The kid needs his usual inconveniently timed trip to the gents. So with almost eighty minutes on the clock, off we go, along a long, long row of worried looking QPR fans, asking every single one of them to stand up so we can pass. A voice in the head makes an irrational suggestion. Perhaps, it whispers, the Rangers will score when you're escorting junior to the khazi. Perhaps you'll hear the roar of a delighted crowd above the roar of the hand dryer.
But, no. With the wee-wee all done, it's still a tight and tense nil-nil affair as we struggle back to our seats. Half-way along, asking preoccupied people to stand up has become a very tiresome business. So we clamber down to a couple of empty places two rows in front of us. We're leaning against the metal barrier that separates us from the wheelchair die-hards. An older gent sits to our right. "They're not going to do it, are they?" he says. "I can't see a goal in this." Right at that moment, it feels like he's not wrong.
To the left, banks of whey-faced Staffordshire scrotes are gloating, reminding us of Bolton's two-goal lead. Charming lads. Their own team's season having fizzled out into mid-table mediocrity, their own team offering very little by way of entertainment, all they have is schadenfreude. Well that's fair enough. All part of the rough and tumble of our great game. But when some of them decide to flob their dirty spit down on the heads of the QPR-supporting men, women and children sitting below them in the School End's lower tier - well, that's not fair enough. That's just bloody horrible. As is the song about Anton Ferdinand being "John Terry's bitch". Look, there's just a chance that this is not meant to give the impression that the singers condone racial abuse. But make what you will of the delighted reaction that results among the Stoke contingent when members of the home crowd make just that accusation.
That's that then. Championship football next season. Some time after the eightieth minute of the tie, the weary-looking gent to our right has had enough. Without a word, he's up out of his seat and ghosting away from us.
So he doesn't see what happens right at the end. He doesn't see that man Ferdinand rising to meet a nicely placed corner. He doesn't see the ball drop handily into the area into which Djibril Cissé has just arrived, having drifted craftily past his marker. He doesn't see Cissé steer the ball into the net and wheel away, intent on giving a display of impromptu cartwheels and back-flips. He is not there when three-and-a-half sides of the ground erupt. Scenes of joy and relief. Joy expressed with such force that it sounds like anger. Then there's the news that West Brom have somehow wiped out Bolton's two goal lead and that the game at the Reebok Stadium has ended in a draw. So we live to fight another day.
When the final whistle blows, supporters stream onto the pitch. Jigs are jigged. Reels are reeled. Fist pumped. Whoops whooped. Grins split delirious faces. This is the happy daze.
it's simple now: shit or bust
A day later, the hangovers are receding and the complex permutations of our situation have disappeared. Blackburn Rovers, beaten by Wigan Athletic, slink out of the top flight among the jeers of an angry Ewood Park crowd and in a squall of cold, hard Lancashire rain. A chicken has entered the field of play, wrapped in Rovers colours, a mocking reference to the poultry industry, the sector in which the club's Indian owners have made their money.
So it's simple now. Wigan are safe. Villa are safe. One relegation slot remains unconfirmed. When the season concludes next weekend, that slot will be taken either by our QPR or by Bolton. Looked at one way, we appear to be in better shape. We have two more points than the Wanderers have managed to amass. Should we get a draw, our vastly superior goal difference would surely mean that even a win would not be enough to keep Owen Coyle's men in the top flight. But if you look at it another way, you may be tempted to believe that Bolton have a better chance of getting a win than we have of getting just a single point. Because Bolton will meet a Stoke side playing for nothing, while our lads face a Manchester City side who know that a win will confirm their first league title since 1968. So, it's not really in the bag, is it?
The week ahead, then, will be another one in which QPR supporters will find it hard not to think of the fate and fortunes of their team. Distraction. Anxiety. Nerves. All made worse by the knowledge that barring a miraculously unlikely win at the Etihad Stadium, our fate is in the hands of others. In the hands of people who owe us nothing and feel no affection for us - the Stoke City team in this case. Well, apart from the fact that dear old Peter Crouch has a soft spot for our club. Perhaps that will inspire him to score a goal that saves the Rangers and relegates Bolton. Clutching at straws? Sure. What else is there to clutch at?
reminders of dismalness
So, difficult as it will doubtless prove, let's try to get on with our jobs and our lives for the next few days, putting all things QPR out of our minds.
