How much time will Jim Magilton be given at QPR?

Of the 24 teams that kicked off the Championship just under a year ago, eleven now have new managers. In the majority of cases, the manager was removed due to perceived failings. Being a Championship manager is like being a duck at a shooting gallery. It’s a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’, no matter how dumb the man holding the gun might be.

It’s a truism, but it all comes down to expectations. Two teams can be promoted automatically, another four can reach the play-offs. Yet by my reckoning seven clubs will expect to finish first or second and nine others will believe they can make the play-offs.

With kick-off still a few weeks away, two-thirds of the managers in this league are now giving optimistic interviews about challenging for the top six. Disappointment for most of them is therefore inevitable. And disappointment leads to jobless managers.

Here’s my top five managers most at risk as teams start their pre-season preparations:

1. Jim Magilton, QPR: The Rangers owners can dress it up any way they like, but the turnover of managers (or head coaches) at the club since Flavio Briatore arrived has been startling even by the bizarre standards football sets itself. QPR have now turned to Jim Magilton, deemed not good enough for Ipswich only a few weeks before his appointment at Loftus Road.

A spat with the Chairman or a poor start to the season could easily see Magilton disappear from his post within a matter of months.  He has to be the favourite to go first.

2. Malky Mackay, Watford: Another new manager who could potentially be at risk early in the season. Watford seem destined to lose talisman Tommy Smith to Sheffield United, and even though the surprisingly high £1.8m fee will be welcome, his departure will be a real blow.

Watford are now a far cry from Boothroyd’s big, dangerous side of a a few years back and if they start badly the club may decide to cut their losses and, against recent practice, opt for a more experienced hand.

3. Gareth Southgate, Middlesbrough: If Southgate had been in charge of any other established Premier League club and turned in the results he did last season, he would be out of a job.  Famously, he belittled Sven Goran Eriksson after England’s 2-1 World Cup defeat to Brazil in 2002, claiming that the team needed Winston Churchill at half time, not Iain Duncan Smith.

I wonder if he recalled those words when his team lost 3-0 to rock bottom West Brom, 4-1 to Bolton or 5-0 at home to Chelsea. The management game, he must now realise, is more than spouting a bit of loud rhetoric at half time.

Steve Gibson always backs his managers but if Boro fall towards mid-table (or worse, as Sunderland did a couple of years back), Gibson may have no other option than to advise Southgate to go back to the pizza commercials.

4. Roberto di Matteo, West Brom: This was truly an appointment out of the left-field. It was as if the West Brom board were so flush from receiving £2m from Celtic for a manager that had just relegated their club, that, like a gambler who believes he’s on a roll, they decided to bet high on a pair of deuces. I mean, the Albion job is a big job these days.

Di Matteo did well at MK Dons, but in truth he was managing a team already built by Paul Ince and one that had a significant financial advantage over most clubs in League One.

It’s a brave decision, but West Brom fans are used to yo-yoing. They’ve had their spin down and now they will be expecting the corresponding spin up. Di Matteo is under significant pressure.

5. Chris Coleman, Coventry: As with the Premier League, there will always be one surprise who’ll go early. I’ll plump for Coleman. He has had time to consolidate at Cov and the board will be expecting something much greater than last season’s finish of 17th.

Only four teams won less home games than Coventry last season and Cookie must somehow find a way to turn that cavernous stadium into an intimidating place to visit.

Now it’s over to you. Who do you think will be first to go? Maybe Shearer won’t be able to take the heat? Or perhaps Gary Johnson will be poached by the Premier League. Let us know below.

Related posts:

1. Championship Team of the Year The PFA Championship Team of the Year was announced on...
2. Championship Club Active In Loan Market The transfer window may be closed but Championship Teams are...
3. Newcastle The New Leeds? Eight Reasons The Championship Will Not Be A Walk In St James’ Park [caption id="attachment_564" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Will Shola Ameobi be enough to...

Life for a newly relegated club will never be easy, no matter what division you are in, and clearly there will be a number of departures from Teeside before the Boro squad for next season is sorted. Southgate will have known this and will be frantically trying to keep some of the top, young English talent Boro are in the midst of producing.

