Rob Dickie’s M4 odyssey — Column Wednesday, 7th Jun 2023 00:31 by Clive Whittingham QPR’s much needed squad rebuild/FFP induced fire sale is underway, with Rob Dickie’s quest to complete the M4 corridor furthered by a departure to Bristol City at a financial loss to the club. Mood musicI quite fancy Bristol City next season. Having previously got the conveyer belt a non-parachute payment club needs going quite smoothly - with big money arriving at regular intervals for Aden Flint, Bobby Reid, Joe Bryan, Adam Webster, Jonathan Kodjia and others - like us they found the model of buying low, selling high and reinvesting hobbled by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent collapse in the Championship transfer market. Like us they’ve seen some sellable assets run their contracts down — Famara Diedhiou left for free and Han Noah Massengo is heading back to France cut-price. Like us they’d also used the headroom created by sales to do some daft things, like handing out chunky three-and-a-half-year contracts to Nahki Wells. Some large financial losses were recorded. A breach off FFP was not out of the question. But it feels to me like a recovery is well underway at Ashton Gate. League positions have remained depressingly static, and they were fourteenth in the Championship last season, but money was invested in infrastructure which means the stadium is now one of the best in the division and a brand-new training ground is up and running. One academy graduate was sold for £10m in January, easing financial worries and providing a fighting fund to hit the ground running with this summer. Alex Scott will surely fetch twice that when he inevitably leaves too. They finished the season winning 2-0 at Loftus Road with six academy graduates in their team and zero loans, against a team that had picked up 34-year-old Chris Martin from them after they’d felt able to release him from his contract early because of the progress of the likes of Tommy Conway in his position. It feels like a club moving in the right direction, and in that context you look at this signing of Rob Dickie for an upfront fee reportedly as low as £700k and think gosh, how shrewd, they mean business. Dickie has just turned 27, has three years of Championship experience under his belt, was rated as one of the division’s best defenders 18 months ago, has won Player of the Year awards at both his previous clubs, and is available cheap because of a (potentially temporary) loss of form and contract situation. Get him out of the QPR circus, into a saner and more settled environment, and reap the benefits. Smart stuff.
I do not fancy Queens Park Rangers next season, at all. Having rattled through three managers last season and at one point won two of 28 fixtures, I thought they were singularly fortunate not to be relegated, and very grateful in the end for Reading’s points deduction. At Loftus Road they have won just one of their last 15 matches, and 12 home defeats was the worst total in the Championship along with Stoke and an unwanted QPR club record. The squad needs a significant rebuild, but with the £24m loss recorded in the last set of accounts now in our three-year reporting cycle for the league’s FFP rules, and the £16m sale of Ebere Eze soon to roll out of that, it’ll have to be done on the tightest of budgets. Dickie, who was bought as a development project and by August 2021 looked like being exactly the sort of buy-low-sell-high signing we needed, has now not only been sold on at a loss. Worse still, the majority of that money - and other fees we’ll receive this summer for his team mates - will go towards making up an FFP shortfall said to be in the region of £10m. It feels like a club moving in the wrong direction, and in that context you look at them losing their first choice centre back in what’s supposed to be the prime of his career, and doing so at a financial loss, and think, gosh, what the fuck are they doing? How are they going to replace him on this budget, and who with? Dickie averaged 43 appearances a season during his time in W12, and as we saw with Yoann Barbet letting somebody that reliable walk out of the building while Jake Clarke-Salter struggles to put together 15 starts a year, is something you do at your peril. The mood around QPR at the moment is as bleak as it’s been for many a long year. A recent thread on our message board asking for expectations for the new season brought the overwhelming conclusion that 2023/24 will be the grimmest of relegation battles, with QPR scrapping to survive playing the worst kind of football with a team held together with elastic bands and chewing gum. And so we assume this is a disaster, another poor move, and we sit and wait for Dickie to come back to Loftus Road next year and launch one of those 30 yard shitpingers he specialised in for while into the top corner of our net. Here's a thing though. If QPR, in this mood, had just spent the thick