We all probably have different assumptions, but I'm always amazed that we expect everything we do to produce wins, successes, and continuous improvement.
It might, if the directors were in control of all the other Clubs. If the manager could sign their players, and pick their teams. Because then we could ensure that we had better ideas and better players.
But we have no control over those things at all. So why the frustration when we don't win. We do win, now and again, and that's how the game is designed. Most of it is luck, within certain parameters. Two teams try to score for 90 minutes straight, yet matches rarely produce more than 3 goals. 3 moments in an entire game when it all comes right. And how many goals are down to hopeless errors?
It constantly amazes me that our expectations - or the expectations we're encouraged to have - are based, not on the reality of our predicament, but on a completely unfounded assumption that it shouldn't be too difficult to appoint a good manager (nobody ever says what that amounts to), if not a great one, and sign better and better players.
Why QPR? Is there a big finger in the sky above Loftus Road saying 'this Club will win - God'. Doesn't he like Fulham? Or Everton? Or the others. Well, obviously not Fulham, but the others? We want to win, naturally, we like to win, of course. We're disappointed to lose, goes without saying.
But the disappointment of dashed hopes is quite different to the disappointment of thwarted expectations. The person who was over-optimistic discovers that he was mistaken. He comes to his senses, experiences a dose of realism.
But, like the directors at QPR, the person who runs on expectations, always discovers that SOMEONE ELSE got it wrong. And the bloke who made all the mistakes goes on making them, and the SAME MISTAKES at that.
Where do these expectations come from? We haven't had even a good 2nd tier team for the best part of 20 years. We've seen manager after manager come and go, so we know we haven't a clue what it takes to find a good one.
We see fewer and fewer Clubs winning anything of any consequence. We see massive losses and debt on a staggering scale, even at so-called 'successful' clubs.
And the days of the Ramseys, Cloughs and Taylors, Revies, Jim Gregorys, and Shanklys taking teams from the 2nd tier straight to the title or even a European title are long, long gone.
When we sign a player, I disagreeumption is that he wouldn't be here if he was any good, he'd be at a side which was doing better. The same where the manager is concerned. Waddock hadn't been a manager, We'd tired of Holloway within a season of his losing a bit of momentum, although we haven't yet matched his highest finish, Gregory hadn't been wanted by anyone for years, Harford hadn't managed, Dowie wasn't exactly football's golden dream although I doubt he was any more useless than most.
Yes, Jim Gregory knew a thing or two. We've had two third division promotion sides in our entire history, except for Gregory's time, when we won the Third with perhaps the best side in its history, won the Second, were promoted as runners-up twice more, won the League Cup, reached the FA Cup Final and the League Cup Final again. and came - unbelievably - within a sneeze of winning the title itself. We were so good that histories of the game routinely assign the honour of being the 'heirs' of the incomparable Dutch masters to the QPR of the mid-sixties.
But Jim Gregory can only really be compared with the curiously un-Gregory-like regime at Ipswich under the Cobbolds. The little club that made waves for 25 years way above its usual capabilities.
If we're expecting a QPR like that, we migth as well expect a QPR like Huddersfield under Herbert Chapman, or Derby and Forest under Clough and Taylor.
In other words, we've a one in a million chance of hitting on it at best. Merely by landing someone who, when they arrive, won't be recognised as talented by anyone at all.
We might change our ways, and set about learning the game.
But we don't even see QPR youngsters getting a game now. When Gregory took the Third and Second divisions in the mid-sixties, with perhaps the most miserly defence the Club has ever known (look at the goals against in 1968 for example), the team was stuffed with kids.
But it wasn't the kids. It was something else. perhaps a positive - that Gregory had something the others, except the Cloughs etc, didn't have. Or - more likely maybe - a negative. That Gregory knew the other Clubs were a bunch of habitual losers, and he realised they would all beat themselves if he could manage to just get a few things right.
That they would do all the things we're doing now. The absurd boasting, the panicky sackings, the creepy manoeuvrings, the pathetic signings. And losing money. More and more and more.
Gregory made it possible to keep wages down by making QPR more successful than Carlisle, whence we got Bowles, or Notts County, whence we acquired Masson, or Luton, whence we filched Givens.
He didn't put the wages of mediocrities up, and then pay even more when they proved how inept they were. Even theplayers of those days - if the stories are to be believed - weren't paid over the odds unless they were brilliant, like Bowles.
Certainly Gregory chopped and changed managers. Trial and error is part of the game. But apart from Gregory, our history has been only trial and error. Trial and 'get-it-right' is unknown to us.
Maybe the biggest assumption is that football is easy. That everyone's a winner just because they say so. Football is all about failure. That's why we have all the league Clubs in the FA Cup, instead of a real Challenge Cup as it once was. And that's why the League was formed.
To give the losers as many games as the one winning Club. So they could balance their books DESPITE their failure. Failure is what makes the game interesting. It's just because winning is so unlikely, and so rare, that it is so highly prized and admired.