QPR’s annual collapse from a promising mid-season is in full flight, and we’re getting to change-the-manager and look-over-our-shoulder time as the R’s head to struggling Leicester on Saturday.

Leicester (11-11-15 LDDLDW 21st) v QPR (13-8-16 LWLLLL 18th)

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The collapse in QPR seasons really should be studied by psychology students.

Obviously the most ridiculous example was 2022/23 when Rangers were top of the league on October 22 and ended up finishing 20th, at one stage winning two of 27 games and surviving relegation only courtesy of a remarkable win at champions-elect Burnley three games out from the end.

It’s a pattern that has played out in varying degrees of extreme several times. That Mick Beale/Neil Critchley/Gareth Ainsworth disaster followed on from Mark Warburton’s last season where QPR were third in December, and fourth at the end of January – two points off second and with a six-point cushion from seventh – but ended up finishing 11th by winning three of the last 18 fixtures.

Steve McClaren had his team eighth at the end of November and was sacked long before it finally limped home in 19th. Warburton’s first season had the team sitting 12th, six points shy of the play-offs, when the country went into lockdown – this week six years ago, can you believe? When football resumed, in June, Rangers had nine games to play including Barnsley H (24th), Luton A (23rd), Charlton A (22nd), Wigan A (20th) and Sheff Wed H (15th). They won just two of them, and finished 13th, with Ebere Eze in the side.

Even last year, despite the horrible start of two wins in 17 games, Marti Cifuentes had hauled the team to within four points of the play-offs when they beat Derby 4-0 on Valentine’s Day. They lost the next four on the spin and won only three of 13 through to May.

This is why both regular readers will hear and see me say all the time that the manager/head coach is not really your problem here. McClaren, Warburton, Critchley and Cifuentes have all lost their jobs after these spring collapses – beware the Ides of March – and it's starting to feel like Julien Stéphan will go the same way after a disastrous sequence of five defeats in six in which QPR have conceded 16 goals and failed to score at all in their last four (the last time they did that five games in a row was 2002). Nothing ever, broadly, changes.

But that’s not to say managers don’t matter. They absolutely do. You saw that when we switched from Ainsworth to Cifuentes. It’s very hard to defend the way Stéphan is going about his work at the moment. You can’t help but think even a basic Championship character, like the one in the opposite dugout tomorrow, would be doing a lot better than this. I guess I just don’t envy any manager having to work in this set up, with this fitness regime and this injury list. More importantly still I suspect if you do bin him off you’d basically get Julian Stéphan 2.0 for next season – a head coach rather than a manager, a cog for the wider machine rather than a strong and charismatic leader in his own right, almost certainly French or with connections and experience in the French market.

When we get to this point of the QPR doom loop everybody likes to alight on someone, or one thing, to blame.

Usually that’s the manager first and foremost as he’s the figurehead and the easiest to sack. I would say, having gone out of your way to make it clear the manager is not the be all and end all, he’s merely the coach in a wider system and it’s a collective responsibility, that would be harder to do this time and leave everybody else in place. But it’s QPR, so I suspect that is what will happen if this continues, and the spin will go into overdrive about how it was all Stéphan’s doing really (as it did last year with Cifuentes). Still, like I say, I wouldn’t defend Stéphan’s approach or tactics at the moment – the set up against Middlesbrough in particular was incompetent and negligent plain and simple.

The club have twice put “head of performance” Ben Williams up at fans forums to justify and explain the approach to fitness and injuries across the season. Naturally, now a second successive season has been completely derailed by injuries (and if any of us were still harbouring doubts about Nicolas Madsen haven’t we just been shown that the team cannot even function without him now), a lot of fans are alighting there for their figure of blame. Totally understandable and justifiable, questions have to be asked about a massively overstaffed “performance” department and its lead. But the same thing happened in the Steve McClaren season – a terrible pre-season, a dire start, some emergency short term measures at great expense the end of the summer window, and then a very select group of players run on take-off power until they all broke down by the end of January.

Recruitment, too, is coming under the microscope – not for the first time. Christian Nourry and the head of recruitment Andy Belk did better last summer, adding EFL experience, pace and athleticism as well as two decent strikers to a team that had none of that and was therefore painfully easy to play against previously. However, they took a team with well known and very obvious issues at goalkeeper, full back and central midfield into the summer, and came out the other side with the same. In January we added another centre back and a striker the same as one we’ve already got, while letting one of our most reliable, experienced and senior central midfielders go on loan to a team now above us in the table. It’s a squad that’s been put together with several single points of failure. They spent a chunky amount of money (relative to our usual outlay) doing it as well. We talked for years about what happens when Ebere Eze gets sold, what we’ll do with that money, how much we’ll get, what a gamechanger it could be… here it is, and there it went, and where are we? Still 18th.