What's more, perhaps we can ask ourselves if relegation would be such a terrible thing. The Championship has a number of plus points when compared with the top division. Away games are cheaper. Wins are easier to come by. It's more of a real competition, much more likely to throw up surprisingly successful teams that you don't expect to be in the running for promotion. More likeable fans too, on the whole. Home and away, you tend to encounter opposing supporters of the old school variety - people who have followed their unglamorous and largely unremarkable clubs through thick and thin (mostly thin) for many years. Loyalty, comradeship and community are the things that drive them on as they urge on their teams. Premier League teams, meanwhile, seem to attract crowds containing a much higher percentage of people evidencing the mindset of consumers of an entertainment product. Those crowds appear to include larger numbers of perfectly nice foreign fans who have been drawn to the excitingly packaged 'EPL' experience pushed by television networks around the world.
This is all well and good. At least the Singaporeans, affluent south Asians etc. that one sees in the crowd at Craven Cottage or Stamford Bridge are people who make the effort to attend matches. They cannot be blamed for adopting an approach to watching football which is unfamiliar to the likes of us - polite applause, comments framed in language that sounds a tad naive to our ears, the waving of plastic flags, the wearing of those awful fucking half-and-half scarves. So let's resist the temptation to deride this new breed of imported fan. They don't know any better. Their money is as good as anyone else's.
But on the other hand, let's direct plenty of scorn at another kind of interloper from foreign climes. This is a a new scourge - one brought right into our homes via our Internet connections.
They sit at their keyboards in faraway places such as Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur or Lagos. Given that they hail from countries with massive income inequality, the mere fact that they possess computers or smartphones tells us that they are the sons of affluent families. Seduced by the razzle-dazzle allure of the most exciting football league in the world, they profess allegiance to clubs drawn from a very small pool: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United.
They have never attended a football match. They probably never will. But they sense that there's some excitement to be had from getting involved in slanging matches via Twitter and other social media platforms. These keyboard warriors are clever fellows. They quickly learn the basic vocabulary of English football banter. They don't quite master it, mind you. They continue to sound out of place and poorly informed. They have read the headlines. But they never get under the skin of the nuances.
So we get strange cases like the black South African Liverpool fan who refers to Anton's Ferdinand's brother Rio as a "moronic curvy lipped black cunt". We get charmers like the Indian "Aspiring Chartered Accountant" (reach for the stars, son) who opines that one team he definitely wants to see relegated is QPR because "Anton Ferdinand needs to be taught that JT is the boss".
It proves a fruitless exercise to point out to young Mr. Muthiyan that the QPR defender is merely a witness in a trial ordered by the Crown Prosecution Service. He persists in the view that Anton Ferdinand has "insulted" John Terry. When invited to find a quote to support this contention, he has no answer of course - because as we all know, our centre-half has remained commendably composed in the face of media interest and ignorant abuse online and at matches. He has not uttered a word that could prejudice the impending court case. The wannabe bean counter of Mumbai cares nothing for Ferdinand's professionalism and decency. He just wants to score points in an argument he barely understands. Just a nice little diversion before daddy's driver takes him to his accountancy classes in the morning.
Shiny stadia. Wonderfully talented players from all over the world - some of whom even play for QPR. These are the sweeter fruits of a globalised game.
Spoilt, arrogant little brats who have seen a few Chelsea games on TV but who know nothing of the culture and traditions of the game. Their twitterings are part of the crap that blows in on the trade winds of the wider world.
Consider this offering from young Yash:
He thinks in terms of people supporting a football club for a "reason". He can't understand why anyone would follow a club lacking a rich and generous benefactor willing to ruin the economics of the game by further inflating the obscene transfer fees and wages of the twenty-first century. If you tried to tell this chap that that you support the Rangers because your father, grandfather and great-grandfather did so, it would cut no ice. If you told him tales of the tight community of old friends with whom you've shared rare triumphs and more frequent despair for as long as you can remember - well he wouldn't get it. Dancing on the streets of Shepherds Bush when Holloway led us out of English football's third tier? He will never experience the blazing sweetness of anything like that. A home-grown hero like Marc Bircham scoring just a few feet in front of you at Griffin Park and going absolutely beserk? He will never feel a rush so intense just by consuming the Chelsea entertainment product via his flat screen TV.
Forget these berks. Or, better still, when one of them pipes up, remember the wise words of B.A. Baracus and "pity the fool".
let it come, whatever it is...
So a strange and often frustrating season concludes on Sunday. We may stay up. We might go down. Either way, we'll continue to have our strange, familiar, bonkers little club. Roll on a summer of transfer rumours and a different kind of anxiety and anticipation.
U RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRssssssssssssssss
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