, Cook 6 (Norrington-Davies 58, 5), Clarke-Salter 4 (Hayden 79, 5); Vale 4, Varane 2 (Morgan 46, 6), Edwards 6, Smyth 5 (Poku 70, 6); Kone 4, Saito 2 (Kolli 46, 6)

Subs not used: Adamson, Hamer, Bennie, Smith

QPR Star Man – Kwame Poku 6 Posed attacking threat. Looked interested in the game and the outcome of it.

Referee – Anthony Backhouse (Carlisle) 6 Little to referee, did that mostly fine. Haven’t seen it back but there was one in the first half where Klarer seemed to bat a ball away from Kone with his arm in the penalty area on the official’s blindside, but Edwards got away with a handball at the other end too.

Attendance – 25,212 (650ish QPR) The beatings will continue until morale improves.

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