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--- QPR Win in Italy! Photos from "QPR, Atalanta, SC Braga - Trofeo Bortolotti"- Throughout the day, the QPR Report Messageboard has news updates, comments and perspectives - even links to other board comments of interest re QPR matters (on and off the field) along with football (and ONLY football) topics in general....Also Follow: QPR REPORT ON TWITTER
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- Three Year Flashback: Parejo and Gorkss Join QPR
- AFC Wimbledon's Odyssey
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2014 WORLD CUP DRAW
• Group H: England, Ukraine, Montenegro, Poland, Moldova, San Marino
• Group A: Scotland, Wales, Croatia, Serbia, Belgium, Macedonia
• Group F: Northern Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Luxembourg
• Group C: Republic of Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Faroe Islands, Kazakhstan - World Cup Draw - COMPLETE WORLD CUP DRAW
Mirror - Villa keen to hijack QPR move for Blackpool striker
- A full version of this story appears in today's People. Read it online at People.co.uk
- Aston Villa manager Alex McLeish is trying to beat QPR to the signing of DJ Campbell – marking a sentimental return for the Blackpool striker.
- The Seasiders have agreed a £1.25million fee for Campbell with Neil Warnock’s Premier League newcomers.
- But Hotline can reveal that Villa’s new boss believes he is leading the race for the 29-year-old forward. Mirror
QPR WIN in Atalanta!
- Additional Photos from Atalanta Including TROPHY!
- Photo of Team with Trophy (Including Past, Present and Future? Owners)
- Video of Trophy Presentation (posted by Devon Park Ranger)
QPR Official Site - WARNOCK: 'A NICE HABIT TO BE IN'
Posted on: Sun 31 Jul 2011
Neil Warnock was all smiles as QPR clinched the Trofeo Bartolotti in Italy on Saturday night.
Rangers opened the three-team tournament with a 1-0 win over SC Braga, before going on to enjoy a 3-2 spot-kick victory against hosts Atalanta, after the match finished 1-1.
A delighted Warnock told www.qpr.co.uk: "We were the underdogs, but we've come away with the trophy, so it's a nice habit to be in.
"They were two good games against two good teams.
"It was a very worthwhile exercise."
Warnock added: "We stuck at it against two very good sides.
"We're very difficult to break down and that's a great quality to have.
"To come away conceding just the one goal is hugely positive for us and I thought we thoroughly deserved to win the tournament in the end."
http://www.qpr.co.uk/page/TheGaffer/0,,10373~2406170,00.html
MATCH 2 - QPR Official Site -R'S WIN TROFEO BARTOLOTTI
Posted on: Sat 30 Jul 2011
QPR clinched the Trofeo Bartolotti in Italy tonight (Saturday).
After beating Portuguese side SC Braga 1-0 earlier in the evenings thanks to Jay Bothroyd's goal, Rangers shared the spoils with Atalanta in their final fixture - before triumphing 3-2 on penalty kicks.
Ali Faurlin gave Rangers a 21st minute lead, only for Padoin to equalise six minutes later.
Jay Bothroyd, Adel Taarabt and Bradley Orr all scored from the spot, whilst trialist Brian Murphy saved one spot kick.
Neil Warnock made wholesale changes for the second fixture against the Italians.
Trialist Brian Murphy started in goal, behind a back four of Matt Connolly, Fitz Hall, Danny Gabbidon and Kieron Dyer.
Faurlin and Shaun Derry sat deep in midfield, with Akos Buzsaky, Tommy Smith and Taarabt supporting lone front-man Patrick Agyemang.
Rangers began on the front foot, with Taarabt's deflected strike squirming wide in the opening five minutes.
Play soon switched to the other end and former Ipswich Town custodian Murphy did his chances of earning a contract no harm whatsoever with a stunning save to keep out Ardemagni's stooping header.
Buoyed by that excellent stop, the R's were soon a goal to the good on 21 minutes.
