'Hands tied, legs tied and a blindfold' - Coach explains why QPR spell was doomed to fail

A former QPR assistant has explained why his time at the club was doomed for failure. Richard Dobson served as Gareth Ainsworth’s assistant during a horrid 28 game run that saw the Hoops win just five of those games, losing as many as 19.

Ainsworth was in place for around eight months, and it proved to be a deeply unhappy return to the club for the former Hoops star, and indeed for Dobson, who supported the club as a youngster.

The pair joined QPR from Wycombe Wanderers where they had managed huge success over the course of a decade. These days, they are struggling with Shrewsbury Town, rock bottom of League One and without any real hope of survival, only winning vie of their 22 games in charge there.

But as far as the QPR spell is concerned, Dobson believes many things were out of their control. He told the Shropshire Star: “That was quite a disappointing time. I grew up watching QPR as a young lad that was my team living in west London.

“I was quite excited to go back and get an opportunity to work there, but we went there at a really bad time. They got themselves in a really bad place with Financial Fair Play. We knew they're in a relegation battle, and we've just got to keep the club up in the first season, and then we'll be able to build, but actually we couldn't.

“We knew that there was a dressing room there that was not in a good way. Half of them wanted to rip the heads off the other half. So you go into that environment totally different to Wycombe Wanderers. But you know we thought that's alright we'll move the ones out that we don't want, and we'll build with the ones that we do.”

Financial Fair Play issues

Dobson added when speaking about the FFP issues the club faced at the time: “Due to the FFP situation. We couldn't move anybody out. It was like doing a job with your hands tied, your legs tied, and a blindfold on. At the end of the season, we had a meeting there, and the finance officer came in and everybody was out of contract. We were just told he's got to go, he's got to go, he's got to go and we went we need to get rid of these players.

“They said no you can't do that, it's going to cost money and we needed to find, I won't tell you the sum of money, a big chunk of money. They thought Ilias Chair was worth £5 million, and that would have made a dent in it - but nobody wanted him, so that comes off the budget.

“Gaz kept saying we've just got to get through to January. I'm saying Gaz we're not getting through to January with this team we're not doing it. So it was really disappointing because they didn't tell us that before they recruited us they told us that two weeks after.”