Queens Park Rangers chairman Tony Fernandes says he would have given Mark Hughes more time at the club had Harry Redknapp not been available. Does this suggest he was badly treated?
Mark Hughes is not a bad manager, he simply struggled to get a large squad of players playing to their full potential. He will bounce back into management at some point and he will do well with another club but not QPR.
Tony Fernandes has admitted that he had to axe Hughes simply because Harry Redknapp was available. Had the former Spurs boss been doing a Guardiola and putting his feet up for a period of time, Fernandes has admitted that Hughes would have been given the chance to save QPR’s season.
“Harry is a special manager. If he wasn’t available, I’d probably have persevered with Mark but Harry’s fantastic. I’ve known him for years going back to when he was at West Ham. Harry being available swung it,” Fernandes said as reported in the Sun.
It all sounds quite odd. The mere fact that Redknapp was available doesn’t instantly make him a better alternative than Hughes who was in at a club with the players he had signed, who’s to say that Hughes would not have secured more than the one win Redknapp has managed so far as the manager of the team.
It seems extremely harsh on Hughes and the comments are ones that Fernandes maybe should have kept to himself. There is no doubting that Redknapp has given a boost to everyone at the club when heads may have been starting to drop and that fear of going back to the Championship was kicking in.
However, what Fernandes is effectively saying here is that he signed up Redknapp because he was a mate back in the days when he was in charge of West Ham. QPR are out off the bottom of the table and five points away from being safe and the time that is going to take Redknapp to rectify will be no faster than if Hughes was still in charge of the side.
Although the situation surrounding Hughes’ departure and Redknapp’s arrival at the club sounds odd and a little confusing, Fernandes does deserve a little credit for showing some initiative in keeping his club in the Premier League. They are on the up and they have now started a consistent run of results which they can carry forward as they start to climb the table.
It does not detract from the fact that the chairman needs to watch what he says because there will be many who sympathise with Hughes after reading this
image: © curiouslypersistent
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