News From The Front

There's a fairly detailed report on the QPR website of a meeting between representatives of the club and various supporters' groups, and also an official statement from the chairman. Basically everyone is denying that John Gregory is about to jump/get the push. While the result at Southend was a shocker, as was the performance by all accounts, I would still be extremely surprised if there was a change right now. Only two weeks ago, after the Burnley game, Paladini gave a long interview where he was very positive about the work Gregory was doing to move the club forward, and from my point of view I like the signings he has made so far and he at least deserves till the end of the season with those players.

Quite apart from anything else, who could we replace him with right now ? Almost any manager who is available right now has, by definition, failed in his latest job. The Star mentioned Joe Kinnear which is surely a joke ; Kinnear has been out in the cold since his disastrous spell at Nottingham Forest who, as it happens, were in a very similar position to that of QPR now when he took over. I have to say that I have warmed to Gregory since his arrival, I think he's had a huge job to do and he's making a decent fist of it. Having said that, I haven't seen any of the away games, 8 defeats on the spin away from home now, and Leeds away on Tuesday is another big game that I'm not holding out much hope for. Still, Hull, Barnsley and Southend were all "must-win" games that we lost, but the sky hasn't fallen in yet and we're still above the dotted line of doom, if only just.

In other news from that meeting, apparently QPR received threats from the triads in the wake of the now infamous Kung Fu Fighting. By the way, if you can't be bothered signing up to You Tube for this, you're not missing that much. Anyway, triads, cool, bring it on ! People should chill out over this kind of thing. At least our players were pulling together in a scrap, not hacking at each other with golf clubs in the middle of the night.

Another thing that hadn't occurred to me was that Rangers are due some more money from the Danny Shittu deal, £250K more if he starts two more games, and I'm sure Watford won't pull any stunts that sometimes happen in these cases with the position they're in and their recent upturn in form. Rangers are also due half a mill in the (fairly unlikely) event that Watford stay up, then again it's not impossible. As soon as Betfair goes back up I'm going to close out my Watford-to-go-down bet just so I can funk them properly to stay up. We could really use half a million right now, if only to keep the taxman off our backs. I might give the Hornets a better chance of survival than Charlton or (particularly) West Ham right now, and they host Wigan on Tuesday in a huge game.