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Queens Park Rangers 1 Everton 2
The graffiti was scrawled on the wall at Goodison Park under cover of darkness. It encapsulated the urgent, furious response to Everton’s brutal regression this season, the sensation that the removal post haste of Roberto Martínez would be a step in the right direction. “Not good enough,” it read.
They say the same thing at Queens Park Rangers, though here they have not seen the need to reach for the paint cans in anger. The mood is more one of weary acceptance, and that is not the sort of thing that brings out anyone’s inner Banksy.
QPR, put simply, are not good enough for the Barclays Premier League, and that is why, barring the most far-fetched of turnarounds, they will not be in it next season.
This defeat felt like the moment the clock started to tick. Chris Ramsey’s team started the afternoon four points adrift of safety, but with precisely the sort of game those threatened with relegation crave: an Everton team sapped of confidence by their travails this year and drained of energy by a long journey to Kiev last week. The scales weighted in their favour, QPR had to win. They did not.
Instead, they left with nothing. They could not hold on to a point — of value psychologically, if nothing else — when the bright Eduardo Vargas cancelled out Séamus Coleman’s artful opener. Aaron Lennon secured the visiting side a victory that left Martínez looking up, talking about soaring up the table and finishing the season on a high.
Ramsey, by contrast, was left counting his blessings that none of their rivals at the foot of the table picked up points and convincing himself, as much as anyone, that “a low total” will be enough to preserve top-flight status this season. Even then, though, he admitted QPR need a “miraculous run of form” to avoid the trapdoor that is opening beneath his feet.
His side have 22 points, and eight games of the season remaining. Five of those are away from home, where they have thus far managed to win just once. They have to go to Anfield and the Etihad Stadium, and they have to welcome Chelsea to Loftus Road too. Ramsey thinks four wins might be enough to keep them up. No wonder, when asked what they need from their trips to West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa, Ramsey just said: “Six points. That’s the reality. We can’t carry on saying we were unlucky.”
On this evidence, they will not go quietly. “We played well today,” said Ramsey. “Very, very well. They showed the fans they have plenty of fight left in them. I did not see any apathy at all. Everyone did their shift. We showed the fans that if things don’t work out, we are not going down with a whimper. We will keep fighting. There have been teams in slightly worse situations that have survived.”
That is almost certainly true, but while QPR do not lack heart, there is something missing that will, eventually, count against them. They ran and scrapped and battled here, to such an extent that you wondered if it was all a little bit too desperate, if they were producing an awful lot of heat and not a vast quantity of light.
That, ultimately, is their problem, much more than all of the off-field drama that has become such a familiar backdrop to this club. The rhetoric of football is such that it would be easy to believe that games are decided by who tries the hardest, who, to use the parlance, wants it more. That is delusion.
QPR wanted this more than Everton, but they still lost, because at some point what really matters, what determines these things, is who is better at football. It is here that Ramsey’s players just fall short. There are too many who do not see the pass until it is a split-second too late, who need just a moment too long to think, who do not quite make the right decision. This is not a team full of bad players. It is just a team of players who are, when it comes down to it, not good enough. Not by a lot, but still not quite.
And so for all their effort, they struggled to create chances against a team that has been alarmingly porous this season. There was a Charlie Austin cross that fizzed just past Bobby Zamora’s head, and there was a Zamora flick that his strike partner could not quite turn into a shot. Everton, by contrast, needed just one decent passage of play to take the lead: Lennon turning Arouna Koné’s cross back to Leon Osman, who slipped a pass into Coleman’s path. The Irishman drilled home off the far post.
It took 50 minutes for the hosts to rise above the ordinary, Junior Hoilett cutting in and crashing a shot off the bar, the follow-up ruled out for a narrow offside. When the equaliser did come, it was by sheer force of will: a Sandro shot blocked, Austin waiting and waiting for the ball to stop squirming around, Vargas arriving and finishing with the power of a man who knows this is not the time for artistic impression.
That point would not, in the grand scheme of things, have made a vast amount of difference, but even that was denied to the hosts, Lennon tapping home after Nedum Onuoha took Coleman’s cross off Koné’s toes. Martínez’s team would not be caught again, despite Adel Taarabt hitting the crossbar in stoppage time.
The Spaniard described it as one of his “most satisfying” moments at Everton, even if it was not “the sort of day for a technically perfect performance”.