One player who sticks out in that category is David Wheater, a central defender who has attracted a lot of admirers through his displays in a Middlesbrough shirt. The 22-year-old no-nonsense centre back has been linked with Aston Villa, but has yet to pledge his future to anyone. Wheater is the kind of player Southgate will need to keep hold of for the forthcoming struggle.

Matthew Bates is another player who Southgate will be glad stuck around and in signing a new contract has shown some of the commitment that Middlesbrough perhaps lacked last season. Too many of their players drifted through games without a care in the world. Those are the types of players who Boro don’t want in their side next season, despite that extra bit of quality they may possess.

Southgate needs to go back to home grown talent, be it from the Teeside area or from Great Britain in general. Looking at the sides that came up last season a lot of their star players were home grown boys. Michael Kightly and Sylvan Ebanks-Blake stared for Wolves while Chris Eagles and Clarke Carlisle were pivotal in Burnley’s success.

Southgate has already taken a risk on young talent in the Premier League, a gamble which never really worked out for the former England international. However, the gulf in class between the Premier League and the Championship is still huge. The likes of Andrew Taylor, Adam Johnson and Tony McMahon will look much better players in the second tier of English football.

What Southgate needs now is some experience to bring the youngsters together, and I feel sure he knows that. It is still only June and a lot will change before the big kick-off on August 8. Yet looking at the three sides who came down I feel if Southgate can get the balance right, despite having not managed in the Championship before, his Boro side may finally steal the headlines in the north-east.

Related posts:

1. Swansea vs Cardiff: The Return Of The Welsh Derby It’s been almost ten years since the two teams...

The only thing consistent about Newcastle United is their ability to mess things up on a grand scale. The two-toned yellow jersey may appeal to a small minority, but the reality is it is yet another reason for the football world in general to laugh at Newcastle United.

Relegation to the Championship, confusion over the future of manager Alan Shearer and a number of “stars” on ridiculously high wages (even for the Premiership) means a summary of misery for the Toon Army and a very difficult route back to the Barclays Premier League.

The departure of the club of Michael Owen on Monday told a story in itself. Signed in a blaze of glory from Real Madrid by Freddy Shepherd, Owen left St James Park with barely a whimper - which ironically summed up his participation in a Newcastle shirt.

Long gone are the days when Newcastle were the most exciting team in England, thrilling fans throughout the country with top stars like Shearer, Les Ferdinand, David Ginola and Faustino Asprilla.

The current team is a far cry from the great team built by Kevin Keegan and Philippe Albert’s exsquisite chip over Peter Schmeichel to put Newcastle 5-0 up against the Champions seems a lifetime to go.

Nobody would love to see Newcastle turn it around more than me - I was a huge fan of Keegan’s side and consider Newcastle one of my favourite clubs in the English league. However, the reality is for Newcastle to bounce back, it’s going to take a change much bigger than on the football pitch itself.

The whole club is a joke and needs an overhaul from top to bottom. Summed up by chairman Mike Ashley swanning about in a replica kit drinking a beer in the stand, Newcastle United lack professionalism and failure to change this image drastically and urgently could very well lead to much bigger problems for the club than relegation to the Championship.

Leeds United are an example of just how far a club can fall from grace - lets hope Newcastle don’t suffer the same fate.

Written by Danny Watson, a professional sports writer who blogs about football news.

Related posts:

1. Newcastle The New Leeds? Eight Reasons The Championship Will Not Be A Walk In St James’ Park [caption id="attachment_564" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Will Shola Ameobi be enough to...
2. CCC Clubs Pre-Season Schedules Here are the pre-season schedules for most of the CCC...

Will Shola Ameobi be enough to fire Newcastle back to the EPL?

Newcastle fans must have watched Leeds United’s loss to Millwall in the League One play-offs and shuddered. It was like watching The Ghost of Football’s Future. Two clubs of similar size with similarly raucous fans, they are teams that by rights should never experience relegation from the top flight, let alone into League One. But it happened to Leeds. And it could happen to The Toon.

There can be no doubt that the steep road Leeds followed during their rapid decline could be one that Newcastle are already barrelling along themselves. The similarities, from playing staff, to wages, to financial excess, to a quick succession of managers, is almost eerie. To a Newcastle fan it should be downright terrifying.

