QPR bring a wildly inconsistent autumn to a close with a visit from a Lincoln City side that won’t want possession of the ball and will spend what bits of the afternoon are theirs heaving long throws at you. Enjoy.

QPR (5-6-3 DWLWLD 11th) v Lincoln (4-3-7 LLDWLL 19th)

Sky’s Super Saturday Brunch Spectacular >>> Saturday November 7, 2026 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather – Grey. Cold. >>> Loftus Road, London, W12

One of the greatest sports documentaries ever filmed (you’ll never sing that) is The Four Year Plan. It is the perfect combination of unfettered access to big personalities overseeing a hubristic catastrophe until a final throw of the dice brings in a grizzled veteran for what he’s assured his wife will be his one, last, final job. He saves the day in the third act. Pure, cinematic, perfection.

About that title, though.

I’ll let you into a secret... Every one of these 92 clubs that make up this financially cataclysmic shitshow, reckon they’re working to a four year plan. Everybody is going to be better, four years from now.

Some of those plans are better hidden than others. Rotherham United, very recently a league fixture for QPR (a league fixture we tended to lose), now third bottom of the Football League with Alex Bruce as manager (when you’re so far in the shit you can’t even afford/persuade Steve) and Schteve McClaren hovering round in the background like a spare prick at a particularly flaccid orgy. Long serving chairman has talked of being a Premier League club ten years from now. This is not as hot a party as I had anticipated.

Wigan: from the Premier League and FA Cup winners, to now potentially League Two. Barnsley looking fairly certain to go the same way: an austerity drive that has asset stripped a Championship yo-yo club back to the third lowest wage bill in League One and it’s second worst team. Leicester City, my God. And there we find Peterborough United as well - Darragh threatening to sell up if they’re not top ten by January, and employing The Blond Bombshite to make it happen.

At the opposite end of the scale you have Brighton. Their CEO goes on the Jake Humphrey High Performance Podcast and - much as we’d like to take the piss - there’s really no reason they can’t win the Premier League, if not this year then in reasonably short order. Particularly while Man Utd look like this, and Man City to surely shortly follow. Brentford, hmmmm. Bournemouth, fuck’s sake. And now, in our league, Middlesbrough flying high, Swansea tucked in behind. Ooooh we buy low and sell high, we develop players to trade, have you seen the shoulders on Will Lankshear? Grow up.

The thing they all have in common, though… The all reckon they’ve got a Four Year Plan. And at the end of every season, three of them go up, three of them go down, and the rest stay exactly where they were.

You walk into a fans forum at any club in this country and - no matter how badly things are going, how desperate they appear - there’ll be a bloke in a suit there who tells you they have a business plan and strategy laid out for the next three to four years. It’ll be built around data, analytics, and AI. It’ll be centred on recruitment, youth development, and a player trading model. It’ll be lowering the average age of the team, promoting from the academy, scouting underestimated European markets. And, if everybody can just be patient, four years from now you can meet us in St Louis. Probably on some pre-season tour.

(This entirely excludes Mansfield, who run a retirement home for tattooed northern footballers overseen by Nigel Clough and punch two divisions above their weight as a result).

With their owners’ proprietary data models, Brentford and Brighton (unfortunately) are different to this. For the rest, unless (like Swansea, Hearts, and Ipswich before them) you can licence a bit of that good stuff from Matthew Benham or Tony Bloom, it’s difficult to reinvent the wheel. Data led recruitment? Congratulations, welcome to everybody else. There’s a reason half the Championship, including us, tried to sign Nolan Galves this summer (ended up at West Brom). Everybody is telling you they're being smart with data, everybody is looking at the same players for the same reasons - bar two, who sit third and sixth in the top flight.

This has been going on for a long time too. I remember, circa 1997, living in Scunthorpe (Do. Not. Ask.) and every house in the town got a flyer through the door from the owner of Scunthorpe United outlining his four (might have been ten, to be fair to him) year plan to establish the Iron as a First Division club. The notion of that at the time was hilarious. My grandad laughed so hard it nearly finished him off – didn’t have to wait long as it turned out, we’d have taken that bloody pamphlet off him if we’d known how close to the edge he was.