end of £1m on not only a centre back from a team with the worst defensive record in the division (71 goals conceded) but also a player who contributed to that shambles more than most with something that at times — Blackpool A, Sunderland H — seemed to be approaching a nervous breakdown, we’d have been wondering what on earth they were thinking. Dickie has looked miserable and played abysmally for a year now, with only a late backs-to-the-wall effort in a surprise win at Burnley hinting that there’s still any kind of player left in there at all. He crumpled under adversity and personal mistakes when he arrived from League One, and he still does now. He’s got a year left on a contract that he’s apparently not interested in extending and could leave for free next summer. QPR have managed to get some desperately needed funds, early in the window, for him regardless. A year ago Bristol City were very publicly punchy about their free transfer capture of Luton defender Kal Naismith, and the Hatters pretty bitter about the whole thing played out. Luton went up without him, City finished fourteenth. The doom, gloom and pessimism around QPR is wholly, wholly justified, and we’ll go into some of the reasons why below. It is one of the many things Gareth Ainsworth and Richard Dobson are going to have to battle against going into 23/24. Everybody, throughout the club and the support base, is thoroughly miserable, fed up with the situation, angry about the state of the club and the team, and ready to throw up their arms and decry everything that happens here as a catastrophe. That’s not an atmosphere that will be particularly helpful to the team when August rolls around. The Rob Dickie escape roomIn Rob Dickie’s first away game for QPR, against newly promoted Coventry at St Andrew’s, he was caught too high up the field, with too much space in behind him, and no pace to make up that gap when a quicker player ran off his back. Panicked, he reached out, grabbed hold of the opponent’s shirt at the shoulder, and pulled him down for a fairly obvious penalty not awarded. A month later, at Barnsley, the same incident played out again, but this time the referee saw it and after 26 minutes Rangers were 1-0 down from the penalty spot and Dickie was back in the dressing room. Here, we surmised, was a development project with two big ticks in his game — a lack of pace to recover situations and combat fast strikers, and a tendency to let his head drop and confidence flow away whenever he or the team made a mistake or had a tough moment. The benefit of so-called ‘confidence players’ (show me anybody who functions well at anything while they feel shit about themselves, by the way) is when the going is good, it gets really good. After a trying first half to the 2020/21 season things turned around in January when two big changes were made. The first was the addition of Jordy De Wijs, Sam Field, Charlie Austin and Stefan Johansen on loan, bringing much needed quality to the team and experience and voice to the dressing room. The second was a switch to a back three which, despite Dickie’s protestations that he prefers to play in a four, suited him and particularly left-sided Yoann Barbet much, much more. QPR immediately flipped from one win in 13 to six wins from seven and won 15 of their 23 matches through the second half of the season. Dickie, with the extra protection and cover, started carrying the ball out of defence to great effect. Nothing disrupts and panics a team that thinks it’s set in its defensive formation and marked up more than an opposition centre back charging forward with the ball and beating a man or two and, while it was an absolute nonsense that the prize didn’t go to Dom Ball for his last minute winner at home to Cardiff, Dickie’s 30-yarder at Middlesbrough in April took the club’s Goal of the Season award. He finished that season with three goals, and two of them were against Bristol City so you can perhaps see why he’s stuck in the Robins’ minds a bit. The finish to Dickie's first year here had been borderline automatic promotion form. QPR spent that summer buying and loaning players, including making all four of their loan deals permanent with a chunky three-year contract for Stefan Johansen into the bargain, and a wave of optimism swept Shepherd’s Bush. It felt like we were finally back and able to make a bit of a push towards the top of the Championship after years of cleaning house. Losing in an early midweek game at Bournemouth the away end regaled the troops with “2-1 down, who gives a fuck, we’re QPR and we’re going up”. Dickie, in particular, was absolutely on fire — though he did err badly that night at Dean Court, a mistake that was possibly the end of strong and decisive Dickie and the beginning of his decline here. He scored from long range again on the opening day against Millwall, and remarkably did so again against his former club Oxford in the League Cup. Close