The QPR Miscellany, by Ash Rose

After seven seasons with Manchester United, Park Ji-sung moved to Queens Park Rangers. QPR had survived its first season back in the top flight and was spending on experienced players in an effort to stay there.

For Korean supporters, Park’s arrival was a reason to pay attention to a club they might not otherwise have followed.

Ash Rose’s book about Queens Park Rangers

I did not expect to find a Korean edition of a book about QPR at the library. Had Park never signed for the club, many readers in South Korea would have had little reason to look for one.

Park joined in July 2012, and the Korean translation appeared that October. His move made the timing particularly apt.

A club with more than a century of history

The Korean edition introduced QPR as a club with 130 years behind it. That figure gives a sense of how much history preceded the season in which Park arrived.

Rose traces the club from its roots in 1882 through the eras that shaped it.

Players, matches, and moments remembered at QPR

Much of the book is devoted to the players, games, and incidents that supporters remember. Rose recounts them in short pieces rather than a single continuous narrative.

I had seen little footage of the club or its older players, and I sometimes found it hard to picture the scene. A few more photographs would have given readers coming to QPR for the first time more to work with.

One point from the top, and a run to the FA Cup final

QPR is less familiar abroad than clubs such as Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United, and Liverpool. In 1975–76 it finished just one point off the top of the old First Division, and it later reached an FA Cup final.

The achievement that stayed with me was how much history this West London club had accumulated while keeping its own identity.

Why QPR retired the number 31

The club retired the number 31 in memory of Ray Jones. The promising 18-year-old died in a road accident on August 25, 2007.

Selected results

These are some of the club’s milestones discussed in the book.

• 1966–67: League Cup winner
• 1975–76: First Division runner-up
• 1981–82: FA Cup runner-up
• 1982–83: Second Division winner
• 2010–11: Championship winner

The 2012–13 season

Having stayed up the previous season, QPR spent the summer bringing in players with experience at bigger clubs, hoping to move toward mid-table.

The season opened with a 5–0 defeat. QPR went sixteen league matches without a win before beating Fulham in the seventeenth.

There was no sustained recovery. The club finished twentieth with four wins, thirteen draws, and twenty-one losses, and was relegated.

Park captained the team early in the season. It was a promising detail at the time, though the results never gave him much to build on.

Back in the second tier

When I revisited the book during the 2023–24 season, QPR was in the Championship and had spent part of the campaign close to the relegation places.

There were fewer reasons for casual Korean viewers to see the team after Park left. Rose’s book remains a way to meet the club through stories that meant something to the people who were already there.

Book details

The QPR Miscellany

Author

Ash Rose

Korean edition published

October 29, 2012

ISBN13

9788964940860

View the book on YES24

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