While all eyes were on the Cup, a home defeat to a Harry Kane-inspired Spurs left QPR deeper in trouble in the Premier League. Ralph Ellis fears that promoting coach Chris Ramsey to the top job could prove expensive…
Chris Ramsey is a comedian. He’s the only person who has ever been chucked off the set of Sky’s Soccer AM mid programme for being too rude.
No, not THE Chris Ramsey, the one who is newly installed manager of QPR. But it is a tad worrying for the Hoops fortunes that when you Google his name, it’s the dodgy bloke from South Shields, who thinks it is funny to use the F word, who comes up top of the list, and not the one who is now trying to rescue Loftus Road from relegation.
If Aston Villa have taken a huge gamble in placing their Premier League future in the hands of Tim Sherwood, with only five months of top flight management experience behind him, then what Rangers have done in choosing Ramsey is like walking into a casino and putting your house on 29 red.
I must be honest, I don’t know a lot about Ramsey. He has an excellent reputation as a coach from his time at Tottenham, and people I’ve met who do know him as a bloke describe him as a terrific man with great integrity and a fantastic work ethic. There were plenty who said that Sherwood would struggle at Aston Villa because he didn’t have Ramsey’s coaching to back him up.
In short, he’s the sort that you hope will do well for the sake of all the other good English coaches who deserve a crack at management.
But as first jobs go, taking over after Harry Redknapp decided he could get no more from an unbalanced squad is about as tough as it gets. Five games into his spell in charge it’s beginning to look like a job that could kill his career as a number one before it barely gets started.
Rangers were unlucky against Tottenham on Saturday. Charlie Austin hit the bar, they had two decent looking penalty appeals, and missed a whole load of chances. They were also pretty unfortunate against Arsenal a few days earlier.
But a manager in the relegation zone has to find a way of making the luck bounce his way and so far, apart from a shock win at struggling Sunderland, there’s been precious little sign of Ramsey being able to do that.
Rangers are 1.232/9 to be relegated, and when you look at the fixture list it is hard to find any reason to think they can defy those odds. A team that has taken all but three of its points at home this season has just four of their remaining ten matches at Loftus Road.
In fact the bigger danger is that the current price of 3.412/5 to be rock bottom looks decent value. The six away trips include Liverpool and Manchester City, and even a visit to current bottom side Leicester on the last day of the season isn’t so inviting when you’ve lost 12 out of 13 on the road so far.
The Chris Ramsey who is in charge of QPR is deadly serious about the job he’s undertaken. But there’s a very real danger that, like his comedian namesake, he’ll be in trouble for using the F word by the end of the campaign.
