How To Wean Yourself Off Football

It struck me today that supporting QPR in the top flight in the late 80s/early 90s was great fun (little did we know how lucky we were). League One was good because it really felt like the players cared and of course a lot more games were won than lost. But this league, in two spells, has been 90% grind and drudgery. Right now, I believe that very few people in the club respect the supporters. Respect me. Briatore sure as hell doesn't. Harford made a very condescending remark about "fans will come back if the team's winning". ORLY ? Ainsworth has gone, leaving only Rowlands and Cook who have a genuine connection with the club. Far from following my advice about cutting down on loan players, the club now have so many they're not allowed to play them all and are paying two players from other teams to kick their heels about the training ground. Enough is enough.

The problem is, as mentioned in a previous post, supporting a football team is very addictive. It's a potent mix of tribal identification and randomized jolts of pleasure and pain. How to break it off ? Well, I'm finding that a few things are helping.

- Cut down the frequency of the jolts. When they're playing, ignore it until it's finished. Have a look. Lost 1-0 to Peterboro, lame. Go back to what I was doing. One jolt instead of several. Ideally I wouldn't even look but I can't go that far ... yet.

- Ignore all the guff in the press and the Internet between games. If your club sign Lionel Messi, or John Terry shags the Queen, you'll hear about it. Instead of logging on to BBC Sport to read Steve Bruce's thought of the hour, forget about it. This is a lot easier if you don't watch TV or read newspapers, but I highly recommend that too anyway.

- Meditation helps a great deal with mental training in this kind of thing. It helps you to simply stop thinking about things you don't want to think about. Cliff notes : when you catch yourself thinking about it, smile at your incessantly chattering monkey brain and stop. Don't judge, don't criticise yourself, just let it go.

You might then be surprised how soon you can go entire days without hooking your moods up to the antics of "the world's thickest millionaires", as Charlie Brooker calls them. Try it and see.

The Devil Is In The Detail

An interesting example of how selective quoting can misrepresent on the BBC website today. If I had just read this :

Peterborough Chairman Slams Team

I would have thought that the chairman had just gone off on one out of frustration. However, if you read the whole thing (which luckily I already had done), it paints a very different picture :

Statement From Darragh McAnthony

I have a lot of sympathy for the guy reading the whole thing, and I wish that more people in football were as honest with the fans, even if they did tread on a few toes inside the game. His comments about keeping the club out of debt were echoed by Barry Hearn (chairman at Leyton Orient) in an interview I saw earlier in the week. He said that his main priority was keeping the club out of debt ; that clubs who go into administration are basically cheating by paying players money they can't afford ; and that administration should be punished with immediate relegation by two divisions. I totally agree, and I'm fully aware that QPR of course went into administration a few years ago.

Nonetheless, "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo", as HG Wells once said, according to this WSC article that I also quite enjoyed. All of these links came to me via the excellent QPR Report. As you can see on that site, Wayne Routledge has left the club for Newcastle United. Fair enough if we got a good price and he wanted to go, the club still has too many players who play in that kind of position. I think Rangers should be looking to reorganise from the bottom up, which won't happen with Briatore there I know, but there are signs that he might be looking to sell (the main one being he says he isn't). I'd be looking to build a team around young players like Connolly, Ephraim and Balanta, who are all already good enough to play and have lots more potential, and anyone who is fully committed to the club, which would probably include Rowlands, Cook and Leigertwood. Everyone else has their price, especially older players on long-term contracts. TBH I think they should look to unload Hall, Agyemang and Buzsaky (who I think was more than culpable in Magiltongate) even at less than market rate.

Here in La Manga I have Sky Sports and have been watching a bit of football in the evenings (there isn't really a lot more to do). Surprisingly (to me) I have really enjoyed a few games, notably the Manchester derby and Tottenham-Leeds. What's disappointing is how long it's been since a game of football excited me as much as those City and Leeds fans must have been. Oh well, it is what it is. If you've made it this far a couple of lolworthy snippets to end :

"Hicks and Gillette don't own the club ... well alright they do, but ..." - Liverpool fan on radio phone in

"Steve Bruce today slammed Liverpool for unsettling Kenwyne Jones, and also confirmed his interest in Portsmouth's Younis Kaboul" - Sky Sports News reporter, without the slightest trace of irony.

