12 Years Today: Paul Hart Exits QPR..Up Steps Mick Harford
Jan 15, 2010 9:30:18 GMT
Macmoish likes this
Post by QPR Report on Jan 15, 2010 9:30:18 GMT
Bump - 12 Years today
QPR CLUB STATEMENT
Posted on: Fri 15 Jan 2010
The Club can confirm that Manager Paul Hart has decided to leave
Queens Park Rangers Football Club with immediate effect.
Assistant Manager Mick Harford will be taking charge of First Team affairs,
starting with this weekend's Championship fixture at Blackpool.
The Club will be making no further comment at this stage.
www.qpr.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10373~1932972,00.html
League Managers Association Statement
15 Jan 2010
HART RESIGNS AS MANAGER OF QPR
The LMA confirms that Paul Hart has resigned as Manager of Queens Park Rangers FC.
LMA Chief Executive Richard Bevan said:
“I am able to say that Paul Hart has left the football club. I understand that he was very unhappy with certain situations which have to remain confidential and felt that resignation was in the best interests of all concerned.
“Paul wants to thank his staff and the fans for their support during his period at the club and wishes them, and the club, well for the future”.
www.leaguemanagers.com/news/news-6504.html
Read more: qprreport.proboards.com/thread/9682/years-today-exits-steps-harfor#ixzz5cfaqosMt
QPR Official Site - HARFORD: 'THIS IS A TIME FOR FOCUS'Posted on: Fri 15 Jan 2010
Mick Harford took charge of First Team affairs this morning following Paul Hart's decision to leave the Club with immediate effect late last night, and his prime objective is to get the players thinking about on-the-pitch matters.
"I am going to try and get the team back to winning ways, and get us climbing the table," he told www.qpr.co.uk.
"The team have only won once in their last ten, and that's something we need to look at."
Harford, 50, was brought in by Hart before Christmas and he explained how he heard the news of Hart's departure.
"I got a phone call late last night asking me to take charge," he said. "It's something I have had to prepare quickly for because the main focus right now is getting the players ready for Saturday's game against Blackpool.
"It's a sad occasion with the Manager leaving his post but that happens in football. I have been given what I consider an opportunity to stake my claim for the job.
"I thought Paul did a great job in terms of organising the players and getting his team set out.
"He was great to work for and I really enjoyed my time with him. I am sad to see him go, but as a Football Club we have to move on.
"The Board have asked me to take charge of the team and I am very prepared to do that.
"I spoke with Paul last night as well as this morning. He enjoyed his brief time here and had a good rapport with the players and the staff.
"It is one of those unfortunate situations we find ourselves in."
With the league campaign only 24 games old, Harford insists the season is far from over for the R's - and promotion is still very much the target.
"We are only four points away from the play-offs," he pointed out.
"We've got two difficult away fixtures coming up against Blackpool and Nottingham Forest, and that's what we are preparing for.
"QPR got a great win up at Blackpool last season (3-0) and hopefully this weekend we can get a similar result."
It will be a real baptism of fire for Harford as he gets ready to face Ian Holloway's Tangerines at Bloomfield Road, and he admits preparation for the match hasn't been ideal.
"It has been very difficult to prepare for this game anyway because of the weather," he said.
"The players haven't really been able to spend too much time on the grass due to the snow. But we have got to be focused and we need to get the players back on track.
"We need to get the team organised."
Harford held a meeting with his players this morning prior to training, in order to keep the squad 'informed,' and now he is calling on his men to play to their capabilities against one of the surprise packages of the season.
"I have got trust in these players," he added.
"Earlier on in the season they went on a tremendous run, playing fantastic football.
"There is enough in our dressing room to get back to winning ways, and we need to do that as quickly as possible."
www.qpr.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10373~1933262,00.html
MEDIA
Media Reaction:
"...Carnival of madness on display each week at QPR"
Ron Liddle/The Times
You don’t have to be mad to be a football fan, but it helps if you are
Chairmen with unchecked egos and aspirations can be the death of a club. Just ask the supporters at Gretna
“SOL, SOL, wherever you may be” — the least offensive line of that little ditty made up by Spurs supporters and directed at Sol Campbell is beginning to take on a certain resonance. The answer right now is, on the face of it, fairly improbable — impersonating a bewildered Teletubby for Arsenal’s reserves. I can’t work out if this is more or less unlikely than impersonating a division four centre-half for Notts County — his last incarnation.
