IAIN MACINTOSH: Nice guy Tony out of depth
Like a naïve tourist who emerges from a Las Vegas motel room with nothing but his underpants and a nasty headache, he’s been well and truly stitched up.
The only thing he’s got right all season was his assessment this weekend that football had ‘exploited’ him.
Fernandes is by all accounts a thoroughly nice chap and his motives certainly can’t be questioned. He did not sink millions of pounds of his own money into Queens Park Rangers in a bid to ruin them. But by thunder, that’s exactly what happened.
Who would have thought that splurging tens of millions of pounds on players who had quite obviously peaked would have had such a destructive effect on team spirit?
Ah, yes. Everyone.
It is all very sad, particularly if you’re a QPR supporter, but now is the time to draw a line under it and moveforward. To do that, fundamental change within the club is required.
If Fernandes thought that players like Jose Bosingwa and Ji-Sung Park (to name just two) would electrify the club, then he does not know players. If he thought that pushing tranche after tranche of mercenaries into an overcrowded dressing room was productive, then he does not know football.
If I had come into possession of an airline, enthusiastically attempted to run it and had then seen it perform so poorly that I’d lost all of my most profitable routes, I would swiftly hand control to someone who knew about airlines. Someone like Fernandes, for example.
With that in mind, it’s time for Fernandes to pass the day-to-day control of QPR to someone who knows what he’s doing. He needs a director of football.
When a club has money, or a pressing need to do business, agents arrive like wasps in a beer garden.
They seek out the point of least resistance to reach the person with most influence. They sneak into hotels, they bribe their way into VIP areas and they pour poison into important ears.
Fernandes, new to the game and eager to please, never stood a chance. But there are people out there who know how to deal with agents and who are immune to their charms. There are people who can work towards building a better team in the long-term without having to worry about results in the short-term. Fernandes needs to hire one of them before he takes another step towards next season.
The summer will be a human resources nightmare for QPR and expertise is urgently required. And no, that doesn’t mean you, Harry Redknapp.
Redknapp’s continuing presence at the club is the source of much concern to many supporters and given his complete failure to stem the flow of awfulness this season, that’s entirely understandable. However, there is an argument the damage at the club was so profound that he never stood much of a chance anyway.
There is a rather more persuasive argument that it will cost a lot of money to sack him, so you may as well give him a chance.
The games come thick and fast in the second flight and he needs as few distractions as possible. He had his chance to sign the players who would save the club. He failed.
You only need to look at Saturday’s action to see what awaits QPR next season. The Championship is nothing like the Premier League. There are no divisions within the division. It’s relentless, high- octane, anyone-can-beat-anyone madness from August to May.
If they go down thinking that they can just buy a few players and quickly bounce back, they’re mistaken. If they leave Redknapp to focus on the team and hand everything else to a good director of football, they might have a chance.
It all depends on the chairman. This has been a very expensive lesson in the realities of modern football for Fernandes.
What matters now is that he learns something from it.
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