When Queens Park Rangers were last fighting down at the foot of the Premier League table, they were fighting themselves. “During the week sometimes tempers can flare,” Bobby Zamora says in that understated manner so beloved of footballers.
It was 2012-13, the season in which the London club would sack Mark Hughes in late November to replace him with Harry Redknapp and when the atmosphere inside the dressing room was toxic. There were rifts and bad eggs and the overriding sense that too many of the squad were happy to take home the big money while worrying about little more than their social plans.
Zamora remembers that he dreaded training and the words of the chairman, Tony Fernandes, at the end of the season, following the inevitable relegation, retain a haunting, loss-of-innocence quality. “Passion is just something that comes naturally to me,” Fernandes says. “If I was a player, I’d go out every week and give it 150%. I don’t know if every player in the Premier League feels hurt when they lose a game. The right sort is very important. I was naive in thinking that everyone was like me.”
“I think that for myself,” Zamora adds, “as someone who was obviously on the outside of it – it’s more a case of just wishing, at times, that you didn’t have to go to training for a week and [could] just turn up for a Saturday, so you’re not around that and you just get to game time. When game time comes, everybody’s fighting for the same cause. It can be a negative spiral but two and a half years ago [in 2011-12] we stayed up with that.”
Zamora signed from Fulham in January 2012, three weeks after the club had sacked Neil Warnock and brought in Hughes and, even for an experienced professional, the vibe was tough to handle. Zamora, though, is looking back in order to look forward.
QPR are bottom of the Premier League, with four points and four goals from seven matches and problemsseemingly everywhere. Fernandes has people in his ear, people that he trusts, telling him that he must sack Redknapp because the manager is a busted flush. Les Ferdinand, the club legend, has returned as technical director in all but name and, judging by Redknapp’s body language on Friday, he is not exactly thrilled about it. There have been fitness issues with the players. The new signings have not settled. And the club’s massive debts mean that another relegation is unthinkable.
But Zamora is laid back and confident. The season is only seven games old, he says, and the more he says it, the more the crisis talk seems crazier and crazier to him. Above all, though, the squad has a character and unity. It is one that Redknapp has rebuilt since the summer of last year and it is remarkable to think that only nine senior players remain from 2012-13. This time, Zamora says, it is different and it will be different.
“There aren’t many lads that were here that [relegation] season,” Zamora says. “It’s been a big turnaround. All the lads get on. Rio [Ferdinand] has been impressed with how the lads are together. Obviously he’s been at Manchester United for a long time and he can’t believe the togetherness of the lads and the spirit that’s in here. Spirit is the big thing when you are at the bottom, probably over tactics. I mean, obviously tactics are very important but if that spirit is there … It’s what got us through towards the end of last season, when it came to crunch time in the Championship play-offs. It’s about not being afraid to play. Harry instils that into us.”
Zamora, Redknapp and everybody in QPR colours will need to show their mettle over the coming weeks, beginning with the visit of Liverpool to Loftus Road on Sunday lunchtime. Thereafter QPR face Aston Villa (home), Chelsea (away) and Manchester City (home).
“We haven’t come to that point where it’s panic stations, far from it,” Zamora says. “When does that come? Ha! A couple of months before the end of the season. We’ll have plenty of points on the board by then, I’m sure.
“This season we’re in a better position all round – club, players, squad, everything. And there’s 31 games to go. The speculation about Harry is crazy. We’re all behind him. He’s pretty much brought all of us in. We just have to do our jobs.”
The issue of players’ fitness has been in the news this week, not least after Liverpool’s Raheem Sterling said that he was too jaded to start for England against Estonia. “If I said that to Harry, he’d tell me to have a rest but see you Saturday,” Zamora said.
But QPR looked particularly flat in the 2-0 defeat at West Ham United before the international break and Zamora said Redknapp had since worked them hard. “I think the gaffer expected a little bit more from us,” he said. “But we’ve had two weeks now of hard sessions, so I’d like to think that any part of lung fitness is taken care of.”
