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.

This was precisely the feeling that makes up for all those 1-0 defeats on rainy Tuesday nights

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.