bright sunlight away from the limelight

Kudos to QPR media man Ian Taylor and his colleagues. Thanks to their good work, Rangers fans were able to follow the team's adventures in the Far East and feel pretty close to the action.

Two of the three matches played in Asia could be watched live online. One of these games, the fixture in Indonesia, was viewed via Ustream, which offers a live chat window alongside the video screen. So those fans who work in offices were able to follow every kick of the ball and exchange comments along the way - all while pretending to get on with their jobs, of course.

Between matches, Taylor was busily tweeting about everything else going on, as were other club officials and the players themselves. So the Rangers were thousands of miles away. But at times it felt like we were with them on their pre-season Asian tour, sharing their obvious enjoyment of what seems to have been a useful and brilliantly well-organised trip. Not least by decorating one of his aeroplanes in QPR colours and naming it in honour of the late Alan McDonald, Tony Fernandes saw to it that the team got to feel like superstars while away from home. All the tweeting from inside the Rangers camp seems to suggest that this has done much to establish a high level of morale in the squad. Now supporters must wait with interest to see if this translates into a good start to the new season.

While those on the tour enjoyed both the experiences it offered and the limelight shone on the club by Asia's media outlets, those few senior players left behind in England have been toiling away in obscurity.

The club's website has not featured very prominently the various friendlies played by the reserves. For example, there is not yet a match report on the site for the most recent of these, a dull affair played down in Aldershot on Tuesday evening.

Aldershot Town vs. QPR: not much fun the evening sun

For anyone really keen to know the details of how that fixture turned out, this blog is certainly not the best place to look. A few comments about the match will follow below. But the details will be very sketchy indeed. As ever, any this is my england match 'report' is only ever going to be a brief jumble of impressions. For a more conventional and more detailed account of the match, Aldershot Town's website offers the best option right now. It certainly offers some clarification for those of us who did spend a warm evening in north-west Hampshire and failed to recognise some of the fellows in the blue-and-white hooped shirts.

So it turns out that the lad in who pulled off a few decent saves was the young Australian 'keeper, Aaron Lennox; and it transpires that the no. 5 and no. 6 shirts were worn, respectively, by Taylor Parmenter and Ben Brown. A side mainly made up of youngsters, then. Of these, teenage midfielder Frankie Sutherland was felt to have perhaps had the best game, judging by occasional murmurs of approval from the travelling contingent of QPR supporters who spent the first half squinting into the fierce glare of the low evening sun. Left-back Mo Sharif also drew attention for having the audacity to lash a couple of long-range shots at the home 'keeper.

The little gaggle of senior players on display, however, did little to suggest they will be at the heart of Mark Hughes's plans for the Premier League campaign - Tommy Smith was largely anonymous, operating from a curiously deep position for much of the time; Rob Hulse did a convincing impression of Rob Hulse; if DJ Campbell's contribution will be remembered at all, it will be for knocking a penalty kick wide of the post.

For all of these senior players, perhaps the inference we should draw from their omission from the Far East tour party is that the club is seeking to offload them, whether permanently or on loan. Will any of them be greatly missed? Well, onlookers would be forgiven for feeling a twinge of sadness at seeing Smith relegated to the second string while his colleagues were out in Asia basking in the enthusiasm of the public there. The former Portsmouth man, after all, scored the Rangers' first Premier League goal last season, has been a useful contributor at times, and may not yet be a spent force. Hulse? No, perhaps his eventual departure will not be widely lamented. One of Neil Warnock's least successful signings, he has simply never made an impact at the club.

As for Campbell, when the time comes for him to leave QPR, some supporters may well wonder what might have been. He joined the Rangers in the wake of a decent campaign at Blackpool, having scored a good number of goals for a team that was eventually relegated. Of the players acquired last summer prior to confirmation of the Fernandes takeover, Campbell surely looked the most promising. But dogged by injuries and eclipsed by the arrival of Zamora and Cisse, it seems that the opportunity for him to make a mark at the club has now slipped away.

The match in Aldershot finished with the home side prevailing 1-0 and some of the Rangers supporters in attendance schlepping home with familiar questions on their lips. Why do I go to games like this? Am I a masochist? Am  I mental?

In some previous seasons, questions like these could have been accompanied by worries about whether the first choice players were very much better than the ones unfortunate enough to be playing their pre-season games with the reserve team. Happily, the footage from Malaysia and Indonesia and the excitement about some of the new arrivals suggests that there is much more room for optimism this year.

Perhaps it's fair to ask whether a couple more signings are needed to create a better balanced squad. Are the Rangers a bit light in terms of choices at centre-half? Could we use another left-back, given that Armand Traore seems to look better when roaming forwards than he does when called upon to defend? The arrival of Andy Johnson notwithstanding, might it be prudent to splash the (salary) cash on a proven goal threat such as Jermain Defoe or Craig Bellamy? Time will tell. Perhaps there will be more signings soon. Perhaps not. Either way, it seems to be an undeniably good, fun and hopeful time to be QPR fan. We deserve it, don't we? We deserve a bit of sunshine after living so long under dark clouds, right?

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