'Deserved to beat Nottingham Forest but dire at Coventry': What Middlesbrough can expect from QPR at Loftus Road

Rangers finished 13th in the Championship last team and have had a mixed start to the new campaign, beating Nottingham Forest on the opening day, before losing to newly promoted Coventry City.

We caught up with Clive Whittingham from QPR website LoftForWords to get the inside track on Boro’s next opponents.

1.How has QPR's pre-season gone and how are they shaping up after a couple of competitive games?

Pre-season was short, like almost everybody else’s.

We beat a poor looking Wimbledon side 3-0 at Loftus Road as part of the ground share agreement, then looked pretty bad ourselves in a 1-0 defeat at Oxford where we conceded exactly the sort of soft set-piece goal we became sadly used to us leaking last season.

There was a 4-3 loss to Arsenal at the training ground and then we were beaten 3-2 at Plymouth in the League Cup where we conceded three of exactly the sort of soft goals from wide areas we became sadly used to leaking last season.

We played really well against Nottingham Forest on day one and deserved to win that 2-0, keeping a clean sheet at the first time of asking having spent 21 games looking for one at the start of 2019/20.

We then looked good for 40 minutes at Coventry and deservedly led 1-0 but conceded a goal with about six separate fundamental mistakes in it and the confidence just seemed to go out of us.

It was a Dire second half and 3-2 defeat, with exactly the sort of soft goal from a set-piece we became sadly used to leaking last season (Are you spotting a pattern here?).

Once again it looks like we’ll cause teams problems going forwards but leak a lot of goals ourselves.

2.What formation are QPR likely to play?

4-2-3-1 seems to be the favoured system. Partly because we’ve got lots and lots of players who like to play ‘ten’, partly because we’ve only got one striker.

3.Who are the players Boro will need to keep an eye on, and what’s the latest on injuries?

Bright Osayi-Samuel is our best player when he’s focused, in form and confident. There were a few signs of the old Bright last Friday so fingers crossed for that.

Our new striker Lyndon Dykes from Livingston is a big, physical lad and looks a real handful so far.

We’ve got high hopes that Ilias Chair can help fill the Ebere Eze void but he was strangely negative in his play and ineffective against Coventry having played well against Forest.

As far as I’m aware we’re fully fit and ready to go.

4.What is the aim for QPR this season?

Well like every club I suspect whatever the aim is or was changed this week with the news that it’s highly unlikely we’ll have any sort of crowds in ground this side of Christmas, if at all before May.

We’ve spent the last five or six years trying to get our wage bill down from the eye-watering figures which ballooned under Mark Hughes and Harry Redknapp.

We’ve also been trying to go from a club that brings in Rob Green on £50k a week one week and then replaces him with Julio Cesar on £120k a week the next, to one that brings in and develops promising youngsters and scouted rough diamonds and develops them into a big sale, as we did with Ebere Eze and to some extent Luke Freeman.

The plan would have been to do that with players like Osayi-Samuel, Chair, Dykes, Dickie or Amos while also remaining competitive in the division.

5. What’s the feeling among Rangers supporters?

Perpetual joy and happiness.

It’s very split, like most support bases in the social media era I would guess.

We finished Steve McClaren’s 2018/19 season with three wins in the entire second half of the campaign, he got the sack, we sold the best players from that already poor side, and then did a summer of 16 going out and 16 others coming in on a lower wage bill.

We were hotly tipped for relegation in 2019/20 and yet finished higher, won more games, won more away games, scored more goals, played better football.

Warburton did a good job last season with very few resources, and that is the general consensus among the majority of fans I speak to at matches (used to speak to at matches) and hang around with on matchdays, and on our message board to be fair.

The defending is starting to wear very thin on people. 76 goals against last year, only Hull and Luton did worse, and that’s the third year in a row we’ve let in 70+.

Warburton got quite prickly when we pushed him about it in an interview a fortnight back.

He’s starting to cop a lot of criticism for our overly attacking set up with the high full-backs which exposes us out wide, and the sheer amount of stupid goals we let in off set pieces (only Wigan let in more off deadballs).

Coventry’s winner last week was the third free header from a corner we’d allowed in five minutes.

6. Finally what’s your score prediction for the match?

We’re the surest ‘both teams to score’ bet on the coupon so 2-2 is usually a good place to start with us, as was the case in this fixture last season.

QPR predicted line-up: Lumley, Kakay, Dickie, Barbet, Wallace, Cameron, Carroll, Osayi-Samuel, Amos, Chair, Dykes

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