Adel to return for pre-season training - do we want him?

[stainrodisalegend]

Methinks you confuse xenophobia, naivety and stupidity for truth telling and realism, mate. That's exactly what Green did and what Seizure did. Some of us prefer players who stand by our club to those who try to take the p iss out of it. Silly, I know. Green plays for his wage and for the badge. Cesar doesn't even play for his wage. And f ack the badge as far as he's concerned

Green doesnt play for the badge, i think your hero worship makes you project values of heroism and loyalty that are all in your imagination. He hung around on the bench picking up his 50 grand a week because no one else wanted him. The double standards are incredible. And before you question my support, i have been following the club since 1977 when adel wasnt even born!

[Rangers77]

Green doesnt play for the badge, i think your hero worship makes you project values of heroism and loyalty that are all in your imagination. He hung around on the bench picking up his 50 grand a week because no one else wanted him. The double standards are incredible. And before you question my support, i have been following the club since 1977 when adel wasnt even born!

Wouldn't dream of questioning your support. We both started the same year, so ought stick together. I only hero worship Clint Hill so I merely appreciate Rob Green. Any Green comments I make are best seen as criticisms of Cesar. For you to successfully lump the two keepers together Green would have had to have been told he wasn't wanted. That never happened. He was told by Hughesless (by proxy, not directly) that he was number two to Cesar. He then played second string for a season, never b itched about it, and was made number one by Harry for the championship season. I give him credit for all that. You ought do too. And perhaps be a bit more critical of Cesar who you must know really couldn't care less for the club. I haven't see any pictures of Green wearing a Chelsea top.

[stainrodisalegend]

Wouldn't dream of questioning your support. We both started the same year, so ought stick together. I only hero worship Clint Hill so I merely appreciate Rob Green. Any Green comments I make are best seen as criticisms of Cesar. For you to successfully lump the two keepers together Green would have had to have been told he wasn't wanted. That never happened. He was told by Hughesless (by proxy, not directly) that he was number two to Cesar. He then played second string for a season, never b itched about it, and was made number one by Harry for the championship season. I give him credit for all that. You ought do too. And perhaps be a bit more critical of Cesar who you must know really couldn't care less for the club. I haven't see any pictures of Green wearing a Chelsea top.

Mate, I don't want an argument but you had made the point that some seemed to be more fans of Cesar and Adel than of QPR, and as I had been one of the main people defending them I just thought I should point out that QPR will always be first, second and third in front of the interests of any one player for me - as I'm sure is the case for you. I really liked Tony Currie and later Buz, but we all move on, as I'm sure you will do when Clint hangs up his boots. As for Green I remember quite clearly Hughes saying at the time that Green was free to go. Whatever we all think of Hughes, he was our manager at the time and therefore spoke for the club. I'm not part of some Cesar fan club and am ambivalent about our keeper situation. I just don't agree that one keeper is the perfect role model devoted to the club and the other is the worst mercenary known to man. In my opinion all our players have a pretty keen eye for looking after number one: look at Zamora - sure he scored THAT goal for which we will always be hugely grateful but over the course of his QPR career he has done pretty well out of us. Yet he is still using Millwall to get more dosh from QPR. Lee Cook aside and maybe Les Ferdinand also for not pushing for a move earlier, I'm struggling to think of a single Rs player who hasn't put himself first. People like Clint are great characters and I wd like to think they have grown to love the club but might there also be a little bit in the case of players like that of knowing we are as good as its going to get for them? Everyone thought Paddy was the "right sort" yet had only been out of the door two minutes before he criticised us. "Lord Derry" didn't seem to give us much of a backward glance, or the beloved Jamie Mackie. All I'm saying (in too many words) is that the so-called good honest toiling Brits aren't necessarily all that much more loyal to the club than some of our so-called foreign mercenaries when it really comes down to it.

[QPRDave]

Don't remember Ian Gillard then

[stainrodisalegend]

Don't remember Ian Gillard then

Remember him well mate. Can't remember what he did tho (other than play superbly)?

[Rangers77]

Can't disagree with much of what you say, Stainrod. I shouldn't have posted that about folk being more fans of players than the club. Everyone on here has to be an R. Why would you be ion here otherwise? But I certainly wasn't referring to you when I wrote it. I guess Geng got my goat by playing the wretchedly unfair and reprehensible race card. But, if all players are self interested, then some are far more self interested than others. Cesar, for instance, far more so than Green. And I really thing credit should be given to those, like Green, who knuckle down, even for a wondrous salary, and play for the club rather than those that don't. I think that's a fair assessment of Green's time at the Rangers.

[Geng]

Great posts by stainrod above, agree with every word.

Rangers77, I deliberately said xenophobic rather than racist, and I don't even mean xenophobic in a BNPish 'dislike black people sense'. I'm talking about a softer sort of cultural association here, the kind of thinking that associates our country with hard-working grafters and foreigners with work-shy mercenaries. I honestly think this is one of the keys to understanding why Adel and Cesar divide opinions so clearly among our fans: they're held to a higher standard than their British counterparts who more clearly fit our prescribed ideas of what it means to be a "good sort".*

We really don't know what Cesar was up to last season, or Green in 2012/13. How do we know Green "knuckled down" and more than Cesar did last year? Are you seriously saying there is some sort of huge difference to a highly-paid first team goalkeeper between being considered 2nd and 3rd choice? Because that is what your argument seems to come down to. Green was on the bench, therefore he was knuckling down and hoping to win his place back. Cesar wasn't on the bench, therefore he was just dossing around. GK isn't like being a forward where you get 20 minutes to impress here and there; they both clearly knew at the time they weren't being considered for the first team.