There is something fabulously surreal about this football season, as if the entire industry were part of some mass military experiment in the effects of psychotropic drugs, with especially large doses being administered, under anaesthetic, at Meadow Lane and Loftus Road.
No work of fiction could do justice to the carnival of madness on display each week at QPR, where the chairman — a colourful businessman previously barred from participating in his chosen sport, Formula One — seems to have effected the dismissal of the team’s latest manager after just five games in charge. I suppose the most surprising thing was that the patently decent Paul Hart agreed to take the job in the first place.
Those psychotropic drugs were also administered in industrial quantities to the fans at Loftus Road, which would explain why they started booing Hart only five games into his regime. Richest club in the world, they were promised — so why hasn’t Hart yet won the Champions League, huh? Quite wonderfully bizarre.
Meadow Lane, though, is even more fun. Campbell should at least be given credit for not having said, when his transfer to Notts County was announced, that he was joining to improve his chances of playing for England.
But, you looked at this, and at the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson, fresh from a familiar failure in Mexico, and began to detect the whiff of collective madness. Before a takeover this was a club owned by something called Munto Finance which had aspirations to reach “the Championship and beyond!” in an unconscious echo of the plastic toy Buzz Lightyear, but which subsisted on crowds that might just about sustain a club in the middle of League One, if you removed the enormous wage bill. But hell, perhaps the crowds could be improved, exponentially so, by a number of high profile appointments — a manager disliked for his ultimately unsuccessful stewardship of the national side, a slightly weird former international centre-half now well past his best and the signing of the, uh, widely respected and admired striker Lee Hughes. That should do the trick, then. The crowds this season are what you might expect for a club in the middle of League One.
I wrote, back in August, that this trembling edifice would last no longer than the end of October. I was, as ever, wrong — but less wrong than I usually am. Sol got the hell out early on and the mutterings now are that Sven will leave within the next week or two, having had scarcely enough time to stack the dishwasher in a seductive manner in front of some local bint.
At the end of last season, I was told by a fairly authoritative source that there would be a whole bunch of clubs going to the wall this year, given the credit crunch, the parlous finances of most lower league teams and the terrible mismatch between expectation and reality. Much the same was said the year before — and it hasn’t happened.
Football league clubs are peculiarly resilient, provided that the aspirations and egotism of the chairmen are not out of all proportion to the support from the terraces. When that happens, they really do go bust, as the supporters of Gretna will tell you. Extremely rich chairmen can certainly lift the team a little if they do so incrementally and with the expectations of supporters dampened down — the model for this is Wigan Athletic, and to a slightly lesser degree Middlesbrough.
Higher up, Chelsea are now mainstays of the top four, but this is not a huge and incalculable improvement on where they were before, which was as mainstays of the top 10.
In all three of those cases I mention — Wigan, Chelsea, Middlesbrough — the departure of the magnanimous chairman would mean only that the teams sink back a little on to their more familiar orbits, not go bust. For an example of this — what happens when the magnanimous chairman departs — I would cite the case of Reading, who are enduring what is, by the standards of the past 10 years, an awful season, but what is, by the standards of the past 50 years, a really, really, good season. They will, one way or another, be fine and quite probably prosper, given that demographic changes are on their side, with Reading no longer a near outpost of London which relied for its income upon making nasty biscuits, but the rapidly growing hub of a hi-tech corridor.
The aspirations of Notts County and QPR supporters, though, is rather different. A rich chairman could in the former case ensure that County punch their weight in League One, given time, and challenge for the Championship. In the case of QPR they might one day find themselves established as a lower to mid table Premier League side, given patience and realism. If they yearn for much more than that, they are on the road to ruin
The GUARDIAN
"...Briatore co-owns QPR with Bernie Ecclestone, and Lakshmi Mittal, and it is the Italian who takes the major decisions, assisted by Gianni Paladini, the club chairman and director of football, according to one former coach.
The coach, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "Paladini has a big say in the day-to-day running as Briatore is always in and out of the country. The owners there do love football but possibly they can get too involved, and don't leave it to the manager and the staff. But what's happening there now with all the managers is making QPR laughable."...