range efforts against Orient and Hull made it four goals in six games from centre back, and there was a goalline clearance for the ages to chuck into the mix up on Humberside as well. QPR also spent that summer publicly saying nobody would be leaving and clubs shouldn’t bother trying. Lee Hoos said in interview with us: “Other seasons you need to sell a player to bring in funds, this year we felt it important to hang onto the boys. That strategy has challenges as well, you need to get the message out to other clubs, please don’t waste your time giving me a bid and risk upsetting the apple cart because come September 1 he will still be with us and you turning his head for a couple of weeks is just going to piss us off.” We were all excited, but given how things have transpired, and the large financial eight ball this summer has now snookered us behind, this looks like a really poor error of judgement in hindsight. Dickie was one of those at the peak of his value to us then, and while there was never a firm offer for him there was interest in him from Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds that August. Neither the fans nor Mark Warburton would have liked it, but for our development model to work you have to bite the bullet and sell players at the right time. Dickie, like Dieng, Willock and others, has declined in value significantly from the point we ideally should have sold them, both because of their form and their contract situations. We should have been setting out a market stall at that point, not actively discouraging browsers. There was, later in the season, a memorable winner in front of the away end at Luton — a result that kept Mark Warburton in a job. But as injuries bit and form tailed away, further defeats that week against Forest and Peterborough torpedoed the play-off push. Dickie’s performances declined in line with the team, and without Dieng to play diagonally out from the back one of the key problems in that run in was Dickie and Dunne passing the ball nervously and aimlessly between them at the back. The progressive runs across halfway and goals of any sort have long since become a thing of the distant past — Dickie leaves having scored once in his last 78 appearances. While I never felt that lack of pace which caught him out early in his Championship days stuck out as much of a problem, coached to position himself better and not get caught out, the mental side of his game has remained an Achilles heel. Whenever things went wrong for Rob, and/or the team, it became a self-perpetuating spiral. Mick Beale made replacing Dickie and Dunne a top priority last summer, and hung his hat on his porcelain pigs Leon Balogun and Jake Clarke-Salter. When both, predictably, broke down, he had to turn back to the original pair, but while Dunne rolled his sleeves up and got on with the task, Dickie spent 22/23 mooching around with a face like a smacked arse. A story did the rounds that he’d been non-too complimentary about the management of Neil Critchley, which felt really bloody rich given his personal contributions to digging Critchley and the team out of the hole they were in at that point. He was playing as badly as anybody. For the record, given the chance to put his side on the end of season Open All R’s Podcast, Dickie says in actual fact he felt sorry for Critchley as a manager dealt a really bad hand and judged unfairly against a lot of stuff that simply wasn’t his fault. As the team collapsed, so too did he. And that happened throughout his three years here. Each game another 90 minutes of watching him flail around hopelessly in the The Rob Dickie Escape Room — Can He Get Out of His Own Head? He was available every week, which in Fred Karno’s Sit Down Army was a significant plus point, but his form had cratered and his mental state got so bad by the spring that I actually started hoping he might pull something just to get him out of the firing line. His personal performance at Blackpool, where Rangers were beaten 6-1 by one of the relegated sides, was as bad a centre back display as I’ve ever seen. Like, ever. There had never been a 0/10 on LFW before, until that night. Once more it had started with a chance moment of adversity - the harsh award of a first minute penalty against him for handball - which didn't need to be a big issue with 89 minutes to recover against a crap side but his brain turned into a terminal illness. We lost 3-1 at Rotherham, he was personally responsible either fully or in part for all three goals, making Jordan Hugill look like Eusebio. Against Sunderland at home, having lost an aerial duel 70-30 in his favour, he picked up the loose ball by the corner flag, looked up, surveyed his options, gave up, turned right, and just lazily toed the thing out for a Sunderland throw. I didn’t cope well with this moment. Hot drink vendors in Ellerslie Road now serve their product with a warning, such has been Dickie’s propensity