QPR Talking To Nottingham Forest And Peterborough United For Defenders

QPR are holding talks with both Nottingham Forest and Peterborough United as they look to sign Josh Knight and Steve Cook, according to the Sunday Mirror.

The R’s are working hard to strengthen their squad as the start of the new Championship season looms.

Defence is an area QPR feel needs attention and they are keen on Nottingham Forest’s Cook and Peterborough’s Knight.

Talks with both clubs are taking place over the structure of the deals and one or both defenders could land at Loftus Road.

Forest defender Cook, 32, is now into the final year of his contract at the City Ground and is expected to move on.

He made just 12 appearances in the Premier League for Nottingham Forest last term, with injury also restricting his opportunities.

Knight also has just a year left on his deal and he made 39 appearances for Peterborough over the course of last season.

The Posh defender has experience of the Championship and has turned out 73 times in the division.

EFL pundits deliver damning QPR Championship prediction

HIGHLIGHTS

QPR finished 20th in the Championship last season.
The R’s kick off their season with a trip to Watford on Saturday.
The Not The Top 20 Podcast predicts that QPR will finish 24th and last in the division this season.

Queens Park Rangers head into the 2023/24 season hoping for a much improved campaign.

After flirting with the relegation zone late on last season, the R’s eventually finished last season sitting 20th in the Championship.

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Gareth Ainsworth has now had a summer window to put his stamp on the squad, though, and a full pre-season’s worth of training to really implement his playing style at Loftus Road.

As such, it will certainly be interesting to see how the R’s line up when they take on Watford this weekend in their season opener.

With six new arrivals so far this summer, it will certainly be interesting to see how many of those new faces go straight into the starting XI.

Not The Top 20 Podcast’s QPR season prediction.

As ever, on the eve of a new season in the EFL, the Not The Top 20 Podcast – a podcast all about the Football League – have been issuing their 1-24 predictions for the Championship, League One and League Two.

With that in mind, we thought we’d give the podcast a listen and see how EFL pundits George Elek and Ali Maxwell thought QPR would get on this upcoming season.

R’s supporters will certainly be hoping that the duo are very wrong.

Indeed, the duo have predicted that the R’s will finish 24th and rock bottom of the division under Gareth Ainsworth this season.

Offering their explanation for this, George Elek said on NTT20: “So, QPR were last relegated from the Premier League in 2015 and this really surprised me. Since then, they’ve only finished in the top 10 once in that time. So this has been a long period of underperformance.”

“If you think back, under the same ownership group as well, to that Neil Warnock season where they came down from the Premier League and they were the big fish in the championship and we’re able to kind of spend their way back to promotion, that hasn’t been the case for a long time now and the good times we’ve seen at the club in recent seasons have been mainly thanks to the individual quality of certain players.

“For a couple of years it was Ebere Eze, who now is an England international and in my eyes, one of the most exciting homegrown talents we have in football right now. Ilias Chair for a couple of years, he’s still at the club.

“But then you look at the squad itself and the work that Gareth Ainsworth has to do.”

Adding to his previous comments, in which he also discussed the great job Ainsworth did at Wycombe, Elek offered further insight into NTT20’s gloomy prediction.

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“I expected that we would see wholesale changes to the QPR squad this summer. I thought we would see loads more in terms of quality out wide, big strikers up top kind of dispensing with some of the ball players. Instead, Taylor Richards comes in, with that deal already agreed before the summer, which means that if you’re looking at their preseason friendlies at least, he’s [Ainsworth] starting Chair, Willock and Richards and basically bypassing them, just hammering the ball over their heads in the hope that they can latch onto the knockdowns or to Lyndon Dykes’ flick-ons. It doesn’t seem to work to me.”

Elek concluded: “I am fully of the church that says that you cannot read too much [in] to preseason friendlies, but you look at the performances that they’ve put in – an injury to Jimmy Dunne in their final pre-season friendly against Oxford as well, and again they lost 5-0.