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/jan/15/paul-hart-queens-park-rangers
And the Updated Directory
QPR Holdings Limited Chairman - Flavio Briatore
QPR Holdings Limited Vice-Chairman - Amit Bhatia
Sporting Director - Gianni Paladini
Managing Director - Ishan Saksena
Deputy Managing Director - Ali Russell
Stadium Director - John MacDonald
Finance Director - Gavin Taylor
First Team Staff
Caretaker Manager - Mick Harford
Reserve Team Manager - Keith Ryan
Coach - David Rouse
Kit Man - Gary Doyle
Physiotherapist - Paul Hunter
Assistant Physiotherapist - Shane Annun
www.qpr.co.uk/page/StaffDirectory/0,,10373,00.html
Paul Hart axed over long-ball tactics
Jan 15 2010 By Paul Warburton
www.ealinggazette.co.uk/sport/football-ealing/qpr-ealing/2010/01/15/paul-hart-axed-over-long-ball-tactics-64767-25608287/?
PAUL Hart’s refusal to play anything but the long-ball game cost him the manager's job at QPR last night after just five games.
Tuesday’s 3-2 home defeat to Sheffield United in the FA Cup in front of paltry 5,000-plus fans was the last straw for chairman Flavio Briatore – who pulled the plug on his 10th manager in just over three years and left Mick Harford to pick up the pieces for the second time following his five-game stint as caretaker in October 2007.
Harford will call on the assistance of Steve Gallen and Marc Bircham, who had a single game as caretakers against WBA last month, for the away match at Blackpool tomorrow.
And taking caretakers out of the equation, 56-year-old Hart collects the dubious accolade of moving to joint-first in the club’s 128-year history of shortest in the hot seat.
Only Tommy Docherty’s first spell at the club in 1968 comes anywhere close when the Scot departed after just 28 days – the exact same number as Hart.
The former Portsmouth manager was never the board’s first choice anyway when they appointed him on December 17 – a day after Jim Magliton left ‘by mutual agreement’ following a bust-up with midfielder Akos Buzsaky.
But it’s understood main targets Alan Curbishley and Steve Coppell both wanted a pot of transfer cash to sign on the Rs’ dotted line – a demand too far for Briatore, who’s stubbornly refused to part with big transfer fees despite the club’s three millionaire backers.
Although a row with midfielder Adel Tarrabt was first cited as the reason Hart was shown the exit, his route one tactics that employed striker Patrick Agyemang as target man and thus bypassed a midfield including £3.5 million record signing Alejandro Faurlin, was seen as a factor in the manager's short-lived stay.
An insider said: "QPR haven’t got the players to play long ball – it was suicide for Hart, and no good for the club’s ambitions."
QPR CLUB STATEMENT
Posted on: Fri 15 Jan 2010
The Club can confirm that Manager Paul Hart has decided to leave
Queens Park Rangers Football Club with immediate effect.
Assistant Manager Mick Harford will be taking charge of First Team affairs,
starting with this weekend's Championship fixture at Blackpool.
The Club will be making no further comment at this stage.
www.qpr.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10373~1932972,00.html
League Managers Association Statement
15 Jan 2010
HART RESIGNS AS MANAGER OF QPR
The LMA confirms that Paul Hart has resigned as Manager of Queens Park Rangers FC.
LMA Chief Executive Richard Bevan said:
“I am able to say that Paul Hart has left the football club. I understand that he was very unhappy with certain situations which have to remain confidential and felt that resignation was in the best interests of all concerned.
“Paul wants to thank his staff and the fans for their support during his period at the club and wishes them, and the club, well for the future”.
www.leaguemanagers.com/news/news-6504.html
Read more: qprreport.proboards.com/thread/9682/years-today-exits-steps-harfor#ixzz5cfaqosMt
QPR Official Site - HARFORD: 'THIS IS A TIME FOR FOCUS'Posted on: Fri 15 Jan 2010
Mick Harford took charge of First Team affairs this morning following Paul Hart's decision to leave the Club with immediate effect late last night, and his prime objective is to get the players thinking about on-the-pitch matters.
"I am going to try and get the team back to winning ways, and get us climbing the table," he told www.qpr.co.uk.
"The team have only won once in their last ten, and that's something we need to look at."
Harford, 50, was brought in by Hart before Christmas and he explained how he heard the news of Hart's departure.
"I got a phone call late last night asking me to take charge," he said. "It's something I have had to prepare quickly for because the main focus right now is getting the players ready for Saturday's game against Blackpool.
"It's a sad occasion with the Manager leaving his post but that happens in football. I have been given what I consider an opportunity to stake my claim for the job.
"I thought Paul did a great job in terms of organising the players and getting his team set out.
"He was great to work for and I really enjoyed my time with him. I am sad to see him go, but as a Football Club we have to move on.