*Yeah obviously tonnes of Adel's stuff, particularly, is completely indefensible. I'm not saying he's got a good attitude, he clearly doesn't, and that's why we had four seasons of such a talented player. But I'm also talking about standards on the pitch too. Imagine a parallel universe where badge-kissing dopey-defending cockney playmaker Adam Talbot had just scored 5 and setup 4 while in and out of a godawful relegation-bound QPR side, along with a bunch of epic moments of random skill. There's no way we would be completely writing him off as having "completely failed", "done nothing", "not good enough for this level" etc.

[Geng]

For what it's worth, re the "Green was asked to compete whereas Cesar was told he was out of favour" argument:

QPR boss Mark Hughes will consider allowing goalkeeper Robert Green to leave in January if he is unhappy about his lack of first-team football.

'In the future if any of my keepers came to me and said they felt their future lay elsewhere then we can have a conversation about that and make a decision that benefited everyone,' Hughes said.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2196693/Rob-Green-leave-QPR-january-says-Mark-Hughes.html

[Geng]

Another good example of the double standard I'm talking about here would be attitudes towards Hogan Ephraim. I love Hogie too, but he was last first choice in November 2010. He's since played about 20 times in the past three seasons, mostly on loan. We were clearly paying him far more than he'll get in his next contract, most likely in league 1. Why didn't Hogie do a Julio Cesar-style "accept a reduced salary to get first team football" move? If there was a big thread about Hogan bleeding us dry I missed it.

And yet you'd still see people on here posting on here about Hogan's potential. One for the future, give him a chance, never had a proper run in the team, would be great with the right coaching/teammates around him. He's a year older than Adel and has a fraction of the on-pitch accomplishments. So why does one get slack the other doesn't?*

*don't say it's just because of attitude. I know Hogan has a great attitude and Adel a terrible one. My point is that plenty of people on here say Taarabt never did anything on the pitch, which they just wouldn't say about others if they were similarly productive.

[Rangers77]

Geng I accept that you're an R first and foremost. But my objections to Cesar aren't remotely born of xenophobia. And you explicitly stated it was him being foreign that lay behind my objection to him. Green was told he could go if he wanted to; Cesar was told he should go. That's the difference. And Cesar could have gone anywhere in the world for good money. He choose not to knowing he wouldn't even be number two. Only when Scolari pressurized him to get first team football under his belt did he go- at Nelsen's prompting- to Toronto. But we've surely exhausted this issue now. Hogan, I think, did himself and the club a disservice by hanging around. However the difference between him and Cesar is that no one wanted him full stop. In such a situation the player, having to choose between wages and no wages, will naturally take the wage for the duration of their contract. No surprise there.

[Stanley]

Well yeah that explains so many of our fans see Barton or Mackie do the odd thundering tackle and think "hard worker" even though they both mark defenders when we have the ball, and why the opposite is true for Adel.

Nope, sorry you've lost me with that sentence.

"Xenophobia is the irrational or unreasoned fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange"

Umm thanks for the English lesson, not that I needed it.

I can see how sticking-to-what-you-know in cultural terms may have a certain dim rationality to it, but you do more or less seem to prove my point.

Really? How's that? Sorry but none of what you've said so far makes any sense.

Saying "British = hard workers" and "foreigners = lazy" fits pretty well into the above definition.

Who said "foreigners = lazy"? Not me.

The fear of not appearing to "graft", as opposed to simply work hard and be professional (and make decent runs when you have the ball for eg).

"Fear"? Where has this 'fear' appeared from? Sorry mate, I'm genuinely trying to understand what youre on about but I'm still struggling....

There's a nice quote from Xavi here

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/feb/11/xavi-barcelona-spain-interview

"Maybe it's the culture, I don't know, but in England you're warriors. You watch Liverpool and Carragher wins the ball and boots it into the stands and the fans applaud. There's a roar! They'd never applaud that here."

Yes thats a good quote. He's right, they are "warriors". He says they don't applaud that sort of thing in Spain, but instead they applaud simulated diving to try and fool referees into awarding free-kicks or getting their totally innocent fellow professionals punished - IOW cheating basically.

Comes back to what I said before, theyre cultural differences - nothing to do with xenophobia.

But as we have seen in the world cup, good honest british toil isnt good enough on its own.

I agree with that. But that's not the main reason why England failed at the WC. There's a whole host of explanations I would place above it.

Successful prem teams have a mixture of hard toiling workhorses in the carragher mold who are often - though not exclusively - british and a few flair players (who are often but not always foreign). Nico and morrison didnt shape up and minus adel we dont have a single player who can really unlock a defence with a great pass or run. Sure you need your hod carriers like barton but you also need a few players with technique like adel. It need not be adel but it needs to be someone. In an ideal world the player will have skill and a work ethic, like ronaldo. But if there is such a player available to us, i havent read about him. I thought even the most traditional english fan accepted this need for balance and realised what continental flair had added to the domestic game for at least the last two decades.

Agree with all that mate.

[Martinmalta]

If neither Milan nor Napoli are ready to get Adel, it will surely put him down to earth. He will have to show his potential as otherwise, his career will vanish like smoke. Maybe this will favour us as with Adel focused again, we will have a player that can win games single handedly. There are not many players of his calibre in the lower part of the Premier.

[Stanley]

Redknapp quote today:

"Yesterday we had 15 players training and of those three or four want to go, like Adel Taarabt, who wants to go back to AC Milan where he did well."

[QPR Richard]

Not sure if Cesar should be called a mercenary. Mercenaries get paid to do a job. What job is Cesar doing?

[2D•TRON]

I think with the possible new formation and the quality around him we would see an improved premier league Taarabt.

I'm for keep him til crimbo as long as there is no special treatment, and there is no negative effect on the moral of the team.