Scunthorpe, at this point, had a midfield of David D’Auria and Alex Calvo Garcia. That sounds exotic, edgy, and Premier League. It was not. D'Auria signed from Scarborough. Although, to be fair, Garcia (I like Garcia, tell me why you like Garcia) was a steady Basque midfield player with a tight black perm who was very popular among the girls in my year at school. Certainly more popular than I was. Nothing about the club was remotely higher division. To get into a game, if you weren’t a member, you had to queue at the box office to purchase a small slip of paper that said “DAY MEMBERSHIP” on it for £1. One person handled that queue.

Scunthorpe, though, did get there. With Brian Laws as manager, later replaced by Nigel Adkins, they developed a nice taste in hot strikers (John Eyre, Jamie Forrester, Martin Carruthers, Billy Sharp, Gary Hooper, Andy Keogh, Steve McClean) and an attractive, attacking style of football. At one point, with an ageing Peter Beagrie on one wing and a young West Ham graduate Lee Hodges on the other, they were a fantastic watch. Remarkably, to me as somebody who spent his teenage years in the town, they did play Championship football, famously beating Newcastle United into the bargain. Unfortunately they knocked us over at both Loftus Road and, infamously, 4-1 at Glanford Park (just fucking put a bullet in me now).

That was built on the chairmanship of Steve Wharton, a local landowner who provided an indoor training facility for the lads by grass seeding the floor of one of his barns. Famously tight, to the absolute distraction of the managers, he stewarded that club expertly. Once he was gone plenty other more "ambitious" owners came, willing to spend big money to realise some pipe dream of Scunthorpe United being even more than that (read the room). One was heavily, dangerously, indebted to casinos. The next, Steve Hilton, went by four different identities. If you’re looking for Scunthorpe now, you’ll find them - two bankruptcies and rescue packages later - third bottom of the Conference. They didn't even sink that low when Jason White was clogging around up front.

I guess the point I’m making here is it’s about people. Anybody can have a plan. If it’s Steve Hilton, Peter Swann, Steve McClaren, Robbie Savage in charge of it then it may as well be written on a cracker, which we’ll give to Polly for safekeeping. If it’s Benham, Bloom, Steve Gibson, Steve Wharton… well you might have a chance. Our Four Year Plan only succeeded because of a brief, perfect collaboration of Amit Bhatia, Ishan Saksena and Neil Warnock while Flavio took a back seat. For a long time before, and immediately afterwards, it was a total fucking shit show. People matter. How you treat people matters.

Lincoln, just down the straightest road in the country (what did the Romans ever do for us?) from Scunthorpe, are another prime example.

Lincolnshire is not a footballing hotbed. Scunthorpe have fluttered and died. Grimsby have decayed away, but are now showing signs of life under a truly game-changing and dreamy owner. Lincoln were always the poor relation of those two when I was growing up, bar one spell where the late Keith Alexander got them going with a John Beck (one of his Lincoln predecessors) approach. A massive back three that included Gareth McAuley, and a long throw serenaded by an air raid siren in the town of the Dambusters.

The three of them sat in the shadow of the Sheffield clubs and Hull City. The Tigers were themselves shambolically run and - for a brief and hilarious time - had Mark Hateley as player manager. Nevertheless, they would maraud over the Humber Bridge and revisit the time of the Vikings on these provincial towns with occasional input from Dean Windass and early Championship Manager legend Duane Darby.

The Imps have done what I always felt impossible. They have climbed from six years of non-league football to the Championship in a decade. They have survived the departure of, what felt at the time, like three inspirational managers – The Cowleys, Michael Appleton, Michael Skubala. They were tipped by many (okay, us) to finish bottom this year. They lost their best player, Jack Moylan, to a team that was promoted behind them last year. And they keep going. You do that through really good people.

