The (occasional) joy of being a QPR fan

I made my way to Loftus Road on Saturday for QPR’s first home fixture of the season. We’ve got a new gaffer in the form of Michael Beale, a 41-year-old Englishman who’s never managed a football club before but has worked as an assistant coach at San Paulo in Brazil and as Steven Gerrard’s right-hand at Rangers and Aston Villa. Can he make the transition from a bibs-and-cones man to a full-blown manager? I worry that QPR have brought him in because (a) he’s cheap and (b) won’t make a fuss about the club’s efforts to cut costs. Since the end of the last season, we’ve let go of 13 players and only brought in four, reducing the size of the squad by nearly a third. That will have cut the wage bill, but won’t do much for our prospects. Going into this game, we’d only won four of the last 20, which is relegation form.

Things started badly for Beale a week earlier when QPR lost 1-0 to Blackburn at Ewood Park in his first league game. Rovers were poor, but we were worse, not managing to get a single shot on target. I watched it on my laptop in a car park in Iceland and the signal kept buffering. The spinning wheel of death felt like a metaphor for QPR’s coming season.

Our opponents on Saturday were Middlesbrough and the atmosphere in the stadium was buzzing, with 2,800 Boro fans having made the 260-mile journey. They’re one of the most fancied teams in the Championship, having finished seventh last season and with an excellent manager in the form of Chris Wilder, who steered Sheffield United from League One to the Premiership.

To add to the pressure, Chloe Kelly, the Lioness who scored England’s winning goal against Germany, is a QPR fan and she carried the match ball on to the pitch just before the opening whistle. This really was a must-win game for the new manager, who’s said he wants to make Loftus Road a ‘fortress’ where other teams are afraid to come. Looking at the faces of the players, the home side looked more nervous than the visitors.

But things got off to a better start than I’d hoped, and I don’t just mean because no one took the knee before kick-off. Chris Willock, our player of the year last season, was back after picking up a hamstring injury in March and scored a fantastic individual goal within the first 15 minutes. He picked up the ball deep into our half and embarked on an aggressive forward run, managing to shrug off two challenges before getting off a shot amid a swarm of defenders. The ball arrowed into the top left-hand corner of the net, giving the Boro goalkeeper no chance. The response in the newly named Stanley Bowles stand, where my three sons and I have got season tickets, was so exuberant I had to cling on to 17-year-old Ludo to prevent myself tumbling into the row in front. Absolute scenes.

But that was only the beginning. We then scored two more, giving us a 3-0 lead within the first 40 minutes. Having dragged my sons to Peterborough, Blackburn, Nottingham, Preston, Huddersfield and Stoke in the second half of last season, only to see the Rs beaten every time, this was a much-needed reminder of how much joy the team can bring. As I keep telling them, watching QPR tear up the pitch like this is a pleasure denied supporters of more successful teams like Liverpool and Man City, who win practically every week. They often look sceptical when I make that argument, but seeing the ecstatic expressions on their faces I felt vindicated. This was precisely the feeling that makes up for all those 1-0 defeats on rainy Tuesday nights.

Needless to say, it all went wrong after that. The visitors managed to snatch one back in the 41st minute and almost got another before half time. During the break, all the talk was of how Boro were bound to come back into it and take all three points – typical bloody QPR! – and sure enough they scored again in the 56th minute.

The next 42 minutes (including eight minutes of added time) were among the longest of my life as the visitors unleashed shot after shot and our players flung themselves between the incoming balls and the QPR goal. A social psychologist really should do an experiment in which he asks the supporters of a team trying to hang on to a 3-2 lead to estimate how long it takes a minute to pass and contrast that with the estimates of the opposing fans. The difference would be huge.

But stone me, we managed to hold on. To watch QPR beat one of the best teams in the league in the sunshine – on the new manager’s home debut – was absolutely glorious. It’s bound to be all downhill from here.