“It had character, it had guts,” he said. QPR had plenty of those too. In the end, that was still not enough
The graffiti was scrawled on the wall at Goodison Park under cover of darkness. It encapsulated the urgent, furious response to Everton’s brutal regression this season, the sensation that the removal post haste of Roberto Martínez would be a step in the right direction. “Not good enough,” it read.
They say the same thing at Queens Park Rangers, though here they have not seen the need to reach for the paint cans in anger. The mood is more one of weary acceptance, and that is not the sort of thing that brings out anyone’s inner Banksy.
QPR, put simply, are not good enough for the Barclays Premier League, and that is why, barring the most far-fetched of turnarounds, they will not be in it next season.
This defeat felt like the moment the clock started to tick. Chris Ramsey’s team started the afternoon four points adrift of safety, but with precisely the sort of game those threatened with relegation crave: an Everton team sapped of confidence by their travails this year and drained of energy by a long journey to Kiev last week. The scales weighted in their favour, QPR had to win. They did not.
Instead, they left with nothing. They could not hold on to a point — of value psychologically, if nothing else — when the bright Eduardo Vargas cancelled out Séamus Coleman’s artful opener. Aaron Lennon secured the visiting side a victory that left Martínez looking up, talking about soaring up the table and finishing the season on a high.
Ramsey, by contrast, was left counting his blessings that none of their rivals at the foot of the table picked up points and convincing himself, as much as anyone, that “a low total” will be enough to preserve top-flight status this season. Even then, though, he admitted QPR need a “miraculous run of form” to avoid the trapdoor that is opening beneath his feet.
His side have 22 points, and eight games of the season remaining. Five of those are away from home, where they have thus far managed to win just once. They have to go to Anfield and the Etihad Stadium, and they have to welcome Chelsea to Loftus Road too. Ramsey thinks four wins might be enough to keep them up. No wonder, when asked what they need from their trips to West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa, Ramsey just said: “Six points. That’s the reality. We can’t carry on saying we were unlucky.”
On this evidence, they will not go quietly. “We played well today,” said Ramsey. “Very, very well. They showed the fans they have plenty of fight left in them. I did not see any apathy at all. Everyone did their shift. We showed the fans that if things don’t work out, we are not going down with a whimper. We will keep fighting. There have been teams in slightly worse situations that have survived.”
That is almost certainly true, but while QPR do not lack heart, there is something missing that will, eventually, count against them. They ran and scrapped and battled here, to such an extent that you wondered if it was all a little bit too desperate, if they were producing an awful lot of heat and not a vast quantity of light.
That, ultimately, is their problem, much more than all of the off-field drama that has become such a familiar backdrop to this club. The rhetoric of football is such that it would be easy to believe that games are decided by who tries the hardest, who, to use the parlance, wants it more. That is delusion.
QPR wanted this more than Everton, but they still lost, because at some point what really matters, what determines these things, is who is better at football. It is here that Ramsey’s players just fall short. There are too many who do not see the pass until it is a split-second too late, who need just a moment too long to think, who do not quite make the right decision. This is not a team full of bad players. It is just a team of players who are, when it comes down to it, not good enough. Not by a lot, but still not quite.
And so for all their effort, they struggled to create chances against a team that has been alarmingly porous this season. There was a Charlie Austin cross that fizzed just past Bobby Zamora’s head, and there was a Zamora flick that his strike partner could not quite turn into a shot. Everton, by contrast, needed just one decent passage of play to take the lead: Lennon turning Arouna Koné’s cross back to Leon Osman, who slipped a pass into Coleman’s path. The Irishman drilled home off the far post.
It took 50 minutes for the hosts to rise above the ordinary, Junior Hoilett cutting in and crashing a shot off the bar, the follow-up ruled out for a narrow offside. When the equaliser did come, it was by sheer force of will: a Sandro shot blocked, Austin waiting and waiting for the ball to stop squirming around, Vargas arriving and finishing with the power of a man who knows this is not the time for artistic impression.
That point would not, in the grand scheme of things, have made a vast amount of difference, but even that was denied to the hosts, Lennon tapping home after Nedum Onuoha took Coleman’s cross off Koné’s toes. Martínez’s team would not be caught again, despite Adel Taarabt hitting the crossbar in stoppage time.
The Spaniard described it as one of his “most satisfying” moments at Everton, even if it was not “the sort of day for a technically perfect performance”.
“It had character, it had guts,” he said. QPR had plenty of those too. In the end, that was still not enough
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