Lincoln City are basically the best run club in this country right now. They were already punching when in League One and yet they’ve happily been there for seven years, never in any relegation trouble, never lower than 17th. Even before Skubala arrived and put them over the top, The Imps have threatened to come out of that division before, finishing fifth and losing the 2021 play-off semi-final under Appleton, and narrowly missing out in seventh Skubala’s first year. This was not a story of one genius manager and they’re now bereft without him. There are very solid foundations here that have sustained five changes of bosses across ten years that have seen them go from non-league to the Championship. This has been overseen and funded by South African chairman Clive Nates (who has been succeeded by former San Diego Padres owner Ron Fowler but remains on the board) and CEO Liam Scully will be attracting admiring glances from elsewhere with the job that he’s doing as well.

They have made it a point of their identity to be as open, honest and transparent with the support base about everything they’re doing. Scully has an account on the club’s main message board where he addresses supporters directly and answers questions as they arise. They might not have the best team in the Championship, but the fan zone outside is second to none. Scully was told on arrival it wouldn’t be possible because “that’s where the directors park their cars”. There has been a real mind shift here over time. They’ve made it part of their mission to involve the people of the city, bring them in and go on the journey together. The official website carries in detail profiles of the board and executive team – who they are, where they’ve come from, what their experience is, why they’re here, what they do.

Let me tell you, you’re not going to like watching them tomorrow. They’re horrible. This is going to be a war. Jimmy Dunne is going to need to have his big coat on. They are bottom of the league for possession, top of it for long passes. They have not one, but two blokes in this team that can throw the ball from Sincil Bank to the North Sea. They’ll have 25% of the ball, and they’ll love that. Our Watford correspondent told me their game at Vicarage Road on Tuesday was one of the worst things he’s ever seen (didn’t stipulate whether that just meant football games).

With five defeats from seven games the harsh realities of life at the higher level may be catching up with the pesky Imps as the opposition match analysis gets wise to their tactics (not you, Burnley). But, they know what they’re about. They’ve had this identity for many a long year, through Beck (who signed Gareth Ainsworth in a double QPR connection), the much missed Alexander, the Cowleys and dramatic combover merchant Matt Rhead in attack, to what they have now where it doesn’t matter if the manager leaves because you just put his coaches in charge and carry on regardless.

QPR could, should, win this comfortably to finish off a satisfactory October period we all saw as very difficult on paper. But… that nagging doubt that Rangers have had 78 cracks at winning with more possession than the opponent over two years and failed every time is about to get its kryptonite test.

The most dangerous thing about this? For the visitors, who already have three away wins to their name (all 1-0, yikes), this doesn’t matter. It’s an ‘Arry special bonus game. They need to do exactly what they’ve been doing – beat Bolton, beat Preston, beat Burnley, beat Derby, and just swing punches at all the rest. It’s a club with a sound plan, and really good people behind it – although, I stress again, you’re going to hate watching this.

It’s a big moment for QPR’s own, latest version. "The project". After frustrating draws with Bolton, Preston, Charlton and now Burnley, you’ve got to start knocking these over.

Otherwise, well, it’s all just words isn’t it?

Links >>> Southampton Awaydays – Patreon Podcast >>> Been a while – History >>> Nobody’s Fool – Oppo Profile >>> Madley in charge – Referee >>> Lincoln City Official Website >>> Football Ground Guide – Sincil Bank >>> The Linc – Local Paper >>> The Stacey West – Contributor’s Blog

Parish Noticeboard…

- Shepherd’s Bush Overground station is closed all weekend. No Overground or Southern services between Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction Saturday or Sunday.

Below The Fold

Team News: With Nicolas Madsen, Rumarn Burrell and Tariq Lamptey all out until after the internationals and Jake Clarke-Salter seemingly on paid leave again one would think it’s unlikely to be a great deal different to the side which played in midweek with the usual shuffling and rotation of people like Kwame Poku and Koki Saito. Ilias Chair was good enough for half an hour against Burnley and more minutes from him would be a big boost to the quality of this attritional looking game, against a club he made his name playing while on loan at Stevenage back in 2019.