After Agyemang was sent tumbling 30 yards from goal, Taarabt curled a delicious cross into the penalty box and the unmarked Faurlin finished with aplomb from eight yards out.
Rangers looked comfortably, but the hosts - buoyed by a partisan home crowd - drew level in the 27th minute.
After the R's failed to clear their lines, a cross from the left by-line was smashed home by Padoin to bring the Serie A side level.
Both sides - to their credit - pushed for a late winner, but it wasn't forthcoming, as honours ended even and the match went to penalty kicks.
Bothroyd, Taarabt and Orr all scored from 12-yards, as Rangers ran out 3-2 winners.
Atalanta: Frezzolini, Capelli, Manfredini, Schelotto (Radovanovic 7), Peluso, Caseta, Padoin, Pettinari, Ferri, Ardemagni, Marilungo.
Subs: Facheris, Lucchini, Bonaventura, Masiello, Gabbiadini, Zappacosta, Kone, Suagher, Raimondi, Minotti, Tiribocchi.
QPR: Trialist, Connolly, Gabbidon (Trialist 7), Hall, Dyer (Orr 34), Faurlin (Gorkss 39), Buzsaky, Taarabt, Smith (Vaagan-Moen 34), Derry (Bothroyd 45), Agyemang (Ephraim 45).
Subs: Kenny, Hill. QPR
MATCH I: QPR Official Site - QPR 1, BRAGA 0Posted on: Sat 30 Jul 2011
Jay Bothroyd's first goal in QPR colours handed Neil Warnock's men an opening victory in the Trofeo Bartolotti.
Bothroyd - who used to ply his trade in Italy for Perugia - bagged the only goal of the opening 45 minute match of the tournament, firing home on 19 minutes.
Adel Taarabt and Bradley Orr were heavily involved in the goal, with the latter's pin-point centre leaving the former Cardiff City front-man with the simplest of finishes from the edge of the six-yard box.
The victory means QPR will now play hosts Atalanta at 10.00pm local time in game three of the three match tournament.
Neil Warnock named a strong side against last season's Europa League finalists.
Paddy Kenny lined up in goal, with the R's back four comprising of Orr, Danny Gabbidon, Matt Connolly and Clint Hill.
Kieron Dyer partnered Ali Faurlin in midfield, with skipper Taarabt, Tommy Smith and Hogan Ephraim providing the support for Bothroyd in attack.
After a slow start, it was Braga who fashioned the first chance of note in the seventh minute.
Left-back Vincius galloped down the flank, before firing a curled effort on target which Kenny did well to smother.
But it was Rangers who took the lead on 19 minutes - and what a goal it was too!
Taarabt's pinpoint cross-field pass found the roaming Orr and when he opted to cushion a first time volley across the face of the six-yard box, Bothroyd fired the R's in front from close range.
Braga should've been level moments later, but Lima - with the goal at his mercy - skewed the ball wide from ten yards, when it appeared easier to score.
Rangers were forced into a change on 31 minutes, with Akos Buzsaky replacing Ephraim, who appeared to have sustained a facial injury.
With the local Atalanta fans in full voice ahead of their side's opening match, the R's - despite Kenny being forced to tip over a goal-bound header - comfortably saw out the last few minutes to register a noteworthy victory.
QPR: Kenny, Orr, Hill, Dyer, Connolly, Gabbidon, Taarabt, Ephraim (Buzsaky 31), Bothroyd, Smith, Faurlin.
Subs: Trialist, Gorkss, Hall, Trialist, Buzsaky, Derry, Vaagan-Moen, Agyemang.
Braga: Quim, Coelho, Ewerton, Baiano, Lima (Meyong 27), Djamal (Barbosa 39), P Vinicius (Galo 27), Luis, Alan, Pizzi, Viana.
