De Canio's QPR Plans

-
Daily Mail - De Canio's reality check for Rangers
Italian boss rules out fairytale rise to Premier League until next season as he warns that new-look side will need time to gel

Luigi De Canio has already started planning next season's push for the Premier League after writing off Queens Park Rangers' chances of snatching a play-off place this time round.
The Italian manager could see as easily as any of the 9,000 souls who braved the Yorkshire gales last night that only one side played like a team. And it wasn't his.
De Canio looked almost relieved that he could finally dispense with any further talk of promotion miracles and said: "What must happen now is that I work to make sure that my players gel as a unit for what is to come and for what will be expected of us.
"It should also be remembered that when I took over as the manager in January we were bottom of the table.
"And so for anyone to be thinking that we could get into the play-offs shows that we have made progress.
"But we will not see the proper progress right now. First we have to work to bring the players together, to make them understand each other better then we will go from there." The expectations on De Canio and his new Rangers are, of course, huge. While Barnsley devoted a mammoth 60 pages of last night's match programme to the FA Cup giant-killing act at Liverpool that won them a quarter-final against Chelsea, they did not forget they were also housing the nouveau riche of the Championship.
One article said QPR fans were "living the fairytale" and the club had "more money than they can imagine" and were "able to outbid most clubs in the country for players."
The reference, of course, was to the purchase of Rangers by Formula One moguls Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, their entrance boosted by the 20 per cent interest in the club bought by Lakshmi Mittal, the world's fifth richest man.
Ten players joined Rangers in January and there will clearly be plenty more arriving in the summer - Briatore having predicted that Rangers would be in the Champions League within four years.
That would, indeed, be a fairytale even with so much wealth to hand. But on the evidence of their visit to Yorkshire against a side that they beat 2-0 only last month, it is going to take a lot longer than four years for them to mix it with the Euro elite.
Rangers hardly look like a team of strangers but neither do they suggest they possess the kind of cohesion that will be required to start a proper climb towards the summit of the Championship.
As de Canio said: "What is most important is that we make ourselves a proper unit, one that can be built upon.
"The process, of course, takes time although you have to feel confident for the future after what we have achieved so far in such a short time. And when you see young players like Angelo Balanta doing so well, you can see that the future can be good at this club."
Barnsley's on-loan goalkeeper Luke Steele, the hero of their FA Cup victory at Anfield, made a superb save to deny 17-year-old Balanta from collecting his second successive senior goal after his debut strike against Sheffield United.
Yet Rangers could have conceded three goals early on but for some dreadful misses by Istvan Ferenczi and an excellent save by Lee Camp to deny Brian Howard, whose last-gasp winner stunned Liverpool.
Barnsley are confident they can repeat their Cup heroics against Chelsea a week on Saturday. Striker Kayode Odejayi said: "We cannot wait for the game and we believe that we will not freeze.
"We know that now more will be expected of us because of what happened at Anfield but mentally we will be ready." Daily Mail