My Official Response To Events At QPR

You Know What ?

To hell with them all. Specifically at QPR, where I don't care who's to blame or what really happened, the fact is they're all being paid fortunes, of our money, and they can't get the job done without poncing about in strops and sacking each other every half a season, while clubs run on a shoestring like Watford and Blackpool put them to shame with their character, team spirit, togetherness and work ethic right through the club (not just the players).

And on a broader level, I've already invested far too much of my time on people who don't even know who I am. I mock the celebrity culture and how people seem to care about "celebs" who wouldn't give them the time of day, and yet I do it myself, spending far too much of my time thinking about footballers or poker players who, for all their faults, certainly spend 0.00000% of their time thinking about me or anyone like me.

I'm probably going to close this blog down in the New Year. I'll just give it a couple of weeks as I have a lot of previous for changing my mind .. but I hope I'll stick to this one. If I devoted that time to thinking about friends and family instead it would be better for me and everyone around me.

Alternatively ...

... they could suspend the manager amidst reports of manager and players throwing head-butts and offering each other out. Jesus, what a laughing stock.

What QPR Should Do

I read this on the BBC website today. How many times have we seen this kind of story about QPR ? I'm not going to comment on individual players, as my sample size of 2 games this season is probably unfair, but I've seen enough of the way the club has been run let's say post-Holloway to be able to make more general comments. What QPR need to do is to stop being so fixated on promotion and try, in a Zen-like way, to properly attend to what they're doing step by step. Basically, build a team, try to play good football and see where that takes you. It might lead to promotion. It might not. If you get it right, that won't matter so much, but you'll still have a better chance of achieving the goal anyway. So here are my proposals :

1) Most importantly, enough with the loans. I don't see the point of Helguson being at Watford (with QPR still paying half his wages) while Simpson is here, Ephraim being at Leeds while Watson is here, Balanta kicking his heels while Tarrabt is here, and so on. Now the players who are currently here on loan probably are a bit better. But not much. And they can't possibly be as committed. Any medium-term improvement in these players, particularly the younger players like Tarrabt and Simpson, is of no benefit to QPR. Bringing in a player on loan should be a last resort. Chuck some young players in, see how they get on. Give your squad players some game time. They might surprise you. One sole exception is if you're thinking about spending big money on a player and there's an option to "try before you buy", then absolutely, make sure he has the character and the commitment. If that's the case with Watson, then I'll make an exception for him. Even with the players currently injured (Connolly, Cook, Rowlands, Mahon), Rangers could put this team out with no loan players : Cerny ; Ramage, Stewart, Gorkss, Borrowdale ; Routledge, Leigertwood, Faurlin, Balanta ; Buzsaky ; Agyemang. And still have Vine, Helguson, Ephraim and Hall on the bench.

2) Enough with the foreign players. I can't think of a single one who has been value for money post-Holloway [2]. Faurlin looks OK but cost a fortune. Ledesma was hyped to the stars and played about two good games. At least that was two more than Parejo managed. Instead ...

3) If you're going to spend decent money, bring in leaders. We need one leader who knows this division in defence, in midfield and in attack. It's unfortunate that both Rowlands and Mahon are injured at the moment, as they fit the bill. But we have no leader in defence and no focal point for the attack. The lack of leadership in the side was brutally exposed by Middlesboro on Saturday as QPR fell apart in the second half. Meanwhile if there's one thing the fans can do it's stop moaning at players like Mahon when they misplace the odd pass. Everyone can't play this tippy-tappy boutique football, you need someone to dominate the opposition physically and we as fans need to accept that these players at this level won't be as good technically.