Subs: Marcos, Vinicius, Mossoro, Cesar, Henrique, Gomes, Imorou, Salino. QPR
QPR - TOUR BLOG: PART VI
Posted on: Sun 31 Jul 2011
After last night's success in the Trofeo Bartolotti in Bergamo, the R's players will enjoy a well-deserved rest day today.
With the QPR coach not pulling up to the Palace Hotel in Milano Marittima until around 4.00am this morning, Neil Warnock opted to give his whole squad the day off ahead of tomorrow's lunchtime flight back to Gatwick.
Last night's victory in the prestigious pre-season tournament in Atalanta owed as much to our quality, as it did to our determination and doggedness.
Time and time again both SC Braga and Atalanta struggled to break us down, which only goes to show that the shape and formation work that the R's have been focusing on in training is working wonders to date.
One attack after another was repelled by the R's defensive unit, with Matt Connolly amongst the most impressive performers in the defensive third last night.
At the other end of the pitch, it was great to see Jay Bothroyd score his goal since his summer switch, whilst Ali Faurlin appears to be going from strength to strength in QPR colours, with another couple of expert performances and a goal to boot.
Trialist Brian Murphy looks like he might have done enough to earn a contract, with the gaffer revealing he expects to sit down with the player early next week.
Not only is 'Murph' a decent keeper, but he already looks at home amongst his fellow professionals, often at the centre of the non-stop banter on this pre-season trip.
All in all, it's been another tour to remember, with the big Barclays Premier League kick-off now just less than two weeks away.
Oh, and there's also the small matter of DJ Campbell. The gaffer is hoping to sit down with him on Tuesday, after the R's had a bid accepted for the Blackpool striker earlier this week.
Arriverderci from Italy … QPR
DAILY MAIL/Adrian Deevoy - The 20 billion reasons why QPR should be the next champions of the Premier League
When the struggling west London club was taken over by three super-rich entrepreneurs with a combined wealth of £20 billion – double that of Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich – QPR fans thought their dreams had come true. So why, after finally making it into the Premier League, are the Hoops still living on the breadline?
Neil Warnock glares at the horizontal rain. It came up from Cornwall and is moving east across Devon and onto Dartmoor. He’s got a lot on his mind. It’s a good job his team are winning 11-0 with ten minutes to go.
‘We only need a dozen!’ chime an optimistic faction of the 800-strong Tavistock faithful, who have turned out for this evening’s pre-season friendly with newly anointed Premier League hopefuls Queens Park Rangers.
Their spirited Tavistock first team – ‘The Lambs’, South Western Peninsula League stalwarts – bluster and kick a bit of expensive shin but they’re no Corinthians. The pitch is getting heavy, but nowhere near as heavy as their legs.
And the visitors look pretty good, fit as a butcher’s dog and hard as nails. Not the pampered west London pretty boys the newspapers would have you believe.
An elderly spectator, who has been treating us all to vivid physical descriptions of the QPR players (‘That goalie’s been at the pasties’), is momentarily lost for words when ‘Big’ Danny Shittu, the Nigerian centre-back who rejoined the club earlier this year from Bolton Wanderers, comes on. In an accent broader than the Tamar, he finally finds an appropriate simile.
‘He’s the size of a… chapel!’ he decides.
QPR won 13-0 in the end. The Lambs were slaughtered. But Warnock won’t rest easy.
Playing in the Premier League is going to be hard but he hopes to avoid anything like the shoe-ing his team just gave Tavistock. Yet he remains positively serene.
‘Bloody rain,’ he says, grinning. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
For their pre-season tours Manchester United went to the States, Arsenal’s warm-up jaunt triggered boy band mayhem in Malaysia (where even manager Arsène Wenger was manhandled by fans), and Chelsea-mania took hold in Thailand. Meanwhile, QPR attend a glorified village fete in a sodden corner of England. It’s all rather poignant.
On paper, QPR are one of the wealthiest football clubs in Britain, if not the world. They are owned by F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone and former Renault F1 boss Flavio Briatore. Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in the UK, has a 20 per cent stake.