"The Board have asked me to take charge of the team and I am very prepared to do that.
"I spoke with Paul last night as well as this morning. He enjoyed his brief time here and had a good rapport with the players and the staff.
"It is one of those unfortunate situations we find ourselves in."
With the league campaign only 24 games old, Harford insists the season is far from over for the R's - and promotion is still very much the target.
"We are only four points away from the play-offs," he pointed out.
"We've got two difficult away fixtures coming up against Blackpool and Nottingham Forest, and that's what we are preparing for.
"QPR got a great win up at Blackpool last season (3-0) and hopefully this weekend we can get a similar result."
It will be a real baptism of fire for Harford as he gets ready to face Ian Holloway's Tangerines at Bloomfield Road, and he admits preparation for the match hasn't been ideal.
"It has been very difficult to prepare for this game anyway because of the weather," he said.
"The players haven't really been able to spend too much time on the grass due to the snow. But we have got to be focused and we need to get the players back on track.
"We need to get the team organised."
Harford held a meeting with his players this morning prior to training, in order to keep the squad 'informed,' and now he is calling on his men to play to their capabilities against one of the surprise packages of the season.
"I have got trust in these players," he added.
"Earlier on in the season they went on a tremendous run, playing fantastic football.
"There is enough in our dressing room to get back to winning ways, and we need to do that as quickly as possible."
www.qpr.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10373~1933262,00.html
MEDIA
Media Reaction:
"...Carnival of madness on display each week at QPR"
Ron Liddle/The Times
You don’t have to be mad to be a football fan, but it helps if you are
Chairmen with unchecked egos and aspirations can be the death of a club. Just ask the supporters at Gretna
“SOL, SOL, wherever you may be” — the least offensive line of that little ditty made up by Spurs supporters and directed at Sol Campbell is beginning to take on a certain resonance. The answer right now is, on the face of it, fairly improbable — impersonating a bewildered Teletubby for Arsenal’s reserves. I can’t work out if this is more or less unlikely than impersonating a division four centre-half for Notts County — his last incarnation.
There is something fabulously surreal about this football season, as if the entire industry were part of some mass military experiment in the effects of psychotropic drugs, with especially large doses being administered, under anaesthetic, at Meadow Lane and Loftus Road.
No work of fiction could do justice to the carnival of madness on display each week at QPR, where the chairman — a colourful businessman previously barred from participating in his chosen sport, Formula One — seems to have effected the dismissal of the team’s latest manager after just five games in charge. I suppose the most surprising thing was that the patently decent Paul Hart agreed to take the job in the first place.
Those psychotropic drugs were also administered in industrial quantities to the fans at Loftus Road, which would explain why they started booing Hart only five games into his regime. Richest club in the world, they were promised — so why hasn’t Hart yet won the Champions League, huh? Quite wonderfully bizarre.
Meadow Lane, though, is even more fun. Campbell should at least be given credit for not having said, when his transfer to Notts County was announced, that he was joining to improve his chances of playing for England.
But, you looked at this, and at the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson, fresh from a familiar failure in Mexico, and began to detect the whiff of collective madness. Before a takeover this was a club owned by something called Munto Finance which had aspirations to reach “the Championship and beyond!” in an unconscious echo of the plastic toy Buzz Lightyear, but which subsisted on crowds that might just about sustain a club in the middle of League One, if you removed the enormous wage bill. But hell, perhaps the crowds could be improved, exponentially so, by a number of high profile appointments — a manager disliked for his ultimately unsuccessful stewardship of the national side, a slightly weird former international centre-half now well past his best and the signing of the, uh, widely respected and admired striker Lee Hughes. That should do the trick, then. The crowds this season are what you might expect for a club in the middle of League One.
I wrote, back in August, that this trembling edifice would last no longer than the end of October. I was, as ever, wrong — but less wrong than I usually am. Sol got the hell out early on and the mutterings now are that Sven will leave within the next week or two, having had scarcely enough time to stack the dishwasher in a seductive manner in front of some local bint.
At the end of last season, I was told by a fairly authoritative source that there would be a whole bunch of clubs going to the wall this year, given the credit crunch, the parlous finances of most lower league teams and the terrible mismatch between expectation and reality. Much the same was said the year before — and it hasn’t happened.
Football league clubs are peculiarly resilient, provided that the aspirations and egotism of the chairmen are not out of all proportion to the support from the terraces. When that happens, they really do go bust, as the supporters of Gretna will tell you. Extremely rich chairmen can certainly lift the team a little if they do so incrementally and with the expectations of supporters dampened down — the model for this is Wigan Athletic, and to a slightly lesser degree Middlesbrough.