The Championship is an unforgiving place - graduation is difficult, expulsion is effortless. Here are eight reasons why Newcastle will find next season to be the toughest battle the club has faced since before King Kev’s revolution in 1992:

1. Expectation: Birmingham faced their fair share of expectation last season and only just managed to cope with it. They went up, but with the players at their disposal it was hardly inspiring. Newcastle have an even larger mountain to climb. Pundits and the Newcastle public, regardless of who stays and who joins, will expect Newcastle to not only win the league, but to win it in style and with games to spare. Newcastle failed to deal with the pressure last season - can they reverse that next season?

2. The Bus: Fans, management, players and directors are going to be desperate for their club to beat Newcastle.  No other team in the league has the cache of the Toon. At St James’ Park teams will, as they say, park the bus in front of the goal. Away from Newcastle, teams will fancy themselves to take a black-and-white scalp in front of their biggest crowd of the season. Every game, from Doncaster to Blackpool to Peterborough, is going to be a scrap. Are they up for it?

3. The Manager: As things stand, Newcastle do not have a manager. In fact, they have not had a permanent boss since the Keegan debacle at the start of last season. Alan Shearer looks likely to take the role and perhaps given a blank sheet of paper he may thrive where this season, to be blunt, he ultimately failed. Yet even with the talismanic Shearer Newcastle could struggle as they come to terms with the take-no-prisoners nature of the Championship. To overcome that, Newcastle need stability on and off the field, which leads us to…

4. Ownership: Mike Ashley wants to sell and says he wants to sell fast. Few could blame him. Newcastle have a large squad full of players on extensive wages that cannot be supported in the Championship. Not only will the new manager need to be rid of a substantial portion of the playing staff, he’ll also need to pick up a few players who will help guide them through the second tier. The longer the sale of the club drags on, the more difficult this will be and the more unprepared the club will become for the new season.

5. Middlesbrough: Newcastle will be favourites, but in reality Middlesbrough will, gallingly, probably be in better shape than their local rivals. Steve Gibson manages the finances of the club well and always backs his managers. The team should really only lose one or two of their better players and, due to injury, they may even hold on to Stewart Downing for the whole campaign. If Middlesbrough do storm the league it will heap pressure on the Toon and leave just one automatic promotion spot up for grabs.

6. Unpredictability: The Championship is an odd league in many ways. It has become a cliche to say that any team can beat any other, but it is close to the truth. Last year, mediocre Coventry beat Birmingham home and away, while Wolves were battered 5-2 against the usually-feeble Norwich. The gap between the top and bottom of the table is nowhere near as large as it is in the Premier League.

7. Goals: Having a Kevin Phillips or a Sylvain Ebanks-Blake in the squad can pay dividends for any Championship team. Newcastle need to act quickly. Michael Owen will be gone, as will Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins. Peter Lovenkrands may look for a transfer, which means only the terminally under-achieving Shola Ameobi will be left of Newcastle’s senior strike force. That seems unlikely to be enough.

8. Referees: We often hear how bad the standard of refereeing is in the EPL, but whatever the real truth, it cannot be denied that those in the Championship are, by definition, worse. The Championship, for example, boasts ‘phantom goal’ referee Stuart Attwell. They are not referees impressed by reputation and the Magpies may find it tough to struggle in the more physical second tier.

Related posts:

1. New Newcastle Football Shirt Sums Up Clubs Plight Newcastle United yesterday unveiled their new away football kit for the...
2. Magilton Leads The Championship Sack Race [caption id="attachment_580" align="alignright" width="175" caption="How much time will Jim Magilton...
3. Southampton and Charlton’s Demise Is Nothing New [caption id="attachment_545" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="St Mary's Stadium will host League...

We already know that Charlton and Southampton are down, with the Saints’ future looking increasingly uncertain on and off the field. The Canaries’ defeat at home to Reading on Monday night means they now need a miracle to keep their place in the second tier of English football. The side that could replace Norwich in the drop zone is also another Premier League side, albeit just for a season: Barnsley.

It’s not the first time a former Premier League side has been relegated from the Championship with Bradford City, Swindon, Leeds, Manchester City, Sheffield Wednesday, Oldham, Notts Forest, QPR and Leicester City all having to endure the indignity of being relegated. However, out of all of those sides only one has managed to bounce back to the top flight and upset the football odds by becoming an established name in the Premier League.