Yet, as a significant chapter in QPR’s history unfolds, and they prepare to return to the top flight for the first time in 15 years, the big money doesn’t seem to have arrived.
Despite the billions stuffed into their owners’ bulging bank accounts, the club has been left financially floundering. The ‘boutique’ football experience the fans were promised at their ground just three and a half miles from Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea has not happened.
Ecclestone and Briatore may own a London football club but their heart – and their money – is in motor racing, and they prefer to spend their time in Monte Carlo rather than Shepherd’s Bush.
Not that either are strangers to the real world. Ecclestone was born into a poor family, started out in business selling second-hand cars and ended up a billionaire (£2.5 billion at the last count) as the circus master and owner of Formula 1. Former restaurant manager Briatore made his estimated £70 million in fashion, nightclubs, motorboats and F1.
Ecclestone and Briatore now inhabit the world of the haves and the have-yachts. They date supermodels. Briatore famously stepped out with Naomi Campbell, sired Heidi Klum’s first child and is now married to Wonderbra wrangler Elisabetta Gregoraci, with whom he has a young son.
Ecclestone’s ex-wife Slavica, mother to his two daughters, Tamara and Petra, was the face and body of Armani.
Ecclestone doesn’t just own a private jet, he owns Biggin Hill airport. He has been known to carry around £100,000 in cash, in a carrier bag, which he once forgot at a meeting in Geneva. Both men wear tinted glasses all the time. And nobody laughs at them. That’s rich.
But since QPR won promotion to the Premier League in May, their high-rolling owners have kept a conspicuously low profile in the football world.
They have hardly lavished money upon the club. In fact, they’ve become almost coy with their cash. This, however, is not an issue they wish to discuss.
‘The idea of ploughing in millions to buy success is not my way of doing things,’ is all Ecclestone will say.
An estimated £55 million in television payments and sponsorship deals will drop into the QPR coffers over the next two years, but no one is guaranteeing that this will filter down to the club, the fans and the future.
In the same week that Warnock was told he would have a meagre £1.25 million budget with which to build a squad that could survive in the Premier League, Ecclestone’s youngest daughter Petra was coolly completing on the most expensive house in Hollywood.
Cost including refurbishment is said to be close to £55 million. (In celebratory mood, Daddy offered the Black Eyed Peas £1 million to play at Petra’s wedding in August. Unsurprisingly, they accepted.)
But busy as Bernie has been with pit politics and property portfolios, the bonsai businessman has still found time to briefly consider, then reject, a buy-out bid for QPR. The offer came from Lakshmi Mittal, the man Ecclestone pointedly calls QPR’s ‘minority shareholder’. But that might just be jealousy talking. Mittal is Britain’s wealthiest man with a fortune over £17.5 billion.
Mittal already owned a slice of the QPR pie, but hungry for more he tabled what he felt was an attractive figure for the Hoops, somewhere around £30 million.
‘Insultingly low,’ was Ecclestone’s response. He is believed to value the club at over £100 million.
And so commenced a battle of wills between two of Europe’s most powerful men.
Now only a fool would confuse the personal wealth of these bartering billionaires – worth in the region of £17.7 billion between them – with the capital they invest in their various businesses.
But it raises a question that QPR supporters must endure on an almost daily basis. How come the richest club on Earth can’t afford a bigger ground, a Premier League-proven centre forward or even a new kit?
Just three weeks before their first Premier League game, QPR had yet to find a sponsor. They were forced to play one friendly sporting old shirts with the previous backer’s name blacked out with gaffer tape. You would think that, considering the business dealings of the club’s owners, securing sponsorship would only involve opening a contacts book and picking a name.
As it stands, QPR can look forward to a season on the most slender of budgets with one of the weaker teams in the league, and with the smallest ground.
