Difficult start to the season for QPR

We clearly are in trouble. Just over a quarter of the season gone, we are bottom of the table, five points from safety. We have yet to win at home. If we are going to stave off relegation again it's going to be a long hard battle.

Things seemed so different only six months ago. By last April it looked as though our new coach Marti Cifuentes had turned the club around. The team was playing good attractive football. While none us thought we were likely promotion candidates, a comfortable mid-table finish this season seemed a reasonable prospect.

So what has gone wrong? Certainly one them is an inability to score. When we have been on top in games we haven't turned chances into goals. We bought a number of players during the summer but still didn't buy a reliable striker. It's a big gap.

New players struggling

Transfer policy now seems to fall under our new CEO Christian Nourry. Nourry, who is 26, describes himself as a 'sports-minded' CEO. His background is in sports consultancy mostly on the money side He specializes in advising investors who want to buy a club. Effectively he now seems to be both CEO and Director of Football at QPR. Judging by his performance at the recent fan forum at Loftus Road, he clearly is an articulate and confident young man. Videos from players were slickly cued in. It was run like a company AGM - almost like a pitch to shareholders. But then that's what he does. What he hasn't done before is run a football club.

Under Nourry, the club has decided to adopt a new data-driven approach to signing players. You identify players who seem on the face of it to represent good value for money, sign them, hope to develop and nurture them for a few years and then sell them on for a profit. For those who've seen the film it's the 'Moneyball' approach to football. Brentford are the brilliant exponents of this. It's a pattern that's great on paper, harder to put into practice.

Using this method we have brought in several players from the lower European leagues. Some are clearly struggling to adapt to the more brutish environment of the English football championship.

At the moment our team lacks coherence. The different players just don't seem to gel together. The team is less than the sum of its parts. It's as if someone who wanted to furnish a house has been given money to go to the summer sales, has bought several pieces that each seemed a good buy at the time, but that no one has worked out whether they match each other or will be a good fit together.

At the moment the club just doesn't have the right players for the right positions. We are playing inexperienced right backs at left back, a central midfielder in defence.

It's difficult to tell how much involvement our head coach has had in the recent recruitment process. When asked about this Cifuentes was quoted as saying "The club has a clear model and then my job is to work with the players we have". For the game against Burnley he named two goalkeepers on the bench. When that happens at a club it seems to me that someone is trying to send a message.

Now to compound all this we have a worrying and lengthening injury list.

Must avoid relegation

Can we get out of trouble? Last season Cifuentes did a fantastic job of dragging the club up the table by its bootstraps. It wasn't always pretty. Now we have a lot of players who only seem to want to play pretty football. One midfielder went through a game recently without making a tackle.

We need to rediscover some real vim and fight and quickly. Clubs who are still in the bottom three by Christmas usually go down.