The Best Ground In London: Loftus Road Stadium, Queens Park Rangers FC

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

Cover image: Tom Stanworth

London’s best ground isn’t an award given in a glitzy award ceremony, it’s just a thing that is.

The crown used to belong to Brentford FC’s Griffin Park, with its pub on every corner, Ealing Road Terrace and double decker away stand.

Then Brentford knowingly and in full conscience, went for a stadium instead of a ground, that nuanced definition that makes such a difference in how football is played and felt.

Fulham fans will chirp up, with a fair amount of credence that Craven Cottage is the best ground in London but they’d be wrong, with their new stand unsympathetic to the rest of the place and serving up prices where it can be cheaper to get into Royal Ascot than the £160 Riverside tickets for Man Utd.

Spurs have the best stadium in London, designed as a beautiful place to watch football, unlike the soulless bowls that so many clubs have fallen foul of.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Loftus Road. Queen’s Park Rangers FC.

But those that went to the old White Hart Lane will accept they don’t play in a ground any more and some of that bricks and mortar heritage went with the new gaff, or should we say put on a shelf, never to be seen again.

That’s a subject for another day, when the haze of £5 cans of San Miguel isn’t so heady. They should weigh five pounds for that price.

Now, Loftus Road, the home of Queen’s Park Rangers, is the best ground in London.

Just go to the place, look at it and say otherwise.

Leicester fans were out early doors, drinking it all in, for they remember Filbert Street and they savour these trips back into football’s authentic past and its future here, shielded from all the abstract crap about “progress” and the rush for super stadia that the likes of Everton are seeing slip past their lips like the bottom of a pint in the Denbigh Castle.

Turn right out of White City tube and there’s a cafe where two women are having a chinwag on the morning of the Leicester game. One is wearing a lovely hooded top of the blue and white hoops which stand QPR apart. The other lady is the mother of QPR forward Paul Smyth. She calls herself his “mommy” in a sweet Belfast lilt and talks about his journey from Linfield to Loftus Road, via Leyton Orient and a collapsed lung.

The wind has been knocked out of the R’s of White City, facing relegation from the Championship and with their rock and roll manager Gareth Ainsworth failing to make a noise, even with the amp turned up to 11.

Yet, QPR have that protection of being a proper club, with loyal supporters and the feeling that better days could be round the corner, even with last October rain shooing falling leaves into gutters.

In the Queens Tavern Pub, they serve no lager other than Carling on tap which is as good an indicator of confidence in its ability than anything else.

People are happy to drink Britain’s nondescript beer which isn’t black label anymore as they are soon to stand in a ground of real interest.

There’s those £5 tins of San Miguel as an alternatives, with talk about just how many QPR are going to lose by, pierced with uncomfortable thoughts about the price per can of a multi-pack of Spain’s finest.

At one point there wasn’t an Englishman in the garden’s yard as it was full of visitors from every Scandinavian country you can stick a pin in.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were all represented because these are guys who can understand real football experience when they see it.

The Finns, off to West Ham United the next day knew all too well the difference between a ground and a stadium, describing the Hammers Olympic venue as “shit” but that they were going anyway.

Any idea that QPR are a tourist club however, can be knocked on the head, with a whole swathe of grizzled R’s making their way up the tight staircases, where you can see the fans below, to their places in the theatre of screams on Halloween.

But here’s the kicker, QPR fans watch football in a theatre and get talked down to by Arsenal fans who watch football in an arena.

The difference between watching your favourite band in a club or listening to the echoey, disconnected hum of performers you can’t touch and feel.

Loftus Road is the Globe Theatre of grounds, where you can hear the last syllable of a soliloquy as well as the guffaws of the regulars in the gallery.

It’s louder than the Globe obviously, you’re not going to burst into a rendition of “Come on your R’sss” during Macbeth, for fear of getting a thick ear from Judi Dench.

QPR remains a club in the truest sense of the world, the stewards are jovial and mess around with each other and the bar-lady makes sure they have a hot sausage roll to eat or whatever.

The fans drink their beers in their hoops, with the backdrops of Stan Bowles, who famously stopped to read the Sporting Life before a corner and played with the kind of personality you couldn’t imagine now. Les Ferdinand, Kevin Gallen, tangible heroes that supporters got to pat on the back after celebrating a finish, the pitch is that close to the stands.

There’s some Flamengo supporters, wide eyed at the narrow concourses of “The Loft”, here because of Júlio César whose sojourn at the R’s was sandwiched between two stints at the Rubro-Negro of Rio.

The hoops work a treat for both and maybe the Brazilians would bring some good luck to a match where Leicester were supposed to give QPR a kicking.

QPR boss Ainsworth plays in a band called “Cold Blooded Hearts” and knows how to tourniquet the flow when needed, even if Leicester had something like 79% of possession.

The luck just wasn’t in for the home side. Leicester’s first goal took a deflection and the bounce of the safe standing section after Andre Dozell’s equaliser was flattened by the red card for Jason’s son on the hour mark.

Dozzell, was censured by the ref for a retaliatory push on the Foxes’ Abdul Fatawu.

You could imagine Stan Bowles chuckling at the handbags moment, while checking for the time of the first race at White City dogs.

A Harry Winks worldie settled it, the England international who doesn’t seem to be able to cut it at the highest level, was able to slice through the QPR with a pearler of a top-corner curler.

Ainsworth didn’t last long after the match, a social media post saying the man in black had departed with “immediate effect”.

We’ll never know if there was enough time for him to sip a can of Monster Energy while listening to Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” to occupy his brain.

QPR found themselves six points adrift in the Championship relegation zone but it really doesn’t matter.

Form comes and form goes and they have the best ground in London.