Admittedly, some money has been spent on QPR’s 18,000-seater mini-stadium: the television gantry has been extended to accommodate upwards of 30 cameras, and a luxury media suite has been built. But the gloomy players’ facilities were presumably deemed unimprovable, and whether or not Loftus Road’s lamentable lack of leg-room and out-dated toilet facilities were up for reappraisal is unknown. So what’s gone wrong?
Has Mittal lost his taste for the game since the takeover knock-back? Are Ecclestone, a Chelsea fan, and his Juventus-supporting sidekick even interested in QPR any more? Were they ever?
It could be argued that without the intervention of Ecclestone and Briatore, and latterly Mittal, there might be no QPR at all. Had the three wise men not appeared before Christmas 2007 bearing their gift of gold, the club would have gone under.
Shortly after they stepped in, fans were all but kissing Briatore’s boots. But times have changed, paranoia has set in and, in many QPR minds, the saviours have become the saboteurs.
Some suspect that the club has been bought as a rich man’s plaything to be polished up and flogged off for a substantial profit.
When I asked Briatore about his plans for the club in 2008 he said: ‘You cannot make difficult decisions purely with the heart. We have to take it slowly. I don’t want to go up to the Premier League and come straight down again like an elevator. Little by little, that’s the way to become a protagonist in English football.’
He went on to outline his plan to get QPR promoted into the Premier League within three years and established as a successful brand thereafter. And that’s precisely what has happened. Granted, until they snared Warnock, managers were on brisk rotation – five in a year – but Briatore’s three-year plan has ultimately worked.
But football fans love to moan and QPR do it better than most. The club have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory so frequently it has become a Rangers’ mantra that if it weren’t for bad luck, they would have no luck at all.
Even last season’s promotion to the Premier League was soured by the possibility of a last-minute points deduction from the FA following a well-documented fandango surrounding the signing of Argentine midfielder Alejandro Faurlin in 2009.
At the heart of this dispute was QPR’s chairman Gianni Paladini, an amiable fellow with the demeanour of a Neapolitan used-scooter salesman, whose role at QPR is difficult to define. Paladini hasn’t endeared himself to fans by apparently luring unexceptional Italian journeymen to Loftus Road. These players are referred to, by the QPR cognescenti, as Gianni’s Salami Selection as there is often a high ‘donkey’ content.
But QPR did not receive the deduction over Faurlin and were promoted to the Premier League. Strangers hugged on Uxbridge Road as the news broke – just two hours before kick-off – that Rangers could play their final game and lift the Championship trophy unfettered by the all-too-familiar feeling of crushing anti-climax.
Their promotion has been warmly greeted by local businesses, as they stand to benefit by £700,000 a year from passing Premier League trade.
‘It can only be a good thing,’ says Christine Connell, manager of the Crown and Sceptre in Shepherd’s Bush.
‘If the visitors are respectful then they are most welcome,’ adds Mr Akhtar of Lahori Restaurant, Uxbridge Road.
‘If we all become as rich as Bernie, then so be it.’
But for fans the post-promotion euphoria was brief.
‘The thing about being a QPR fan is you’re not happy very often, and when you are it doesn’t last for long,’ says Clive Whittingham of the QPR fansite loftforwords.
‘At the moment it feels a bit like being sent in to fight lions armed only with toothpicks and charged £760 for the privilege.’
As if a 40 per cent hike in season ticket prices didn’t upset the QPR lifers, then announcing some of the highest ticket prices in the country did.
When last year’s £25 seat leapt to nearer £60, a sizable percentage of supporters put their hands up and conceded that they simply couldn’t afford it any more.
In the absence of any official word, the QPR rumour-mill has gone into overdrive. Gossip is rife: Adel Taarabt, the team’s mercurial Moroccan talisman, has been sold to Paris St Germain for £15 million; Warnock wants to resign but is holding out for a pay-off; Mittal will come back with a better offer and all will be milk and honey.
Throughout all of this, Warnock has remained tight-lipped.