The players have escaped relatively free of criticism to this point. Jimmy Dunne’s midweek post-match interview was good. He said the players had to have a good look at themselves in the mirror and ask if they could be doing more. I like Jimmy a lot, his interview sounded a lot like the things Chris Martin was saying here three years ago. But he did also say “sometimes when you’re not clear on a few things it can look like a lack of effort”. Certainly Koki Saito, giving another horrendous performance, didn’t even seem to know where he should be standing half the time. That is on the manager – organisation and motivation. But we had a lot of senior players involved in that game – Dunne, Clarke-Salter, Cook, Hayden, Norrington-Davies. A lot of them were on the pitch for the Wrexham collapse, for the Southampton thrashing, for the Boro humiliation. Do you need a manager to tell you to run? To tackle? To close down a cross? Could somebody not have taken it upon themselves to go and stand in that space Hayden Hackney was wallowing about in last Sunday for a bit? The first half at Birmingham was a disgrace, do we think Stéphan told them to play like that? We haven’t even tackled anybody for about a fortnight – we’re getting absolutely pumped at the moment and it’s three games since we even got a yellow card.

The reality is it’s a whole collection of factors. And if we win a couple of games, this will all go away again – “usual headloss after a defeat”. The themes, however, remain a lack of leadership, a lack of accountability, and a lack of ambition.

It just feels to me like it’s always somebody else’s fault, like there’s a lack of honesty. The club are going out of their way to avoid scrutiny. Interview access has been reduced, pulled, or editorial control eroded. Transfer fees - undisclosed. Contract lengths - secret. Injuries - GDPR mate. What injury updates they were putting on the official website now seem to have ceased, and the old ones deleted. We’ve signed a lad who hasn’t been seen since he put pen to paper because he’s got bone bruising in his shin, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but instead of just saying that the club stay silent on it allowing a vacuum to persist and conspiracy theories to run riot. Fans forum - stick it out before the season starts and that’ll do for the year. Have an interview, as long as you don’t ask about Marti Cifuentes. Invite questions for an online q&a with the coaching staff – never happens. When an online q&a is held with the CEO, the questions selected are “do we have open academy trials?” and “can we rotate the pitch 90 degrees?” and “do we scout Norway?” and it’s whacked out Friday night before the accounts land the following week so no questions about those are possible.

People are entitled to their opinions. Many won’t agree with this, and that’s fine. Personally, I still think it was crazy to take the CEO and DOF roles (two big gigs in their own right), slam them together and give them to a 20-something who’d never done either job before. I still cannot believe Ruben and Lee Hoos did it. It certainly wouldn't happen at Westports. C-suite execs are in their 40s and 50s – the average age for a CEO in this country is 53-58 – and that’s because you need experience and you need people skills to do the job, both of which are picked up over time. QPR is a difficult club to run.

The first thing I would do this summer is separate those two back out and seek strong, experienced characters for the roles. In these circumstances I want somebody who has been there before, knows how to handle it, and somebody who’s willing to front up properly in tough times. It doesn’t have to be a former QPR figure - in fact it might be better that it isn’t given our club’s over-fondness for choosing ex-players to cure all our ills - but there are names from the club’s past out there doing those jobs really well elsewhere who would love a swing at it. The bleed of QPR people out of the club at the moment is another concern, for me in any case.

I don’t know if there is the will, the drive, the desire to do that though. What does Ruben want? To sell it? For it to be successful? To keep it ticking along? To put it in a box and forget about it? To escape? We never hear from him to know. The people who he employs to run it for him have serious questions to answer, but we rarely hear from them in an open, uncontrolled way either. At the moment it's crickets.

If you go back to that fans forum in August, when the panel was asked what would constitute “success” for QPR, the first answer was “a younger squad”. Jon De Souza said: “If we’re able to be here in five years’ time still consistently delivering the same messages that means we’ve been successful.”

Did somebody say “ambition”? That’s ours is it? To be here in five years’ time saying the same thing? Works for me, I'll just copy and paste this, but sport is about winning. Even the QPR fans want to win, deep down.

In the meantime we’re back at that point where we’re looking over our shoulder wondering how Portsmouth have got on, how many games are left, and where the four points we need are coming from. Every year I sit here and tell you with a nine-point gap and nine games to go you could probably lose seven times and still not go down because if you win the other two it means Oxford have to win six. We always run it close, I always end up nearly looking silly, but so far it hasn’t caught up with us.

With the likes of Watford, Bristol City and Swansea still to come to Loftus Road, and at least some of the walking wounded coming back (Kwame Poku a big positive from the midweek) that should be the case again. Usually at this stage we pick a surprise result up from somewhere, and perhaps a fragile Leicester side with one win in 13 games and one clean sheet in 31 matches might be the opportunity tomorrow on a ground we tend to do quite well on.

