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Queens Park Rangers need to make a good decision. Just one good decision. And surely something sensible must eventually occur on Tony Fernandes’s watch. If only on the law of averages.
The owner is in many ways an appealing character, anxious to communicate with the fans and ready to spend big — so big the club has been found guilty of financial unfair play — while plans for a 40,000-capacity stadium retaining the old Loftus Road atmosphere are encouraging. But what else hints at a brighter future?
Not the Premier League table, at the foot of which Rangers sit squirming. Not the Football League’s warnings that, if relegated, they could be cast as far down football’s hierarchy as the Conference for refusing to pay a fine for overspending when in the Championship last season.
Not a list of recruits under Fernandes’s previous management — Kieron Dyer, Park Ji-sung, Jose Bosingwa, Fabio, Esteban Granero, Andy Johnson — that reads like a suicide note. And what, now, about Rio Ferdinand? Did that signing proclaim that even Harry Redknapp has lost his touch in the transfer market?
We should not, perhaps, reach conclusions with less than a fifth of the season gone. As Ferdinand argues, while pleading for Redknapp to remain despite reports that Fernandes may turn to Tim Sherwood: “We are not even in double figures for the number of games played.”
But this, of course, is where Redknapp came in. Fernandes let Mark Hughes stay in charge for 12 matches in 2012-13 and, although there was an improvement under Redknapp, the club still went down.
How QPR’s summer signings have fared so far
Fernandes simply has to make the right call now. Because of the Football League’s stance, the stakes have never been higher.
As the fans stand helplessly by, wondering if a change will come before Sunday’s visit of Liverpool to Loftus Road, perhaps recalling Tony Pulis’s transformation of Crystal Palace, they’ll be hoping that someone, at last, whispers good advice in their custodian’s ear.
