da realsbet： It’s very, very unusual being a QPR fan this season. I am not used to seeing as near the top end of the table, never mind seeing us in pole position. Every time I look at the Championship table I have to check twice, then think there must be some kind of mistake or that any minute a football news story is going to break with the headline ‘Loftus Road has fallen into a Black Hole’ or ‘The current owners have decided to sell the club to the Mormons and the club will be relocated to America’. Hey, given our history you can forgive me for thinking up such wild stories.
da leao： Despite being able to enjoy my own teams’ season this year, I do have some kind of a complaint. When you have owners or ‘investors’ such as Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and the family of Lakshmi Mittal you start to wonder why there hasn’t been some sort of transfer fund for manager Neil Warnock to dive into.
Our current squad costs just a little over £2 million with mostly free transfers during the summer. That IS less than what Cardiff City paid for Michael Chopra, yet people think we are top of the Championship just because we have money.
To be fair, the owners have gone on record as saying they’re treating this as a business venture and want the club to fund itself eventually. They don’t want to splash their cash on high wages and high transfer fees in order to gain success in the short term, they want long term success. As a fan I can appreciate this knowing that there isn’t a chance of us falling into past misery we had during the dreaded days of Administration and League One football.
However, with the club sat top of the league in January, you think one of these three rich investors would approach Neil Warnock with a cheque of £5 to £10 million and say, ‘go and confirm our promotion to the Premiership’. They’d be able to claim that money back in the following season with the TV Money but instead Neil Warnock has had to rely on the loan signings of Wayne Routledge and Ishmael Miller, which are decent additions to our thin squad.
Although, it’d be great to see us signing players like Charlie Austin from Swindon Town or buying out of favour players from the oversized Premiership squads, it makes me wonder what these rich owners have planned if Warnock is to win us promotion back to the Premier League on a budget. If we want to stay in the EPL, we’ll have to make huge improvements to our squad with the likes of Paddy Kenny, Sean Derry and Clint Hill all being on the wrong side of 30.
Also, will we be able to keep the likes of Adel Taraabt next season? Even if we have Premier League status the board may be tempted to cash in on the talented playmaker if big offers come in for him. I am also worried by the rumours that Warnock will be replaced once we gain promotion, with a foreign manager being more favoured, especially by the likes of Briatore.
However, we are currently five points clear at the top of the Championship with only a few months of the season left to go – if you had given me this situation one, five or ten years ago I would’ve bitten your hand off. So I am going to sit back and enjoy, it or at least try to.
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