4) Build your squad by taking punts on young players from lower divisions. You only need one Michael Kightley or Jack Rodwell to pay for all the ones that don't come off. Give them a chance when the squad is needed rather than bringing in another loanee on big wages from another club. It's not that long ago that QPR saved their season in the top-flight by bringing in Darren Peacock, Rufus Brevett and Andy Tillson from lower divisions. One was sold for £2.5 million profit [1], one was a good servant to the club for many years and OK the other didn't work, big deal.

5) Cut admission prices and cut wages accordingly. Alright we're stuck with players on big wages. If they don't merit them, ship them out. Explain the situation to the supporters, we're not complete idiots, and the goodwill generated by not asking anyone for more than £25 to watch Championship football will go a long way. Sign players on shorter contracts but promise them they will be extended if they do well (and of course keep those promises). OK, sometimes a player might do well and move onwards and upwards when his contract expires causing you to miss out on a fee - swallow it. It's better than paying players off for long contracts or having uncommitted players hanging around drakking up the dressing room because you can't afford to pay them off and no one wants to buy them.

6) Give your manager more time and let him get on with it. Every manager since Holloway has been constantly looking over his shoulder. The immediate pressure to get results has often mandated paying over the odds for transfers, bringing in too many loan players, not giving youngsters a chance, etc. Invariably the axe has fallen medium-term anyway, and so a new manager comes in who wants his own players and his own system. Managers should only be changed mid-season if the team is absolutely falling apart and/or in imminent danger of relegation IMO.

7) Invest more money in youth system obv, do I even have to explain this one ?

Do those things, build a team, be honest with supporters and do the best you can. I'd buy into that and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of fans would too. Unfortunately I have no confidence whatsoever that the current owners are prepared to do any of these things.

Cliff notes : Why would any QPR manager even try to build a team with a view to being stable and successful in 3 years time, when he knows he won't be there ?

[1] Many people, myself among them, date the start of the club's decline to the sale and non-replacement of Darren Peacock.

[2] Buzsaky is an exception but remember he had already played 100 games for Plymouth. I'm talking about players with no experience of English football.

Despite All My Rage

... I am still just a rat in a cage. Victoria Coren made an interesting point in an interview she did recently (there's a link to the interview in the blog). When asked if poker was addictive, she said that it wasn't because you have some control over the outcome, whereas blackjack and roulette are far more addictive because (card counting aside) there's basically nothing you can do but put your bets down and hope.

It had never occurred to me that this is a big part of why watching football is so addictive too. It's the random jolts of pleasure and pain. Say you have your lab rat in a cage with a button to press. For a while, it gives out food. Then it gives an electric shock. Pretty soon the rat will stop pressing it despite the fact that it previously gave out food. Now you take another rat and give out food/shocks randomly for a bit. Then switch to just shocks. The rat will keep pressing it forever. This is fact by the way, scientific fact [1]. In football, not only do you have your random wins and losses, you can watch the game and have your pleasure/pain hits of goals for/against, and then you can watch all the games funking for someone depending on how you bet or just how much you hate each particular team/manager ... it seems endless.

I'm trying to wean myself off it, basically. The best way is to just go and do something else when the games are on, and see how they turn out afterwards. It's not easy on a night like last night when I was sat at home with no other games on, and on Saturday I was actually at the game (having rashly pre-bought tickets for 4 games throughout the season) suffering every kick. Maybe I'd be singing a different tune if I'd been at a couple of the games where QPR whacked someone else for 4 or 5 this season, instead of the only two home defeats (bok), then again it's just another peak or trough in the endless graph. It's pretty annoying that on Friday and Monday afternoon I played a great round of golf (2 out of my best 3 ever), only to allow myself to be knocked off my cloud because one team of over-paid hired guns lost to another, and I think, for me, it has to stop.

[1] By which I mean I read it somewhere and it suits my argument.

When Irish Eyes Are Crying

I wasn't going to say anything more about the Henry handball incident, having already argued about it far too much on Facebook, but having said that :

Ladies And Gentlemen, Mr Roy Keane

Whether you like Keane as a person or not, he absolutely nails it here.