Adel Taarabt has hit out amid claims from his manager Harry Redknapp that he is three stone over weight and is not fit enough to play for QPR.
The QPR manager made no secret of his disgust at the player’s lack of fitness and slammed him twice in the space of a week for not being good enough to contribute to the team’s fight to avoid relegation. Taarabt was considered a key player to QPR’s cause and the fact that he is not able to play for them at the moment is a massive blow. It is clear from their results that they are struggling to score enough goals to win games at the moment and they are lacking a little bit of flare and magic needed – which Taarabt would undoubtedly have contributed had he been fit.
Redknapp made no attempts to hide how frustrated he was with the player in a post match interview, saying: “No, he’s not fit. He played in a reserve team game the other day, and I could have run about more than he did. So no, I can’t pick him. I pick people that want to try, and deserve to be at a good football club like QPR, and want to work, and come in every day and want to work, and train, and show a good attitude. And that’s what I got today from the players. When he starts doing that, whether he ever can do it, maybe he’ll get a game. The other lads, I’ve got a fantastic group of lads here, absolutely superb, all of them. I can’t keep protecting people who don’t want to run about and train, who are about three stone overweight. What am I supposed to keep saying, keep getting your 60, 70 grand a week but don’t train? What’s the game coming to? The others are as good as gold.”
These were quite harsh words against the player, which – even if they are all based on truth -his manager could have held back on, due to privacy. But it seems that the no nonsense gaffer has had enough of the situation and wanted to hang his player out to dry.
Taarabt has not taken this quietly however and had this to say in return: “I was desperate to play before the game. I was fuming when I didn’t play.” Taarabt, who has not started for QPR since 27 August said. “The journalist was doing his job and asking if I was injured. He should have said ‘when he is fit he will play’. He is an experienced manager and he should have controlled that situation. I didn’t do pre-season with the team because I had an ankle injury, so I wasn’t 100%.”
So whose side of the story do you take as gospel? Is he really just struggling to shake a niggling injury that he had during pre-season? If a player does not par-take in pre-season then that usually does put them behind the rest of the squad in terms of fitness, and one could perhaps understand him missing the first couple of games, or being used as a late impact sub, so eight games into the current season, there seems to be a lot more to this than meets the eye.
Harry Redknapp says the player is still unfit, and Taarabt says he is ready to play, so it could perhaps be a clash of personality that is stopping the gaffer picking him?
It seems that the real victims of the whole situation are QPR themselves, a team currently struggling to pick up any sort of form, playing on the most part without any sort of urgency or desire to win a football match – with the exception of their game against Liverpool at the weekend which saw them put up quite a good fight and they were unlucky not to come away with anything from that game.
But whether they play well or not, they need something different, a new face in the team, someone who can inspire them to start winning and go on a little run to get themselves out of trouble, and there is a player apparently chomping at the bit at a chance to play.
It is a very peculiar situation, but history tells us that public falling out between a manager and a player ends up with the player being shipped out on loan or flogged on the cheap at the next transfer window. It could seem that Taarabt’s QPR career could be at an end.
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