QPR: Premiership beckons

A titanic struggle of epic proportions. The majority of this, the most fast paced and unforgiving game I have ever seen at Loftus Rd was spent in either one of the two halves and both goalkeepers will be feeling like they’ve been through the mill tomorrow morning.

I was seated in block CL, in the Paddocks of the South Africa Road, and almost right next to the QPR dug out. What that meant, among other things, was that you could hear every word from Warnock and his team, many of which could probably be heard in Ellerslie Road such was the pitch of his screaming. Much of this was tension, which afflicted the entire ground for the full 90 minutes as the game see-sawed dangerously from one end to the other, but much was reserved for the quite woeful performance of the linesman on our side. It’s fair to say he had a pretty poor game, but Warnock needs to watch his mouth. So much for family entertainment.

Special crowd attention was reserved for Craig Bellamy as you’d expect, and the diminutive Welshman was the terror of both flanks. His pace was really quite special and didn’t seem to tire at any point. Equally however Adel Tarabt was als unplayable and his second, sealing a turnaround from having gone one nil down to the Cardiff side after a calamitous slip from a QPR defender that was ruthlessly punished, led to an eruption of pent up tension from the QPR faithful.

From that point onwards, however, it was heart in mouth time. I saw pies uneaten, flasks of tea un-drunk and mouths open at the fluidity of play and sheer danger of both teams. The pace didn’t slack at any point and both sides showed their athleticism. Should both of these sides go up at the end of this season they will be better sides than several in the premiership at the moment.

Warnock was at pains in the programme and elsewhere to emphasise that this result was not the be all and end all of the season but he betrayed his emotions at the end by euphorically turning to the paddocks and punching the air repeatedly. The crowd responded in kind and you’ve got to imagine that, 5 points clear and having dealt the third successive defeat to their nearest challengers, if they don’t go up this season they never will.

The evening was soured at the end by some ridiculous policing. Having warned the Cardiff fans over the tannoy throughout the game that they would be kept in at the end for “your own safety”, the police then decided to let them out at the same time anyway. The fans have a well-deserved reputation for violence at the best of time and they had just witnessed a high tempo crucial match which they’d lost. You can imagine the entirely predictable results and I saw at least two punch ups as the moronic contingent of both sides traded versions of each other’s parentage.

Apart from that - a fantastic afternoon in W12. Here's some footage of the winning goal courtesy of QPR fan Neil