to just constantly wallop the ball into the middle of that stand over, and over, and over again. We’ll always have Burnley. A remarkable 2-1 rope-a-dope win against the league champions, a huge step towards Championship survival, secured against all odds in no small part thanks to Dickie’s first half heroics, three death-defying goalline clearances, and a man of the match display. But, overall, it was a dire season for Dickie and the team. By March he wore the vacant, ghostly expression of some Victorian child haunting a family in the American Midwest. Pale, staring, lights on, nobody home. We used to say you could distract Rob Dickie with a shiny piece of paper, but by the time we’d finished with him I’m not sure you could even say that. Through the closing months of last season he had that Andrea Ledsom quality of appearing to be permanently concussed by somebody whacking him over the skull with a large, flat pan. You couldn’t help but surmise a fresh start was best for all concerned. Development clubQPR were so bad in 22/23 that we shouldn’t be in a rush to see anybody involved with it ever again. If ever a team needed ripping up and starting again, it’s now this one. One of its key problems is a failure to cope under any sort of pressure and with any kind of adversity. Neil Critchley said after Fleetwood and Hull the mentality of the squad was in the bin, and Les Ferdinand made a huge play about the mental, confidence and mindset side of the game when we pressed him on the problems at Rangers in February. Given Dickie is arguably the worst for all of that, it’s perhaps no surprise to see him straight out of the door first chance we had, regardless of his contract situation or our FFP status. For this piece I went to look up the trendy new “mentality monster” phrase in the dictionary to try and figure out the opposite, and just found a picture of Rob there staring back at me. Listen to the Richard Dobson episode of The Football Psychology Podcast titled “creating a club culture” if you want to cling to the slim hope the appointment was anchored in some sort of logic and desire to address this problem, rather than yanking the nostalgia lever to quell rising dissent among the fans. It was a huge part of the success they built at Wycombe. Nevertheless, losing one of the players you did spend some money on from the lower divisions, presumably with the intention to build him up and sell him on for profit, in this manner is one multiple disasters large and small currently befalling QPR. To actually be selling him at a significant loss, given where he was 18 months ago, is pretty remarkable. I guess one positive is if Oxford’s sell on clause is a percentage of the profit rather than the overall fee then they owe us some more money now, right? Right? QPR have been poor at selling players at the right time. The ideal point to offload Rob Dickie was August 2021. Now, of course, you can defend the club and say you can only sell players if there is an interested buyer. Genuine, hard, serious, cash offers for any of our players have been almost non-existent since Ebere Eze departed. But Dickie was a reasonable prospect in the Championship at that point and QPR were busy shouting their mouth off about how we wanted to keep the squad together and have a go at promotion, that other clubs shouldn’t even bother making an offer because the answer would be ‘no’. We were all excited at the time, and had we sold a couple of players I’m sure the fans and manager would have been upset and that old “lack of ambition” criticism would have reared its head. But you shouldn’t run your club on the mood swings of supporters, some difficult decisions sometimes have to be made. We desperately need to get better at that. Linked to that is retainment. Eze and Ilias Chair, the two biggest assets, did renew their contracts here in a timely manner, and having netted £16m for the former (with £4m in add ons due, and a first England cap this summer poised to trigger at least some of that) it’s now time this summer to get as much as we can for the latter. But there have been too many other examples of good, sellable players leaving for nothing, or for cheap, because their contracts ran down. Jack Robinson, Ryan Manning, Bright Osayi-Samuel, Yoann Barbet, now Rob Dickie and shortly Chris Willock and Lyndon Dykes. The club have a sob story for all of them, “oh Robinson wouldn't swallow his pride and ended up leaving for a worse offer, oh Manning was a dickhead behind the scenes, oh Bright's dad wouldn't let him sign, oh Yoann wanted to go back to France,” and so on and on and on. But it’s too many for it to be bad luck. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, players who are palpably never going to be good enough for the level, like Shodipo, Owens and Travelman, are kept around interminably earning money while never likely to contribute.
