When Steven Gerrard left Rangers, almost a year ago to the day, there was a bitter taste left in the mouths of fans given, that just a week before, he had infamously asked Emma Dodds if “do I look happy?”.
Not only was the timing of his departure a sore one to take – just days before a league cup semi-final – but the fact that he took his whole coaching team also meant that we were scrambling around for a coaching team prior to such a big game.
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His trusted aide and now QPR manager, Michael Beale, has been speaking to Darrell Currie on BT Sport about the departure, claiming that both he and Gerrard had plenty of offers before they decided to depart as a team to Aston Villa. Interestingly though, he firmly believes that the season might have turned out better if they hadn’t left:
“I had a situation and stuff going on, at every window and break we had people come for different staff. It was at that stage. Do I think we could have taken it forward? I definitely think we’d have won the league.”
He may well be right. The four-point gap last season pretty much came down to the Old Firm derbies when you consider that we won just one point out of a possible nine in the second half of the Covid-19 interrupted season having beaten them at Ibrox in the first encounter.
It’s an easy claim to make because there is no way of knowing if he is right. We were top of the league but, we were also conceding stupid goals and struggling to create chances. We were far from the team that we had seen just months before when the league title was won in such an emphatic fashion.
Beale isn’t daft and is doing a good job of repairing the damage done when he upped sticks, however, he chose to leave halfway through a season and before a big game, he was also overseeing what was an underperforming team before he left – bringing him back under any circumstances would not be the step forward that many think it would be.