As Tim Sherwood and Queens Park Rangers shamble towards one another -- as inevitable as loneliness, as inevitable as the Earth plunging into the sun, as inevitable as rain -- it's impossible not to appreciate, even admire, his courage. The First Knight of the Order of the Gilet will be taking on a big job in West London, and it's not just the mess he'll be inheriting that's the problem.
The universe hates the next QPR manager
Harry Redknapp and Tony Fernandes got QPR into this mess. Luck might stop them getting out.
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The mistakes of the Redknapp reign are myriad and manifold, but were we to pick our favourites, we'd probably go with: one, the failure to leave after the playoff final, regardless of the result; two, the decision to hack his squad to pieces in pursuit of a 3-5-2 formation that was abandoned after a couple of games; three, a whole raft of peculiar squad management decisions; four, Rio Ferdinand. (A much longer, more detailed, fan-written view can be read here.)
But that’s all policy and human error and decision making and other avoidable, mundane things (and we should note, in the interests of fairness, that QPR weren’t exactly a model club before Redknapp rocked up). The incoming manager -- be it Sherwood, be it some other poor sap -- won’t just be struggling with the mess he’s inherited; he’ll also find that the forces of blind chance have arrayed themselves against him.
Luck is the most powerful force in the universe, and in the Premier League, its avatar is the fixture list. Before the details, though, some hypothesising. Around this time of the season, the Premier League tends to divide into three parts: the Good Teams, who are all shuffling around the European places; the Bad Teams, who are all scrapping around the relegation zone, and the Mid-Table, a strange place where nothing much seems to matter anymore. This season, as things stand, we've got something of a squeezed middle: the teams in positions 1-8 comprise the Good; those from 13 down the Bad; and Swansea, Stoke, Newcastle and Everton the Mid-Table.
All subject to change, of course, but that’s where we are right now. So if you -- yes, you -- were a team in the relegation scrap, what would constitute an ideal fixture list for the last fifteen games? At a guess, and very much in theory:
- You’d want any relegation six-pointers to be at your place, since home advantage is a definite thing, even if nobody seems to quite agree why;
- And, conversely, you’d want any games against the better teams to be at their place, since a marginal advantage might not be much use in a game against a team of significantly higher quality, and you can probably write those games off anyway.
Luck is the most powerful force in the universe
So, in short, you want as many of your winnable games at home, and the trickier away games can be written off against the trickier opponents. It might also be nice to have plenty of games against mid-table sides, who might be drifting a tough, but there aren’t too many of those this season.
Right. Here are the rest of QPR’s home games, in order, with league positions in brackets:
Southampton (4), Arsenal (5), Tottenham (6), Everton (12), Chelsea (1), West Ham (8), Newcastle (11).
And here are the rest of QPR’s away games, in order, with league positions in brackets:
Sunderland (14), Hull City (18), Crystal Palace (13), West Brom (15), Aston Villa (16), Liverpool (7), Manchester City (2), Leicester City (20).
Which is, we think, almost precisely the opposite of what any relegation club could hope for. Take that run of home games, for a start. Four or five of those seven teams -- Southampton, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea for certain, and possibly West Ham as well -- will likely still be chasing something, be that fourth place, the title, or the Europa League (a competition we're sure that Sam Allardyce would love the opportunity to bitch about next season). That home advantage is going to have do some serious work.
Now, onto the real misery: the aways. Ignore the Liverpool and City, and look at the rest. Six visits to fellow trapdoor botherers, including the last day of the season. In every opportunity that QPR will have to directly make up ground on one of their fellow strugglers, that home advantage will be working against them. Redknapp really did get out just before the going got really rough.
It’s this peculiar skewing of the fixture list that goes some way to explaining the oddity in QPR’s home and away records. On home form alone, they sit a very respectable 11th; away from home, they haven’t picked up a single point. That’s because they’ve yet to host five of the top eight, and they’ve yet to go away to most of the rest of the bottom eight. All things being equal, that might be expected to shake itself out, were it not for the fact that playing struggling teams later in the season can be different to playing them early. Two of those fellow strugglers have already upgraded their manager and all have added players over January. QPR didn’t do much of the latter, and while they’ll probably end up doing the former, it might well be too little, too late.
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Much of this was predictable, of course; the fixture list is public knowledge, and most of the teams involved at either end of the table are doing as expected. It’s unfortunate that all, bar one of the relegation six-pointers, come in the second half of the season, but that only increases the pressure on the management to get points earlier in the season, something that they resolutely failed to do.
Most of the bottom five look doomed in one way or another, whether it's Aston Villa's inability to score goals, Burnley and Leicester's willing but limited squads, or the giant black cloud of abject, hope-swallowing misery that appears to have settled around Steve Bruce and Hull. But fate has dealt QPR's new manager what looks, in theory, like an absolute pig of a run-in; that, along with the unbalanced and unhappy squad, makes them strong favourites find themselves returning from whence they came. Managers like to complain that the world is against them; Sherwood, or whichever other sucker Tony Fernandes ends up appointing, might actually have a point.
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