‘If I were a younger man,’ says the 62-year-old, negotiating a narrow Cornish country lane.
‘I’d be tearing my hair out by now, because I really don’t know what’s going on and there’s only two-and-a-bit weeks to go until the Bolton game.
‘I don’t know if they’re selling the club,’ he adds.
‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to sign any more players. I don’t know what the owners are doing. I don’t know what’s happening with Adel (Taarabt).’
His eyes crinkle when the talk turns to the Moroccan star.
‘I’ve been too soft on the lad, I know,’ he concedes.
‘But I do like him a lot and I’ll be very sad to see him go.’
Sad? You’ve built an entire team around him; the season is about to start and you don’t know if he still plays for you or not.
‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ Warnock sighs. ‘But Flavio is dealing with Adel’s move.
'If it happens, I’d love to have kept him until Christmas.’
So Briatore doesn’t keep you in the picture?
‘I go through Gio (Paladini) really,’ he shrugs.
‘But he speaks to Flavio about 300 times a day in Italian. God knows what they’re talking about.’
And yet, amid the tumult, Warnock comes across as super-humanly calm.
‘No one is going to stop me enjoying this,’ he says.
‘I’m excited. It’s taken me a while – more than five years – to get back up there and I’m going to have the time of my life.’
By bizarre coincidence, a news item has come on the car radio. Something about Ecclestone salting away a few million in Europe.
‘Well, I haven’t got it,’ laughs Warnock.
‘If there’s one man who definitely hasn’t got Bernie Ecclestone’s money, it’s me!’ Daily Mail
- Bushman's Photos from 1959-1960 Season
- VIDEO re "Inside QPR" - Looks to be a Truly Riveting Video 'Four Year Plan'
- Parliamentary Committee Issues Report Calling for stronger FA, Control over Club Ownership and stronger, implemented "Fit and Proper" Rule, and So Forth
- Year Flashback: Nobody Else Wants Him so Taarabt Open to QPR
- Two Year Flashback: Alessandro Pellicori Joins Queen's Park Rangers
SQUAD NUMBERS FORTHCOMING QPR's Ian Taylor: "For all those asking ... We're expecting to announce the #QPR squad numbers early next week" http://twitter.com/IJTaylor81
- Guide to Football Grounds... Guide to Loftus Road
- QPR XI Beat Buckland Athletic
- Cesena-QPR Reports, Photos, Videos
- World Cup Qualifiers: India Knocked out
- USA Axe Coach Bob Bradley
- Four Year Flashback: "QPR Chief Paladini to Sell Up"
- UDPATED: Europe's Top Clubs Threaten Revolt. Fan Reaction
- FA Reportedly Given Year to Reform or Else Legislation
- Flashback: The 1959/1960 Season
- Year Flashback: Vine and Pellicori Reportedly Set to Exit QPR
- A Statistical Guide to Points Needed to Stay Up
- QPR's Championship Medal Sold for just under 1,000 Pounds (Proceeds to QPR in the Community Trust)
- Assessing Premiership Summer Transfers Thus Far (Including QPR)
- Updated Ecclestone Comment re German Bribery Allegation
- Kudos to Chelsea: Make an Official Complaint to Malaysian FA re Anti-Semitic Abuse
- Play "Spot The Ball"
- "How clubs lost control of the football kit"
- Premiership Relegation Odds
- An Early Preview of QPR vs Bolton
- Premiership Rules re Kits
- VANISHED WITHOUT NOTICE! The Club's Official Messageboard
- Still No QPR Offical Site Update re the Status of the Official Supporters Club (OSC). Despite Committee Resignations.
- Home Ticket Price Information
- Something to Look Forward to: Flashback from June Official Site: "Plans are already afoot for a pre-season celebration, once the players return to training in July" - QPR
QPR's Remaining Pre-season Games
- Tuesday 2nd August - Crawley Town (a) 7.45pm
- Friday August 5 - Luton (A)
QPR