Tis The Season

[El Gordo]

I received a text from an old friend who happens to support QPR. It went like this:

"Hi any chance of getting a couple of tickets for #watford v The Billionaires as our pathetically small allocation of 2500 has sold out in under an hour. We are going up! Come on you R's"

Soon to become the second most hated team in the land me thinks.

Way too early to say, Nick. Most QPR fans I know reacted with some elation to the news, having been knocking on the door of administration for over 10 years (and entering it once for a year). But after the relief of the debt being paid off, a strange sense of reality, or perhaps unreality, is breaking. The QPR messageboards are full of discussion on the 'billionaires' thing. There's a small but mouthy minority who are giving it large, while the great majority are shushing them, reassuringly worried that we'll handle it badly. There's a nice piece in the Telegraph about it today:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jh...qpr124.xml

I've been pleased with what I've read Briatore say on several occasions, that he wants to change the way that football is marketed to the local community, and wants to make improvements to the stadium. He's been quick to swat away any suggestion that there'll be a spending spree on players. He's talked about a £10m budget for the coming year which is respectable by Championship standards, but not the mark of the Abramovitch strategy -- to buy success at all costs, and to think nothing of paying £20m+ for player who then sits in the stands for an entire season. He's talking about picking up reliable Championship-level players, as well as the possibility of a couple of surprises from Italy. I think this may be what he's about: shipping a fading Italian star or two over to add a bit of glamour -- if the Naomi Campbell/Tamara Beckwith thing was anything to go by. These guys have been successful in F1 by being resourceful and creative, rather than spending their way to success, and they SAY that's what they plan to do in football. I hope so. QPR have always been a relatively small, family club (not unlike Watford), that most people seem to quite like in a nostalgic sort of way. It would be a shame if they lost all of that.

On the Watford match point, there's been a lot of disappointment about the size of the allocation which is apparently much smaller than last time. It sold out a couple of weeks ago, though I suspect not within an hour. Looks as if I'll be in with the Watford lot, like many Rangers fans.

Good luck to Watford -- after Saturday. I'd like to see them go up again this season, preferably at the expense of Fulham and Reading.