Queens Park Rangers Story: September

As September approached, I was in a confident mood. My team had started scoring, and our defence was holding up well. Radek Cerny in goal was doing brilliantly, getting a 7.31 rating out of 10 for the competitive games. My transfers were all done and dusted, and I didn't feel I needed any other players. Until the injuries came...

September had 6 games for us to play, with the first coming on the 13th, almost a fortnight in! So 6 games in 18 days, which is frankly quite ridiculous. Nevertheless, we lumbered on and these were our results for the September matches:

Preston 0-1 Queens Park Rangers (CCC)
Queens Park Rangers 1-1 Barnsley (CCC)
Norwich 0-2 Queens Park Rangers (CCC)
Queens Park Rangers 1-0 Blackpool (LC)
Queens Park Rangers 1-2 Southampton (CCC)
Queens Park Rangers 2-1 Swansea (CCC)

These results took us to 6th place with 17 points, 2 points off of the top spot. Even though it was only 9 games in, the league was looking very tight, with only 6 points seperating 1st and 13th. I took this as a good sign, as a couple of wins on the bounce can propel us to the top.

Now I was mentioning injuries a few paragraphs back, and this was a real crisis. The results do not show it, because mostly the strikers remained fit, but I now see we need at least 2 more defenders in January. After the win against Norwich, Peter Ramage (DC) and Damien Delaney (DL) were both injured for 2 weeks, and after Blackpool, creative midfielder Daniel Parejo on loan from Real Madrid suffered a stubbed toe and would be out for 3 weeks. Also a day before the Southampton match, steely midfield maestro Martin Rowlands broke his finger and would be out for 2 months. If it was a Premier League side this would be no problem due to the strength in depth, but QPR had no other left backs, and Peter Ramage was playing right back because of no other good ones! We had to call up 2 youth players, and both of Southampton's goals came from the wings, and errors made by the youth players. Without our 2 creative midfielders, we looked short of ideas in the final third, and a penalty from young (not the youth players) defender Matthew Connolly was the only reprieve we had from Southampton's relentless charges. After that, Ramage and Delaney came back and we shored up our defence, giving us more occasion to attack. Kevin Doyle, our top scorer, capitalised on this, scoring and assisting in the Swansea game.

I hope that injuries will not wreck my team too badly until January, so I applied to the board about getting a parent club to get loanees from. They came back with Tottenham and West Ham, with me picking Tottenham after looking at their reserve team. No players have been loaned to us yet, but I hope we will snap up 1 or 2 defenders before the end of October. Speaking of October, it is up next so thanks for reading!