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It is interesting to speculate where Queens Park Rangers would be without Adel Taarabt, the Morrocan magician who has scored 18 of their 67 goals this season, and provided the assists for many more.
PR manager Neil Warnock sets up the other nine outfield players in a rigid framework and looks to Taarabt for inspiration, rather as a jazz troupe will maintain a steady beat while the saxophonist sets off on a solo.
The tactic has worked brilliantly all season. After Saturday’s thrilling encounter against Cardiff — in which Taarabt scored twice to nick a 2-2 draw – QPR need only one more point from their final three games to ensure automatic promotion (assuming the fuss over Alejandro Faurlin and his third-party ownership does not lead to a points deduction).
Taarabt has not just performed above all expectations at QPR (earning the Championship’s player of the season award), he has stayed fit too, starting all but two of their games. But when he was absent a fortnight ago, against relegation candidates Scunthorpe, QPR went down to a 4-1 defeat, their heaviest of the season.
If and when QPR make the jump to the Premier League, they can hardly maintain a strategy that relies so heavily on one player, no matter how brilliant he might be. The billionaires who own the team, Formula One’s Bernie Ecclestone and Indian steel ty**** Lakshmi Mittal, need to unbuckle their wallets.
After such an eye-catching season, Taarabt may not even be at Loftus Road next August. But then Warnock’s presence cannot be viewed as a certainty either. The story of QPR has long been a soap opera and recent reports suggest that the owners may replace him imminently (even though he is about to equal the Football League record – held jointly by Graham Taylor and Dave Bassett – of seven promotion campaigns).
Marcello Lippi, the former Juventus manager who won the 2006 World Cup with Italy, has been identified as a possible successor, as has Republic of Ireland manager Giovanni Trapattoni. A P45 would be tough on Warnock, who has turned QPR from relegation battlers to virtual promotion certainties in just 13 months. Last week, he spoke of his eagerness to spend “another two years in the Premier League” after the bitter ending to his single top-flight season with Sheffield United in 2006-07.
Warnock’s organisational skills were crucial on Saturday, when Cardiff’s powerful strike pairing of Jay Bothroyd and Craig Bellamy produced performances that would have won them the headlines in any other game. After the game, Cardiff manager Dave Jones complained that “we took them to the cleaners for the most part”, before paying tribute to QPR’s defensive resilience.
But for all the obvious determination of Clint Hill and Shaun Derry, Taarabt was surely man of the match at Cardiff City Stadium, even though — as Jones pointed out — “he was in his deckchair for a lot of the time”.
Taarabt’s contribution to general play may have been limited, consisting mainly of picking up the ball, trying a couple of dummies, dribbling into a defender, falling over, and appealing unsuccessfully for a free-kick. But whenever he was granted a modicum of space near Cardiff’s penalty area, he was quite lethal. This happened three times. The first two occasions produced goals, and the third a scuffed cross-shot, two minutes from full time, which fell into the path of strike partner Heidar Helguson.
Unfortunately for QPR, Helguson managed to slide the ball into the side-netting just when three points — and a champagne-popping promotion party in the dressing-room — looked the likeliest outcome.
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