It’ll catch us out one day though. And while the club is set up like it is, led like it is, talking like it is and behaving like it is, it’s hard to believe it won’t look like this in March 2027, and I won’t be sitting here saying the same things all over again.

Links >>> Rowett’s latest rescue mission – Oppo Profile >>> Nygaard’s Van Basten tribute – History >>> Whitestone in charge – Referee >>> Leicester City Official Site >>> Leicester Mercury – Local press >>> Foxes Talk – Message Board >>> When you’re smiling – Podcast >>> The Final Whistle – Vlog >>> Fosse Posse – Fan Site

Parish Noticeboard – for reasons known only to themselves, Sky have chosen QPR’s home game with Bristol City for live TV coverage at 12.30 on Saturday April 11. They’re showing Norwich v Ipswich at the same time, but want ours as well, because.

Below the fold

Team News: Steve Cook the latest to collapse with a savage contact injury during the loss at Birmingham so he joins a crippling absentee list of Nicolas Madsen, Rumarn Burrell, Ziyad Larkeche, Karamoko Dembele, Ilias Chair and Justin Obikwu. There is some suggestion the latter’s bone bruising may have cleared up enough for some involvement against Portsmouth next week. Amadou Mbengue has successfully dodged the 37-game yellow card amnesty for ten bookings so now has six yellows in hand before his next ban. Kwame Poku looked good in his 20-minute cameo at St Andrew’s.

Jannik Vestergaard has missed the last eight games for Leicester and is not ready for this one either despite returning to training this week. Other long termers Aaron Ramsey and Harry Soutar are also ‘back on the grass’ but this game comes too soon. Captain calamity Asmir Begovic and left-back Victor Kristiansen are the Foxes’ only two first team squad members not currently training.

Elsewhere: An all-Welsh affair this evening between Wrexham and Swansea, although given it’s a good three and a half hours by either road or rail you’d be hard pushed to term it a derby. Not sure that’ll stop Gary Weaver screaming on about dragons all night mind, given Sky used to bill Plymouth v Portsmouth as a derby because they both have boats.

The early Saturday games focus very much on the race for the title. Coventry are motoring off into the distance with an eight-point gap now and six straight victories. They’ll have a tough gig extending that at home to Southampton, and divisional manager of the month Tonda Eckert, whom they haven’t beaten in six attempts. Middlesbrough at home to Bristol City will be awaiting any slip. City are in dreadful form but Boro are doing strange things and have lost the last five games against the Robins and are winless in eight.

Boro were surprisingly beaten at home by Charlton in the week leaving Millwall just a point back and with a pretty rotten Blackburn side at The Den tomorrow the Lions could move into the top two for the first time. Mind you, it’s two wins in 20 games against Rovers for Alex Neil’s side. Ipswich have had two controversial last minute penalty decisions go against them in two games, but shouldn’t need luck to get the win they need tomorrow at Sheff Wed.

Just three points separate five teams at the bottom. West Brom are now second bottom ahead of their homer with Hull, who have won ten away games so far this season – one more than the Baggies have managed in total. Oxford, at home to Charlton, are only goal difference behind Leicester and those two are then only one back from Blackburn who have that awkward trip to The Den.

Portsmouth, having played their way up the table, are now back in the shit after a bad run of results and must wait until Monday night to take their swing at Derby at Fratton Park – another kind Sky pick for the fans that one.

The rest of it is very midtable indeed – Birmingham v Sheff Utd, Norwich v Preston and Stoke v Watford.

Referee: Experienced Championship referee Dean Whitestone for this one. His first QPR game was way back in 2008 against Colchester. Details.

Form

- QPR won the first meeting 4-1 at Loftus Road after scoring four times before half time. At that point Rangers were seventh, one point behind Millwall in sixth. Julian Stéphan's side have won only three of 16 since and are now 18th in the league, with a ten-point gap to sixth and a 21-point stretch to Millwall.

- QPR had won five of seven games when last they played Leicester. This time they have lost five of the prior six, conceding 16 goals in the process. The R’s are on a run of four straight defeats to nil in which they’ve shipped 12 goals.

- QPR have lost four games without scoring for the first time since December 2016. They haven’t gone five league games without scoring a goal since 2002 (Port Vale A 0-0, Northampton H 0-1, Luton A 0-0, Cardiff H 0-4, Notts County A 0-3) – both those sequences were under Ian Holloway and the latter also featured two debacles with Vauxhall Motors woven in there.

- QPR have conceded 59 times in the Championship this season, only Sheff Wed (74) have a worse defensive record. In the last ten seasons Rangers have conceded 60+ goals in a season on six occasions and 70+ on four.

