Danny Gabbidon revelations on 'crazy' QPR

Oh dear. Makes you wonder how this sort of stuff was ever allowed to happen.

Carl Serrant, our fitness coach at the time, told me a very similar story about the dressing room. 3-4 of the players who were in the promotion side were openly aggressive in training against those who were bought in and this led to a "French" clique forming who wanted nothing to do with the politics of it. Zamora was a target in the dressing room which led to his infamous "I'd rather be fishing" quote. Warnock has to take a lot of the blame as he openly stated that he left dressing room discipline to two of the players and that didn't sit well with the others. Obviously I never saw any of this with my own eyes but I have no reason to doubt what I was told, especially in light of other stories going about at the time and now, Gabbidon's tale. The fact that two players, popular with the fans, were shipped out to help repair the dressing room says a lot about just how bad things were.

Who were the two shipped out? Barton and one other?

You getting the wrong season lads. He means 11/12 so maybe Hill and Rowlands? Although no French clique then....unless it was dear old Armand on his own

Cisse and Diakite arrived same month

Trying to piece together the timeline as the signings that arrived in the summer of 11 were mainly English.

Cisse and Diakite came in after Warnock left though

Heidar, Kenny or Barton 🤔 all left the club in summer of 2012. Kenny didn't have much good to say about the club after he left.

But Adel was part of the promotion side and Barton was the one on big wages.

If you listen to Derry and Clint on one of the podcasts, sounds like a school playground in the way they all acted.

I blame Flávio and knee high for the last minute trolley dash which started the cycle we have never recovered from.

I was also told by very reliable source that one of our old guard hero’s was very and intentionally disruptive and unwelcoming to new players and encouraged the clique

Mackie & Derry were the ones shipped out and Hill was also part of it but stayed.

That was what the problem was, the old guard never received any increase in money except Adel after threatening to leave (£27k to £43k) I was told). It was during that first season that the problem festered and simmered and Warnock didn't do anything about it but, as alluded to by Gabbidon, Hughes came in and tried to sort it out. I don't blame the promoted players for wanting the rewards available when seeing journeymen like Barton, SW-P etc on silly money, but how they went about it was wrong. The French cliques WAS the second season under Hughes and was Traoré, Adel, Cissé and Remy for a short while.

I spoke with Traoré a number of times at games and he was quite affected by it all at the time. He was also quite worried about his performances as he couldn't get past his mental block regarding the next injury he got could finish his career and knew it was affecting his ability to perform as required. We discussed a few self help books and the one that worked for him best was the one that a lot of Archers use for preparing for competitions etc. called The Chimp Paradox. As well as the club, a lot of good players were ruined by QPR during that time, Vargas, Isla, Remy, M'Bia spring to mind and in a different way, Diakité. Dark days at QPR then but I feel there is light appearing at the end of the tunnel, and it's not the light of an oncoming train.

One Hill, Derry, Tommy Smith, Kenny, Heider is worth a 1,000 Traore's, SWPs, Remy's or M'Bia's. All did nothing after leaving us. Cisse, however, was a player on or in his day.

really accurate post this

M'Bia won consecutive Europa Cups in the two seasons after he left us. Vargas was Golden Boot in the CONCAF tournament. As I said, we ruined a number of players back then.