You can’t force players to sign contracts. They earn more from a free transfer because without a transfer fee they can demand a bigger signing on fee and wage. I’ve no doubt with some — Manning is currently holding Swansea over the same barrel he did us — we didn’t do much wrong and didn’t have much hope with. There is an element of damned if you do and damned if you don’t because they’ve had absolute pelters for tying down Kakay and Hamalainen to four-year deals. If you’d given Dickie a new contract and he’d just turned in the season he’s had that would have attracted similar criticism. But if you want to be selling players for any sort of money, you can’t keep letting them get to the last year of their deals as often as we are. Whether it’s a renewal or a sale, we’ve got to be more aggressive in doing that earlier. If the player has had a good first year (as Dickie did), top up that contract then. If they don’t want to, then you know you’ve got somebody who wants to run the deal down to a lucrative free transfer for themselves and you can get on with trying to sell them then when you have leverage — not trying to copper up for a player with 12 months left on a deal. Incidentally, there’s a really good post from Hunter in response to this on this thread. There’s also a discussion to be had about whether, with the transfer market the way it is, and players increasingly happy to just run contracts down and keep moving on lucrative free transfers, how realistic our original ‘development club’ model is in a post-Covid world with EPPP hampering academy efforts. Are we pursuing a pre-Covid policy in a post-Covid world? Have we, in appointing Ainsworth, actually already abandoned it? And what alternatives are there for a club with our stadium and income, wholly reliant on owner’s putting money in, if it’s not developing cheap signings and youth prospects for big sales? Like I say, I’ve become so sick of watching QPR lose games week after week that I’m not bothered about seeing the back of basically the entire team at this point. It seems likely that Dickie will be joined through the exit door by at least Chair, Willock and Dykes this summer. Together with the players already released, and that magnificent army of loaned trojans that did us such a good turn last season, that’s a huge chunk of the squad departing. Good, may be your reaction to this, after the campaign we’ve just had. It’s probably mine. But it’s a lot of bodies to replace. We are going to have to field somebody at centre back next season. Given that the train wreck of 22/23 has so far resulted in absolutely no changes to the management, board, recruitment team or business side of the company, it looks like it’s going to be the same people overseeing that massive overhaul. They’re also going to be doing it while trying to hack into the budget, because as the Eze sale rolls out of the three-year calculation and the £24m loss for 21/22 stays in, things will become very tight on FFP — it’s here that the now infamous £10m shortfall figure has come from. The sale of Dickie, Chair and others will, by and large, go towards plugging that hole, rather than creating funds to spend on other players. Again, that’s fairly disastrous in the development model — you’re meant to sell at profit and invest that in three or four more prospects, not sell at a loss and have to use what money you do get to plug a financial hole. In short, you’re going to be rebuilding this squad, with very little money to do that with. And then there’s the persistent issue of Gareth Ainsworth’s preferred style of play which continues to divide opinion. West London Sport, which it should be said has so far been critical of Ainsworth’s approach and prospects moving forwards, says that as well as Dickie’s contract situation and desire to leave, he simply “didn’t fit the style” and so could go. My big fear is that having got ourselves into all sorts of problems last season by giving a manager exactly what he wanted and letting him sign loads of his boys, we’re about to attempt to correct that by giving another manager exactly what he wants and letting him sign loads of his boys instead. Given QPR’s propensity to not only chop and change manager, but also change from a manager of one style to one of a completely different one (and you don’t get much different than bouncing from Warburton/Beale/Critchley to Ainsworth), it feels horribly inevitable that a poor start to the season could lead to Ainsworth being jettisoned in October time amidst a wave of criticism of his football at which point we decide it’s time to go trendy, forward thinking, and European leaving some Marti Cifuentes or Ajax Youth Coach 3.2 type trying to explain the vagaries of the four-box-two formation to Josh Scowen. 22/23 In numbers: 21/22 In numbers: 20/21 In numbers: If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via PayPal The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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