That will be a worrying trend for three out of the four of these clubs who could be making those dark and lonely trips to Yeovil away on a cold Tuesday in February or watching Stockport come away with a point on their own patch (no offence to those sides). Norwich, Charlton and Southampton all spent big trying to regain their place in the top flight and it failed, leaving them with empty pockets and a reliance on youth and experience which clearly hasn’t worked for those three.

They say that the Championship is the most unpredictable league in England and probably rightly so as I don’t think many of us out there will have picked any of those four teams to face the drop, maybe with the exception of Barnsley. Being a supporter of a club still in the top flight I can remember at least one occasion when my side was beaten by Charlton, Norwich and Southampton and always thought they would one day return to the Premier League.

Perhaps that is the problem, maybe trading on your name and history in the Championship doesn’t work and instead of attracting the young, hungry types of player you want you get those who are just looking for a pay day. You have to question where all the money went that each club made from selling their big stars when they went down, especially Southampton with their sales of Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale and Kenwyne Jones.

It seems then that going on recent history we will be unlikely to see any of the four potential relegation candidates back in the top flight for some time and perhaps now it is the turn of a smaller club to enjoy its time in the limelight and develop themselves into an established top flight club.

Related posts:

1. Carling Cup Ouster For CCC Sides The First Round of the Carling Cup has seen more...
2. Credit crunch to bite into the Football League You know things are going to get bad when the...
3. Southampton and Charlton’s Demise Is Nothing New [caption id="attachment_545" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="St Mary's Stadium will host League...

St Mary's Stadium will host League One football next season

Sheffield Wednesday, QPR, Manchester City, Wimbledon (aka MK Dons), Leeds, Oldham, Nottingham Forest, Swindon, Leicester, Barnsley, Bradford. Soon to be joined by another two and probably three in Charlton, Southampton and Norwich. All these clubs have tasted the sweet nectar of life in the Premier League only to later sup at the workaday bitterness of League One. In Bradford’s case, even League Two.

If Norwich go down, as seems likely, that’s 14 teams who have played against the best and slipped to the third tier of English football in the last 17 years. In a game full of startling statistics, that seems pretty mind-boggling. It might hearten fans of Saints and Addicks that a decent portion of those teams have at least made it back to the Championship. Indeed, this time last year Leicester were belly-up and now they are like a horny young salmon, leaping back upstream to play with the bigger boys and girls once more.

In a sense, this shows the outstanding strength in depth of the English leagues. Unlikely teams including Bradford, Swindon, Hull, Stoke, Wigan and Reading all made huge strides in the last decade and a half to reach the top of the mountain. Yet it does not take much to find yourself back at base camp in double-quick time.

It can be put down to poor money management. It can be blamed on carelessness and poor decision-making. But the shocking thing this year is that two clubs who have often been held up as excellent examples of how a medium-sized club should be managed are either already down or simply waiting for the trap door to open.

When Sheffield Wednesday, Man City, QPR, Leicester and Leeds fell into League One, the structure at the clubs was poor and all of them had dealt inadequately with the money the EPL gave them. But Charlton and Norwich do not seem to fall into this category. Charlton have cleverly developed a fanbase from all over Kent and steadily improved a stadium that was derelict 20 years ago. Norwich had more than their fair share of problems in the boardroom in the 90s, but they have a city dedicated to the team, a real sense of community and Delia Smith providing heart and soul as well.

For those two clubs, the short term might be unpalatable, but the feeling is that the long term might be rosy. They are sensible clubs. If they cut costs, appoint the right managers and keep expectations sensible, they could return a stronger unit, like Leicester appear to be doing.

Southampton, though, could be a different story. Not so long ago they had a new stadium, Gordon Strachan had taken them to the Cup Final and they were the latest in a long line of clubs hoping to break into the top six of the EPL. Now the money is gone. The stadium is not being filled. The stars of their youth system have almost all been sold in an effort to balance the books. Rumours of a takeover notwithstanding, it seems likely that Andrew Surman and Adam Lallana will now have to be sold as well.

Around this time of year a lot of pundits make long faces and say it’s a shame for this team or that team to go down. They are saying it about Newcastle now, but is it a shame when clubs the size of Southampton are relegated to League One? Would we prefer to see the smaller clubs, like Doncaster or Blackpool, get relegated, to keep the status quo?

