QPR travelled to South Wales last Wednesday night to witness a goalless draw between Rangers and Cardiff City.

1 – The Match
Delightfully mediocre Championship fair. QPR played with one man up front who kept missing the target and Cardiff knocked long balls to two small fellas in their attack with predictable results against he giant Stewart and Gorkss combination. Clearly the news that target man Jay Bothroyd was injured and not playing had not reached Johnson and co at the back and they just continued to launch balls down the field straight onto QPR heads for the entire evening. Cardiff started the brighter of the two sides but Matt Connolly somehow managed to clear their most serious effort on goal despite laying flat on his back in the six yard box. Rangers came back into he game midway through the half and should have scored when Routledge cut the ball back to Miller but the Irishman seemed somewhat surprised by the whole thing and ended up running the ball into the arms of Konstantopoulos in the Cardiff goal. After half time Michael Chopra showed all the finishing ability and awareness of a Unibond League forward when he snatched at a presentable chance and smashed it over the bar, then snatched at another one and hammered it straight at Kaspars Gorkss who almost kicked through his own net while trying to stifle a giggle. Rangers were far superior for the last half an hour and Heidar Helguson submitted another couple of entries to his own miss of the season competition as the chance for an away win passed us by.
5/10

2 – QPR Performance
Good. Solid. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I am writing this after a supposedly more ambitious QPR line up than this was played off the park by Barnsley on Saturday but in my defence I did say last week that it would be wrong to think an extra striker or 442 formation would have won this game. QPR played far, far better at Cardiff than they did a Barnsley and only failed to win through their own poor finishing. They lost at Barnsley because they were terrible. In defence Stewart and Gorkss were solid, Damien Delaney kept the potentially dangerous Chris Burke under wraps and Gavin Mahon was back to his solid and composed best in front of them. Mikele Leigertwood dominated the midfield and Lee Cook had his best game for some time. Only the finishing of Helguson let us down but even he did not play too badly apart from that.
7/10

3 – QPR Support
Despite travelling in small numbers, 300 Rangers fans is about par for the course on a Wednesday night match rearranged at short notice 150 miles away, the R’s fans were in great voice all night. For twenty minutes in each half the travelling fans sang ‘Paulo Sousa’s blue army’ which not only supported the team and seemed to visibly lift the players but also silenced the vociferous Cardiff fans either side of the away end either through boredom, irritation or tiredness with the relentless chanting from the other side of the fence. This is the best kind of support – positive, loyal, loud and constant. Such a thoroughly welcome change from a weekend spent abusing our own players. If only 50 times that amount of QPR fans could do the same at home matches.
8/10

4 - Atmosphere
Quite possibly a final chance to watch QPR play a league match from a terrace and although this has proved to be an inhospitable part of the world in the past I thoroughly enjoyed it. As already said the atmosphere in the away end was terrific with everybody joining in with the chanting and a really positive attitude from everybody there. Cardiff has never been a particularly hospitable place and as kick off approached the usual gang of chavs and low lifes gathered to our right and left to begin the taunting. In the end though it was more good natured than it has been before – any genuine passion and hate was directed at Wayne Routledge leaving just good natured banter to pass between the two sets of supporters. As said already the twenty minute long chants about Paulo Sousa seemed to bore the home lot into submission and by the end of he game they were very quiet and any noise being made was criticism for the home team. I did raise a smile midway through the first half when the stewards tried to draw a green cloth curtain across between the home and away fans only for those that wanted to keep bantering back and forth to move down all of one block so they could still see each other. Farcical but funny.
7/10

5 – The Ground
Well let’s start with the facts and then get all misty eyed a bit later. Ninian Park is a terrible place. Old, decaying, cold, uninviting – a ground from a different period of time. The toilets in the away end had to be seen to be believed – blocked without exception, surrounded by an inch of piss on the floor and emitting a smell the likes of which has not been smelt in this country since the time of the great plague. The bar and refreshment area was made up of a variety of corrugated iron sheets that look like they have been picked up from the side of railway lines and stolen from building sites over the course of several years. It looked like one of those places you might find in the Outback somewhere, without the nice weather. Or the nice beer. The away end offered a poor view of the pitch, further obscured by various, posts, pillars, wires, ropes, nets and curtains designed to stop the roof falling on us or gifts from the neighbouring Cardiff fans flying through and bludgeoning us around the head. In 2009, at £20 a time, there is no place for facilities like this so high up the Football League.