Lincoln fired blanks at struggling Watford during the week, losing 1-0 at Vicarage Road, and now face another long trek back down south for this one four days later mirroring the nonsense facing QPR for the return fixture. Top scorer Mikkel Ladefoged sat out that defeat due to concussion but the protocols do allow him to return on Saturday assuming he’s fit and well. Justas well, with fellow striker Ben House picking up a fifth yellow card and one match ban in that game. Man Utd loanee Ethan Wheatley is a medium term absentee but close to a return, as is midfielder Conor McGrandles.

Elsewhere: A Friday night televised affair between Derby and Bolton is a challenging wank indeed, but with the Rams now seven points adrift of safety and conceding at a rate of four goals a game (three times in the last five that’s happened) it’s surely goodnight John Eustace if they lose again tonight at the end of a week where they’ve let in eight already to Millwall and Norwich. County return on the other side of the international break to three away games in four at Southampton, Wolves and Middlesbrough. Ouch. Derby certainly giving it the big build up in any case. The car park shall remain locked until morale improves...

Supporters are reminded that, should a large number of fans leave the stadium early, some temporary road and car park closures may be implemented to ensure the safety of pedestrians. These closures will remain in place until it is deemed safe to reopen the affected roads and car parks.— Derby County Supporter Services (@DCFC_SLO) November 6, 2026

A big, big win for Wrexham during the week at home to league leaders Middlesbrough. The archetypal “easing the pressure on manager…” Phil Parkinson football cliché, and watch that mood continue to do a full 180 if they head into the break on the back of another victory this weekend against fellow promotion chasers Wolves. That’s the pick of the three lunchtime games tomorrow, although there’s intrigue elsewhere. QPR are generally considered to have had a good start, but have quietly slipped below the Portsmouth side they beat on the opening day of the season. Pompey can maintain/extend that advantage with another home game tomorrow, albeit their opponent Stoke are now (ludicrously) up to fourth. Similarly, Norwich are widely seen to have had a bit of a nightmare to begin their year after such high hopes in the summer – the Canaries can be level with Rangers by kick off tomorrow if they win their early game at Bristol City. Narrative, baby.

It’s been a week of private jets and public humbling for West Ham. Scott Parker’s new manager bounce was more concrete floor than a trampoline as Cardiff surged into a three goal lead by half time on Wednesday. My summer prediction that Jack Moylan will cost you £10m next summer is fast becoming £15m by January, and it’ll probably be Championship seal clubber Parker who buys him – “the boys are perhaps just a little bit low on confidence and need that extra bit of help and quality”. The Hammers did rally to 3-3 to be fair, and could/should have won in the end, so watch out Blackburn away. Cardiff, meanwhile, host hapless Burnley.

I don’t think many would have picked out Birmingham (3rd) v Swansea (5th) as the game of round 15 before we got started, and yet here we are. Most would have had West Brom (6th) against Millwall (14th) the other way round in the sweep, but that chronic injury list is really taking its toll on Alex Neil’s side.

For the other promotion chasers, highly winnable away games: Middlesbrough, still first, go to Watford (three wins in 14); Sheff Utd, quietly honing in and up to ninth, go to Charlton (no wins in 11); Southampton, gaining fast in seventh and joint top but for their deduction, get the gimme at Preston this week (last victory refereed by Plato).

The weekend list is rounded out byyyyyyyyyy… no, that’s it, I’ve mentioned everything. Two weeks off, Merry Christmas American Airlines 965 you do a great job good night.

Referee: Former Premier League referee Robert Madley is in charge of this one. Only his second QPR game in ten years either side of his controversial four year absence from the sport. Details.

Form

- As QPR have become more inconsistent, so they have faded back towards midtable. They come into this game 11th, as low as they’ve been all season following an October in which they won 4-1 and 5-0 at home, lost 3-0 and 4-1 away, and sandwiched that hot nonsense with a pair of 1-1 draws. Three points from seventh, three points from 15th, they have won two of their last ten games.