I don’t think so. I think it’s a healthy situation that big clubs occasionally taste life in the bottom half of the Football League. It’s good for football that so-called small teams like Peterborough can play at Championship level.

With dreams of winning the Premier League unrealistic for fans of all clubs except perhaps five - six at a push - the dream has perhaps been downshifted to glory in the Championship and a chance to merely get in the ring with the big boys.

The difference this season compared to others is that three clubs who have all played at the top level within the last four years are (probably) heading down. Not only should that be a lesson to clubs currently happy in the Premier League, it should be a warning. There are at least half-a-dozen Premier League clubs who could be facing the same crisis as Southampton in three or four years time.

Related posts:

1. How the mighty have fallen as former Premier League sides face the abyss There was once a time when Charlton, Norwich and Southampton...
2. F.A. Cup Third Round Draw The thrid round of the FA Cup draw is out...
3. Who Will Feel The Pain Of Relegation? The season is almost over and other then Charlton Athletic,...

  Hull City boss Phil Brown celebrates his sides play-off victory at Wembley in 2008.

As the Championship football season reaches a crescendo of excitement, supporters of many clubs up & down the country must be looking at their OWN clubs current plight, & thinking not where they want to finish, (we all want our own team to finish top!) but more to the point whether where they do finally finish is considered an acceptable, realistic, reasonable, honest reflection of their season come the end of next week.

I am, as it happens just one of those fans! My Club, Crystal Palace (a club I support with a passion) are currently mid-table in the Championship, have not got a proverbial pot to piss in financially, due mainly to an over-sized squad of mediocre players with limited ability on impermeable contracts, (that we are unable to shift even if we had tried to offload them at a Sunday morning boot fair), along with its fair share of internal wrangling.

I am not using this as a platform for slinging mud or lambasting my own Club, as I am well aware that quite a few football clubs are in similar situations, due in part to the current financial climate. I digress…………where was I, the play-offs.

This season the Championship had for the most part been dominated by three clubs, Wolves, Birmingham & Reading, basically leaving the rest of the league to scrap it out for the remaining three places that would secure a play-off spot, & the potentially lucrative opportunity to reach the ‘promised land’ of the Premier League. However with various twists & turns of late, we enter the final week of the season knowing only Wolves are guaranteed Premier League football next season.

Promotion would generate an estimated cash injection of £30million plus to each of the successful teams, depending on what one chooses to utilize as their source of information.

This Championship season boasts a number of low, medium & high profile clubs namely  Sheffield United, Birmingham & Reading jostling for the one remaining automatic promotion spot, with Cardiff, Burnley & Preston battling to make up the remaining play-off places.

The play-offs were introduced in 1986/87, so there have been 21 previous years of reasons for supporters to shed tears & joy or despair at some point since the late 1980’s. Martin Lange was the man responsible for the end-of-season extravaganza. Lange saw promotion play-offs as a means of rekindling supporter interest in the lower divisions, thereby bringing the clubs much-needed extra income.

The play-offs remain with us today because they have met, and arguably exceeded their expectations. Since their introduction attendances across the lower three divisions have more than doubled. It is hard to argue that Lange’s innovation has been at least partly responsible for such a dramatic increase. Supporters have accepted the play-offs with a mixture of enthusiasm & interpretation.

The matches themselves invariably produce extraordinary levels of drama, incredible scorelines & the reason for this has in part been due to an astonishing number of crucial late goals! Of course, a sudden-death contest determining a club’s fate for the whole of the season inevitably leads to heightened emotions, the fall-out from which has given plenty of ammunition to opponents of the system.

In the Championship play-offs the disappointment has been greatest for Preston & Ipswich, with a record six unsuccessful attempts each. No other clubs have tackled the play-offs so often, so unsuccessfully!

Crystal Palace though, are the undisputed play-off masters. Palace have one of the best overall records in the play-offs, with three victories, a losing final and two losing semi-finals. And all of them were for a place in the top division.

In the first two seasons the play-offs were introduced, the third to fifth sides from what was then the ‘old’ Division 2 competed with the fourth from bottom side in the ‘old’ Division 1.

In most other seasons the play-offs were for the third to sixth placed sides, but in both 1990/91 and 1994/95 this was different due to League restructuring. In the first of those years the fourth to seventh sides took part whilst in 1994/95 it was the second to fifth sides. Ignoring those first two seasons when the format was significantly different, the winners of the play-off final in the other 19 seasons have been:

Highest placed club - 6 times.