Higher up, Chelsea are now mainstays of the top four, but this is not a huge and incalculable improvement on where they were before, which was as mainstays of the top 10.
In all three of those cases I mention — Wigan, Chelsea, Middlesbrough — the departure of the magnanimous chairman would mean only that the teams sink back a little on to their more familiar orbits, not go bust. For an example of this — what happens when the magnanimous chairman departs — I would cite the case of Reading, who are enduring what is, by the standards of the past 10 years, an awful season, but what is, by the standards of the past 50 years, a really, really, good season. They will, one way or another, be fine and quite probably prosper, given that demographic changes are on their side, with Reading no longer a near outpost of London which relied for its income upon making nasty biscuits, but the rapidly growing hub of a hi-tech corridor.
The aspirations of Notts County and QPR supporters, though, is rather different. A rich chairman could in the former case ensure that County punch their weight in League One, given time, and challenge for the Championship. In the case of QPR they might one day find themselves established as a lower to mid table Premier League side, given patience and realism. If they yearn for much more than that, they are on the road to ruin
The GUARDIAN
"...Briatore co-owns QPR with Bernie Ecclestone, and Lakshmi Mittal, and it is the Italian who takes the major decisions, assisted by Gianni Paladini, the club chairman and director of football, according to one former coach.
The coach, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "Paladini has a big say in the day-to-day running as Briatore is always in and out of the country. The owners there do love football but possibly they can get too involved, and don't leave it to the manager and the staff. But what's happening there now with all the managers is making QPR laughable."...
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/jan/15/paul-hart-queens-park-rangers
And the Updated Directory
QPR Holdings Limited Chairman - Flavio Briatore
QPR Holdings Limited Vice-Chairman - Amit Bhatia
Sporting Director - Gianni Paladini
Managing Director - Ishan Saksena
Deputy Managing Director - Ali Russell
Stadium Director - John MacDonald
Finance Director - Gavin Taylor
First Team Staff
Caretaker Manager - Mick Harford
Reserve Team Manager - Keith Ryan
Coach - David Rouse
Kit Man - Gary Doyle
Physiotherapist - Paul Hunter
Assistant Physiotherapist - Shane Annun
www.qpr.co.uk/page/StaffDirectory/0,,10373,00.html
Paul Hart axed over long-ball tactics
Jan 15 2010 By Paul Warburton
www.ealinggazette.co.uk/sport/football-ealing/qpr-ealing/2010/01/15/paul-hart-axed-over-long-ball-tactics-64767-25608287/?
PAUL Hart’s refusal to play anything but the long-ball game cost him the manager's job at QPR last night after just five games.
Tuesday’s 3-2 home defeat to Sheffield United in the FA Cup in front of paltry 5,000-plus fans was the last straw for chairman Flavio Briatore – who pulled the plug on his 10th manager in just over three years and left Mick Harford to pick up the pieces for the second time following his five-game stint as caretaker in October 2007.
Harford will call on the assistance of Steve Gallen and Marc Bircham, who had a single game as caretakers against WBA last month, for the away match at Blackpool tomorrow.
And taking caretakers out of the equation, 56-year-old Hart collects the dubious accolade of moving to joint-first in the club’s 128-year history of shortest in the hot seat.
Only Tommy Docherty’s first spell at the club in 1968 comes anywhere close when the Scot departed after just 28 days – the exact same number as Hart.
The former Portsmouth manager was never the board’s first choice anyway when they appointed him on December 17 – a day after Jim Magliton left ‘by mutual agreement’ following a bust-up with midfielder Akos Buzsaky.
But it’s understood main targets Alan Curbishley and Steve Coppell both wanted a pot of transfer cash to sign on the Rs’ dotted line – a demand too far for Briatore, who’s stubbornly refused to part with big transfer fees despite the club’s three millionaire backers.
Although a row with midfielder Adel Tarrabt was first cited as the reason Hart was shown the exit, his route one tactics that employed striker Patrick Agyemang as target man and thus bypassed a midfield including £3.5 million record signing Alejandro Faurlin, was seen as a factor in the manager's short-lived stay.
An insider said: "QPR haven’t got the players to play long ball – it was suicide for Hart, and no good for the club’s ambitions."
(She isn't a totally lost cause though, she thinks Ken Bates is a total w****r..........) ;D
