If Queen’s Park Rangers do stay in the Premier League – and even after this slightly ragged 3-2 victory that is a substantial if – then history will perhaps record that the campaign to erect a vast bronze likeness of Charlie Austin on Shepherd’s Bush Green started here.
Austin scored a finisher’s hat-trick against a neat but brittle West Bromwich Albion to make it eight in his last five home games as Rangers recovered from going 2-0 down in the opening 20 minutes to claim an improbable home win.
At the end of which Harry Redknapp’s non-travelling Hoops now have five Premier League victories at Loftus Road this season: Austin has scored at least once in each, four times claiming the winner. Here he ran and chased relentlessly and several times fell over his own feet. But he was brilliantly sharp whenever it mattered, scoring all three goals from corners, the winner coming in the 85th minute with a lovely leaping header from an inswinging Joey Barton delivery.
“Everybody will talk about Charlie’s three goals, but his defending late in the game was fantastic,” Redknapp said later of a player who now has more goals this season than the rest of the QPR squad put together. “He made a tackle right by the corner flag. Anybody would have thought he was a right-back. That summed him up, his work rate was phenomenal.”
Before kick-off this match had the feeling of a slightly premature relegation pre-eliminator, a tribute to QPR’s determination to play like a team with one hand tied behind its back. So far this season Rangers have the home form of a top-six team and the away record of something that doesn’t really resemble a team at all, more a collection of disparate, slightly baffled individuals fulfilling the fixture list.
Austin had missed the latest of these – the limp 3-1 defeat at Everton on Monday – through suspension. Here he returned to partner Bobby Zamora up front, with Eduardo Vargas pushed high up on the right and the expectation of another storming home start.
This time, though, Rangers ran cold as West Brom’s short-passing midfield dominated possession. With seven minutes gone Brown Ideye clumped Stéphane Sessègnon’s cut-back into the second tier of the stand from six yards out (no mean feat in itself). But the goal was coming, and after 10 minutes it duly arrived, Joleon Lescott heading in Sessègnon’s flick-on from Sébastien Pocognoli’s corner. The challenge from Rangers’ central defenders was flaccid, in keeping with a poor start that saw the home team repeatedly give the ball away and a flat midfield offer little drive or invention.
West Brom continued to pass and move with greater purpose, and with 20 minutes gone it was 2-0. Silvestre Varela poked home his first Premier League goal at the end of a run from halfway, a simple exchange of passes with Sessègnon enough to bamboozle a Rangers defence in which Richard Dunne twice lost his man, turning and twisting with all the gossamer grace of a fully laden municipal dustcart.
QPR showed spirit to hit back almost immediately. James Morrison pulled back Leroy Fer at a corner as the Rangers man went to poke a loose ball goalwards, a good spot through a crowd of players by the referee Craig Pawson. Austin blasted the penalty kick past Ben Foster.
At the start of the second half the drive finally came from Rangers. A series of long punts forward, a bullocking run from Nedum Onuoha down the right, and West Brom were rocking. Dunne headed a right-wing corner against the bar, Bobby Zamora nodded it back and Austin – of course – finished.
Rangers, for all their lumpen first half, were level at 2-2.
West Brom settled again, taking possession for periods without creating clear chances, but looking vulnerable whenever Rangers did press. In a fevered, error-strewn last 10 minutes Austin’s moment finally came, as it always seemed likely to.
For Alan Irvine there was simply disappointment. West Brom played the better, more coherent football, but suffered from a lack of concentrated cutting edge. None of the starting front six here have more than a single goal this season, albeit there were encouraging signs that the swift and skilful Varela and (more dimly) the hesitant Ideye may be starting to settle.
“We were the better team,” Irvine said, correctly. “We created most of the chances, we controlled it for long periods, but unfortunately we just didn’t defend well enough at three corners.”