Second highest placed club - 4 times.

Third highest placed club - 5 times.

Lowest placed club - 4 times.

 These statistics simply emphasise the fact that there is no real benefit in finishing in a higher League position. Of the six teams in total that have finished third in the league and were promoted via the play-offs to the top flight, three of those teams have been in the last three consecutive seasons, namely Watford, Derby & Hull.

For the record in 1989/90 the winners at Wembley were not actually promoted. Although Swindon Town beat Sunderland in the final, it was the losing side who were eventually promoted after Swindon were punished for financial irregularities.

This season’s Play-Off dates:

No related posts.

With the Black Cats Keane had very little cash to work with and a fan base crying out for Premier League football. That will stand him in good stead at Portman Road where money is tight and the supporters expect no less than the Sunderland ones did. However, why Keane chose Ipswich remains the big question to me when he reportedly had offers, no offence to Ipswich fans, to manage bigger clubs.

It’s clear the former Manchester United skipper enjoys a challenge but I also believe he likes to be away from the spotlight you are placed under when you are a manager in the Premier League. Despite Keane saying in his first press conference that he wants to get Ipswich back into the top flight of English football I believe he will probably enjoy his time in the Championship more.

The quieter nature of the Championship suits Keane more I feel, as we all know how much he likes to escape the limelight by walking his dogs, something which is a lot easier to do in the old Second Division where the pressure is less intense. However in the Premier League Keane seem to bottle the big challenges after comfortably keeping Sunderland in the Premier League first time around he walked away when things got difficult this season.

Keane will bring something different to Ipswich after taking over from Jim Magilton, who seems to have been done over in this situation, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Blues did enjoy promotion next season. The pressure will be on Keane to repeat the feat he performed at Sunderland in getting Ipswich promotion and whilst Keane the player would never shy away from a challenge I just wonder when the going gets tough whether Keane the manager will stick around or put his tail between his legs again and head back to dog walking.

No related posts.

Call yourself a fan? As the season reaches its climax and the play-offs loom, your support matters all the more. The good news is we can help make sure that you’re there for the games that really matter!

Coke Zone are offering 5 pairs of tickets for every single Coca-Cola Football League game in their Big Match prize draw during April. Yep, that’s 5 pairs of tickets for EVERY game!

Best of all, it only takes two points to enter the draw, which you’ll get just for registering on Coke Zone!

Get more details here and make sure you don’t miss a minute of the action!

Related posts:

1. Football League Rules In Favor of Derby The Football League ruled today that ticket prices for the...
2. The Season Has Begun! On Saturday the CCC season officially started as 24 teams...
3. Credit crunch to bite into the Football League You know things are going to get bad when the...

1st September 2007. I stood outside Loftus Road looking in silence at the memorial laid by fans for our young striker Ray Jones who had been tragically killed in a car crash. As I turned to enter the stadium a vehicle pulled up and from it emerged then Chairman Gianni Paladini along with the man about to buy the club, Flavio Briatore.

For years Rangers had been struggling with finances, seemingly always only days away from a second spell in administration (unlike most clubs, QPR emerged from an administration period worse off than when they went in). Now, just as the club had reached the lowest possible point with the death of a young striker, there was just a semblance of hope. As Briatore crossed the road the silence was broken by an ovation. No cheers, just clapping hands, a sign of thanks and appreciation.

For a while, things were actually pretty good as the club turned to an Italian none of us had heard of, Luigi De Canio. Along with a slew of signings including Fitz Hall, Matthew Connolly, Patrick Agyemang and most importantly the sublime Akos Buzsaky and the mercurial Rowan Vine, De Canio dragged us up the table pretty quickly. There was an annoying penchant for conceding late goals and the away form was shaky, but at Loftus Road fans were treated to the best football in years. Two 3-0 thrashings against promotion-chasing sides Stoke and Bristol City in particular were an absolute joy. We were rich. We were scoring goals. We loved the manager. All was right with the world.

But since April of 2008 very little has been right with the world. Buzsaky and Vine both became injured and between them have played less than five times in the last 12 months. The cultish De Canio left the club under uncertain circumstances, no one quite sure whether he was homesick, whether the players were frustrated by his lack of English or whether he was always only a stop-gap to stave off relegation.