Yet having said all of that the future home of Cardiff City sat all bright and shiny just across the road and I cannot help but think that we will miss this hovel next season. Cardiff’s new ground will be very nice I’m sure, but it looks just like all the other new stadiums. Another Ricoh Arena for a world that didn’t want or need the first one. Watching games from a terrace used to be taken for granted at football and now they are slowly disappearing with this one about to be the latest one to go. It is a great pity because while this ground clearly needs condemning and pulling down I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t a happy medium somewhere that would allow safe, new terraces to return to English football.

Shit hole it may be but I enjoyed it and I shall miss it next season as we look around and struggle to remember whether we are in Cardiff, Swansea, Leicester, Derby, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Southampton etc etc.
5/10

6 – The Journey
A routine trip that we have done many times before has actually turned into the most expensive trip of the season. First of all we had train tickets booked from Sheffield for the original match at a cost of £70 that were non-refundable. Then with no trains running back that far after the rearranged fixture we had to drive down and got flashed by a speed camera in the M42’s wonderful “active traffic management” system that was “actively managing the traffic” at 1am when I was the only car on the road. I await my notice from West Midlands Police telling me that I was doing 49miles per hour on a motorway in the middle of the night and therefore owe them £60. Add in petrol and all in I have spent £200 getting to this bloody match!

I’ll have my little rant about the need to rearrange this game while I’m at it as well. The original game was called off firstly because Arsenal v Cardiff in the FA Cup was called off when it snowed. Arsenal have undersoil heating, but everybody was worried about supporters getting to the ground. Our game against Swansea was called off the same night for the same reason (another £30 train ticket down the toilet by the way). How about in future the authorities worry about getting the pitch playable and then we’ll worry about whether or not we can get there safely? Nanny state. Then of course Arsenal and Cardiff absolutely had to play their rearranged fixture on the day of our game. Absolutely had to, that is, until Setenta Sports came calling and moved it to Monday night. Therefore no reason that the game could not have been a day or two later and our fixture remain.

And breathe.
2/10

7 – Pre Match
After leaving work in Derby at 2pm I arrived in Cardiff at 6pm via a couple of pick ups. We decided that we had the time to walk back into town rather than chance our arm (and stomachs) in any of the home fan hostelries around the ground. Sadly though we went in a Wetherspoons next to the railway station, after it must be said ending up standing in the middle of the Cardiff bus station being attacked on all sides by National Express coaches due to a confusing set of road works. Wetherspoons outlets seem to get worse every time I am in there. Positives – cheap beer. Now negatives.

The tables are wiped down every ten minutes (whether there are people sitting there or not) with UHU Glue that means your sleeves stick to the table surface when you lean on it and your hands quickly become grubby and sticky. The staff are rude and disinterested in your order – the woman that served me short changed me on a £20 note and then acted like it was my fault when I pointed it out. Our “gourmet burgers” arrived cauterized to within an inch of being edible and then set alight by whatever arsonist they had hanging around the kitchen with a wild look in his eye. To cover the thick black crust around the meet they had been covered by what the menu suggested might be cheese although it was not cheese as I know it – I wondered whether it was in fact McDonalds milkshake left out in the sun too long. The dish came with a side order of bits of an old cardboard box that a tramp had been sleeping in chopped up and served in the shape of chips. My poor stomach. Please send recommendations for a better pub we can use next season to the usual address.
2/10

8 – Police and Stewards
There seemed to be a bit of an incident at the back of the stand in the second half where one QPR fan had a noisy dispute with a steward and that took a bit of sorting out through mediation. Every QPR fan was vigorously frisked at the turnstile which seemed a little bit over the top but overall I saw few problems with either the stewards or the coppers on the night.
7/10
Total – 43/80

Photo: Action Images

Queens Park Rangers Polls