Hoop Dreams - QPR FC

Hoop Dreams  - always the first to breaking news. Yes, it is finally time to deal with the sacking of Jim Magilton and his hasty replacement by Paul Hart with Mick Harford as his assistant. Clearly this was far from a good time to take a break from writing about QPR.

When I left things, Rangers were ready to face Watford off the back of a truly miserable 5-1 defeat at home to Middlesbrough - the only game Gordon Strachan has won since joining the club eight games ago. It was a startlingly bad performance and one which demonstrated complete chaos at the back and an absence of spirit throughout the team. Just three days later, the increasingly malignant atmosphere around the club exploded.

Taking on a decent if far from spectacular Watford team, manager Jim Magilton (pictured below) chose to drop some of the club's best performers over the course of this season, including Adel Taarabt and Jay Simpson, preferring a front partnership of Patrick Agyemang and Rowan Vine. The football produced on the night by QPR was limp and predictable - a series of aimless long balls and mistimed passes which somehow resulted in Rangers taking the lead. That Agyemang failed to celebrate his surprise strike and instead shrugged off his teammates in an angry display was surprising but it only hinted at the level of discontent in the QPR ranks.

The three goals in reply by Watford and whatever was said in the QPR dressing room after the game then acted as the spark. Within hours, pictures came out of Akos Buzsaky standing crestfallen on the side of the Watford pitch, unable or unallowed to enter his own team's dressing room. By the next day, the news was even harder to digest as Buzsaky accused his manager of head-butting him in a post-match altercation and in the fall-out, which I won't go over here, Magilton departed the club just a week and a half later.

The facts of what went on that night are unlikely to ever fully be established especially as the club has once again quickly drawn a line under Magilton's time at the club, as if he were never there. Magilton's sacking definitely fits a pattern both in the ease with which it happened and the general confusion for supporters who are rarely given a reasonable explanation by the current QPR owners.

That is not to say that it was the wrong decision as there were a number of signs that the team's morale was worsening by the week. But for all that, the QPR job has now become one of the most unappealing in football and in light of the short-term nature of Paul Hart's (pictured left) contract, the club will most likely have to go back out into the job market to find another manager in the summer. They could well recieve a frosty reception.

More on Hart's appointment and the Boxing Day clash with Bristol City to come...