In addition, despite boasting a Board worth billions of pounds, season ticket prices shot up - in some cases by as much as 50% when taking into account discounts for the previous season. There were grumbles, but fans conceded that if we wanted success and more good players then perhaps we should have to pay for it.

There were all kinds of rumours about who the next manager might be (the most outlandish being Zinedine Zidane) but in the end the man chosen was a decidedly unglamorous Iain Dowie.

In a blaze of publicity, QPR managed to sign Real Madrid starlet Daniel Parejo on a one year loan deal, a player Arsenal were rumoured to have offered £10m for only a few months earlier. There were concerns about the lack of a top class striker at the club, but otherwise hopes were high.

A decent start soon went sour. Emmanuel Ledesma, a loan signing from Italy, scored one of the most perfect hat-tricks I have ever seen against Carlisle in the League Cup, but soon lost form and never recovered. Parejo showed flashes of brilliance, but struggled to adapt to the English game. Both have since left the club early. Dowie’s initial expansive football quickly gave way to a more defensive game, causing rows with Briatore. By October he was gone.

Paulo Sousa’s time in charge has been mixed. Some excellent results - a scintillating 3-2 home win against Preston and a 3-0 destruction away at Blackpool - have been enjoyable, but with Buzsaky and Vine still injured, Agyemang joining them and new signing Heidar Helguson seemingly unsure of fitness from one week to the next, the problem of scoring goals has persisted, resulting in some very dull 0-0 draws.

About a month ago, the club trumpeted the return of the Early Bird Discount Scheme whereby existing season ticket holders and members could buy a season ticket for next season at the same price as last season as long as they bought it by mid-April. How the word ‘Discount’ was allowed to be in that offer has been discussed at length, because there was no discount. In fact, because of the VAT reduction, it was actually an increase on last year’s prices. Having sat through a fair amount of turgid football (although at least for once we have been top half for a whole season) fans were furious.

Revolution has been brewing for some time and the whole sorry mess regarding the sacking of Paulo Sousa for apparently revealing ’secrets’ about the club to a fan has brought things to a head. Sousa may not have set the club alight, but he has had just six months. He is not responsible for buying players and Sporting Director Gianni Paladini has failed badly in this regard to acquire strikers of an ability to make us into a team worthy of promotion. He continues to appear to wield a disproportionate amount of power at the club despite being a former agent who has never coached, never managed and has been responsible for bringing a number of sub-standard players to the club on big contracts.

Indeed, it seems possible that Paladini’s signing of Gary Borrowdale in January precipitated the current crisis. Borrowdale was signed on loan in November with a permanent signing also agreed. Sousa was not impressed and Borrowdale never started a game and has been shipped out to Brighton on loan. In retrospect it appears possible that this may have caused something of a power struggle between the coach and the sporting director.

Sousa was an outstanding footballer and a man of honour. A few years ago QPR could never have dreamed of attracting a man of his standing to the club, and now it has booted him out on an embarrassing technicality. He deserves better.

The PR machine at QPR has quickly gone into overdrive, relegating the story of the sacking of the manager to the fifth item on its news page only hours after the initial announcement (where Sousa, bizarrely, was referred to as Paulo De Sousa) and proudly crowing about a 5% reduction in season ticket prices, as if that makes everything okay.

Of course, it makes nothing okay. QPR fans are in a terrible situation. We were desperate for a takeover, for someone with money to have faith in the club. Now we have it and the club is a circus, a shambles, an embarrassment. It is starting to make Newcastle look like a well-run ship.

And who is going to manage this club now? No one seems capable of lasting more than around six months in the job and even a minor run of poor results could mean the sack, as could a disagreement with Briatore or Paladini. Some people have mentioned Darren Ferguson or Gary Johnson but neither have any reason to risk their good names. At the QPR circus, the coach cannot be the Ringmaster, which usually makes him the clown.

I go to football for entertainment. On Monday when Rangers will undoubtedly lose to Sheffield Wednesday, I am dreading the ugly atmosphere that will flood the stands.

Related posts:

1. Magilton Leads The Championship Sack Race [caption id="attachment_580" align="alignright" width="175" caption="How much time will Jim Magilton...