Foul Play - Battle Of Loftus Road

On a filthy afternoon of unrelenting torrential monsoon rainfall in foggy Shepherd’s Bush, Foul Play managed to get fucked out of Loftus Road before the half-time whistle. I would like to stress at this point that no anti-social behaviour took place on my part, and that I represented you all with great dignity and decorum.

I’d nipped over to London primarily to feast my eyes on the Jaguars-Cowboys summit at Wembley, but a swift scan of the fixture list revealed that Man City also happened to be visiting QPR on the Saturday, and it would’ve felt plain wrong not to lend my moral support. There being no tickets left in the ‘away end’ two days before I trekked over, I ordered one in the main stand, and didn’t really give it a second’s thought.
As any of you who witnessed the match can testify, it turned out to be a cracking five-star encounter, an end-to-end roller-coaster affair which made a total mockery of the teams’ respective standings in the League tables. Happy Harry’s QPR troops were ‘well up for it’ in the popular parlance, with Charlie Austin and Bobby Zamora a non-stop menace to a terrifyingly off-colour City back four, and they had already rattled the back of Joe Hart’s net three times before the 20-minute mark, though two of the strikes were chalked off.
It was shaping up to be a catastrophic afternoon, so when the almighty Sergio Aguero fashioned a magnificently crafty equaliser, I may have jumped out of my seat and hit the proverbial roof, as you do. It wasn’t an action I gave any great premeditated forethought to: celebrating a goal never is. It was an involuntary reaction and, one might have thought, a perfectly reasonable one in any sane universe. That it had been a mistake was very swiftly apparent, with hordes of angry, white, skinheaded London lads of questionable evolutionary provenance fixing me with glares of unconcealed hatred. The evident willingness of several of them to collaborate on the collective enterprise of smashing Foul Play’s face in, there and then, was not lost on me, and a posse of stewards swiftly intervened.
What followed remains gobsmacking: I was slung out. It seemed quite an astonishing interpretation of where the greater balance of blame ought to lie, since they were the ones acting threateningly, swearing in front of kids and issuing vile threats of direful violence. The steward who made this unilateral decision, to put this as kindly as possible, was a gorilla visibly over-promoted into a position of responsibility far beyond his station: he appeared obsessed with the notion that I had been ‘mocking the home fans’, that I ‘should have known better’, and to be taking considerable pleasure in confiscating my ticket and slinging me out the door. I take no pleasure at all in saying that he was an atrocious reflection on Queen’s Park Rangers FC.
I also must salute the lad working on reception beside QPR’s box office: a gentleman and a credit to his football club, he agreed completely that the decision had been an appalling one, sympathised whole-heartedly, suggested that I cool my heels in a nearby boozer (The Springbok) and apologised profusely, explaining that he didn’t have the direct authority to overrule a steward’s decision, was embarrassed on behalf of the knuckleheads who had got their pound of flesh, wished me nothing but the best and hoped it would not dissuade me from attending further matches at Loftus Road. Over to you, QPR.....
Anyroad, I got home just in time for the Battle of Celtic Park, a night where the Republic took two steps back, again, as seems to be our wont after any semi-decent result. Any delusions that we were set for a majestic procession toward the Euro 2016 party in France have had the sharpest of reality checks; ours is shaping up to be arguably the trickiest of all the qualifying groups, and the fear is that that last-minute leveller in Germany may have papered over the cracks in much the manner Richard Dunne’s one-man act of resistance in Moscow did back in 2011.
In what was an abysmal game of football on several levels, the Scots — a profoundly limited crew of Championship-level battlers — at least displayed sporadic flashes of wit and invention, whereas the poverty of Ireland’s creative ambition was sufficient as to raise serious questions about what difference Trapattoni’s removal has actually made. Four months of wound-licking and calm reflection now await before the next fixture, which may be no bad thing.
The table doesn’t look too bad, and the road remains open, as it bloody well ought to with 24 qualifiers. But this will need to be done the hard way. Onward we go...