- Leicester’s midweek victory against Bristol City was their first in 12 games. Their clean sheet, secured with a second half penalty save by Jakub Stolarczyk, was their first shut out in 31 games (the club’s longest run without one since 1957).

- Leicester had taken just four points from ten games prior to that victory, but they have now lost just one of five under Gary Rowett and taken six points from 15 available.

- Leicester are currently locked on 38 points with third bottom Oxford having been deducted six points for repeated financial infringements. With the points back on they would be 19th, three behind QPR and have actually lost one fewer game than the R’s (15 v 16).

- Leicester have only ever played in the third tier of English football once – Nigel Pearson’s side won the League One title and made an immediate Championship return in 2008/09. They’re currently trying to avoid becoming the fifth side to be relegated straight from Premier League to tier three - Swindon, Wolves, Sunderland and Luton the prior four.

- QPR’s surprise 3-1 win at Hull is their only away win in 11 attempts. The R’s have won two of their last 14 away games after winning three and drawing one of the four just before that.

- QPR had eight shots on target in that Hull win, more than they’ve managed cumulatively in the four games since (three v Sheff Utd and Boro, one at Southampton and Birmingham).

- Abdul Fatawu and Jordan James are joint top Leicester scorers with nine league goals each.

- Leicester have lost their last five home league games against London teams by an aggregate score of 12-0, last winning in December 2024 in a 3-1 win against West Ham. They were most recently beaten 2-0 here by Charlton.

- Gary Rowett has won just two of his last 12 league games against QPR (D5 L5) and is winless in three (D1 L2).

- QPR are looking for a league double over Leicester for the first time since the 2010-11 campaign when they won the Championship title under Neil Warnock.

- QPR’s only double so far this season is against Hull (3-2, 3-1). This game is one of three remaining chances to secure another (Leicester A, Bristol City H, Swansea H).

- This is one of those new grounds where QPR tend to do quite well as a visiting team. Rangers have won four and drawn one of their last eight visits here including their last league visit the season before last when Ilias Chair and Sinclair Armstrong scored the goals.

Prediction

In our Prediction League for 2025/26 we’ll once again be handing out prizes for being top at Christmas and overall winner from The Art of Football - sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. QPR_Hibs won last season’s Prediction League at a canter and is lending his thoughts to this year’s previews…

“A couple of months ago, a friend of mine and her husband went on a fortnight’s cruise around the Caribbean. They were surprised to find that, staying in the berth next to them, was ‘the one and only’ Chesney Hawkes. It transpires that he was doing a few shows on board in preparation for his ‘Smash It To Pieces’ Tour of the UK – Friday 6 March Gloucester Guildhall, Saturday 7 Kendal Brewery Arts Centre. You get the idea with that…... I vaguely recall seeing him perform at Rewind 80’s festival many years ago, which was odd because his huge selling debut single was released in 1991. Anyway, my friend told me that he was actually not that bad, and a bloody nice bloke too. VIP tickets are (not surprisingly) still available for Bush Hall on Wednesday March 18. It’ll certainly be more entertaining than going to watch the Rangers.

“The less said about Wednesday evening’s game with Birmingham the better. It’s a good job that I think that xG figures are a load of old rubbish, otherwise I might have completely lost the plot seeing the first half stats for QPR of 0 shots, 0 big chances, 0 corners and 0 xG. Surely that’s a first in the Championship since records began. We improved slightly with the introduction of a couple of half-time substitutions (an unprecedented move from Julien) and presumably some sort of explanation that the game had actually started and that this wasn’t a Birmingham open training session. Another injury, this time to Steve Cook, makes the decision to loan Sam Field to Norwich look even more mystifying. The only positive on the night was a cameo appearance from Kwame Poku.

“To paraphrase our captain, Jimmy Dunne, there appeared to a lack of understanding as to what the plan actually was on Wednesday, and possibly a lack of effort from a few players? These are just a couple of things that need to improve considerably for our away trip to Leicester on Saturday. For me, another improvement needs to be in the quality of the delivery of our free kicks and corners, which was dreadful from the usually reliable Vale. The team selection will be the same or similar to the last game, because there’s NOBODY else. Unusually, this game is kicking off at 15.00 on a Saturday, because someone at Sky failed to flag it up as a relegation six-pointer. 'You're a lightweight- you're fired!'

“It would be good to keep a clean sheet. It would be a miracle if we could score a goal. It would take us 12 points clear of Leicester if we could sneak a win. Will any of these things happen? I’d say we’ve got more chance of signing Harrison Burrows to play at centre back.”

QPR_Hibs Prediction: Leicester 2-0 QPR. No scorer.

LFW’s Prediction: Leicester 2-0 QPR. No scorer.

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