​Queens Park Rangers have been in fantastic form this year. If the Championship season started in 2016, the Londoners would be just four points off the playoff places. What’s the most impressive is that they’ve been without top scorer Charlie Austin since the middle of January following his move to Southampton. The 26-year-old was almost single-handedly trying to get them into the top-six, but his exit has actually been a blessing in disguise, and here’s why…





The Hoops had been far too reliant on Austin’s goals for some time. He was outstanding in their promotion-winning season (34 games, 19 goals) and continued to shine in the Premier League (35 games, 18 goals), but this campaign saw him feeling the pressure the most. Back in October, he announced he would be leaving the club the following summer, and it’s clear that the burden on his shoulders was too much.

10 goals in 12 league starts was a fantastic return in a failing side, and the penny finally dropped that the club were pinning all their hopes on him and him alone. The first two months of the Championship season saw Queens Park Rangers trying to outscore the opposition to make up for their woeful defensive record, similar to how Brendan Rodgers had Liverpool playing in 2013/14 with Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez.





It’s a philosophy with an expiry date as scoring multiple goals per game isn’t always possible. The Londoners kept just one clean sheet in their first 11 league games of the season, conceding a staggering 22 goals, which puts a lot of pressure on the attack to continue firing. Austin missed 11 games in the Championship through injury in 2015/16 before his move, and the Londoners managed just three wins. Of the nine appearances he failed to score in, Rangers won just once.

In November, then-manager Chris Ramsey was sacked for a pragmatic interim boss Neil Warnock and he worked on improving the defensive record. Austin’s exit revelation was known at the time Warnock took over, and it meant he had to pin more focus on the side not conceding as they wouldn’t have Austin’s goals to save them forever. The striker’s injury problems meant he missed a number of games too so the ethos had to change.





Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was eventually appointed on a permanent basis, and he’s continued the defensive work undertaken by Warnock, while making Queens Park Rangers more structurally attacking. Only five clubs have scored more goals than the Londoners in 2016, because work undertaken on the training field to get players into dangerous positions in the final third has really paid off.





If Austin was still at the club, the side may have been too reliant to sit back and feed him the ball at every opportunity in the vain hope that he would continue winning them games. His sale has forced the scoring burden to be collectively shared, and they are benefiting from it, having averaged more goals-per-game without Austin (1.29) than with him (1.21).

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