- Lincoln have also gone through the extremes this month, losing 6-0 to one of the parachute clubs West Ham and then winning 4-1 against another Burnley. They have lost five of their last seven matches coming into this one, including the previous two this week against Birmingham (3-1) and Watford (1-0). It’s as many as they’d lost in their previous 42 (W28 D9). They arrive in West London 17th in the table.

- Lincoln are playing at this level for the first time since 1961 and have so far found their uniquely direct style more suited to games away from Sincil Bank. Three of their four league wins have all been away (Bolton, Bristol City, Preston) and all of them by the same 1-0 scoreline. They are 1-2-4 at home and 3-1-3 away.

- QPR, meanwhile, have lost only one of eight at home in all comps (W3, D4) but have conversely only won three of their last 11 games in W12. They have four clean sheets in 26 games on their own patch.

- Only Burnley (seven) have drawn more Championship games than QPR (six) this season, with five of the Hoops’ last nine ending level (W2 L2).

- Lincoln have failed to score in three of the last six, and have conceded 18 goals in their last seven. Only the bottom three and Bolton have shipped more than their 24 goals so far, although six of those did come against West Ham where they were down to nine men inside the first 23 minutes.

- It is now 255 games since QPR last won having trailed by two goals. They’ve had 78 chances to correct that since coming back to beat Millwall 3-2 at Loftus Road during lockdown. Only West Ham (288) have waited longer for such a comeback.

- It’s now 78 games and 25 victories since QPR last beat a team while holding more of the ball than their opponent. The midweek draw here against Burnley was achieved with 57.7% in Rangers’ favour.

- Lincoln play 24.8% of their passes long. It’s easily the highest percentage in the league, ahead of Preston (19.5%). They average 37.5% possession in games which is the lowest Championship total, again next to Preston who average 40.4%.

- Harvey Vale came within an inch of opening the scoring against the Clarets with an early free kick at the Loft End. We are fast approaching the four year anniversary of QPR’s last goal from a direct free kick – Ilias Chair at Middlesbrough in February 2023.

- Lincoln, Preston and Burnley have the joint worst record of conceding goals from set pieces – eight each.

- These teams have only ever met six times before, and have only shared the same league twice (1961/62 and 1948/49). QPR have won four and lost only one of those meetings. The last game saw the R’s, then Second Division, beat the Fourth Division Imps 4-2 in the League Cup in 1972, and the last league meeting was ten years prior to that and saw Rangers win 5-0 at Sincil Bank.

- Richard Kone is now out on his own as QPR’s top scorer after four goals in a week following none in his first nine appearances. Club record signing Mikkel Ladefoged is the top scorer for the visitors with three.

- QPR have lost seven consecutive league games vs Southampton, equalling their longest losing run against a single opponent in league competition (also seven vs Liverpool between 1986 and 1989). @JTSupple

- Como this week equalled the most goals scored by any club in their first four major European matches (19), matching QPR in 1976.

Prediction

In our Prediction League for 2026/27 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. JB007007 won both prizes last year and has kindly agreed to keep up tradition and offer his irrational dislikes of each of our opponents this year…

“The last time we played Lincoln I was barely walking and talking, much like a lot of my Saturday's now.

“I like Lincoln as a city and have some good work related memories going back a few years. They've made a very creditable start to life in the Championship with some notable wins, but results lately have tailed off and this next period will really test them I'm sure.

“I didn't mind some of our performance the other night, just frustrated that we don't (again) have that bit more cutting edge and final ball to finish teams off. That's another poor side that we've dropped valuable points against.

“I am expecting us to get back to winning ways on Saturday and although this will be a tougher game than many think, I'm predicting a 2-0 win with Poku to come back in and score the first goal.”

JB’s Prediction: QPR 2-0 Lincoln. Scorer – Kwame Poku

LFW’s Prediction: QPR 2-0 Lincoln. Scorer – Paul Smyth

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