Michael Beale is a duplicitous git guilty of a terrible betrayal- Times journalist calls out loyal Micky

Matt Dickinson of The Times has utterly destroyed Michael Beale on the day that he was virtue signalling to the gullible about what a solid, genuine, honest geezer he is.

Almost every sound-bite contained ‘I fink’ or ‘I fot’ as he demonstrated how uber staunch he is, in short a real True Blue.

Outside of his own little world there are different views on Beale. Whatever the audience he has a script, almost the same amount of faces and views as a politician as they blow with the wind without any purpose or conviction.

Dickinson is currently covering the World Cup in Qatar for The Times, taking a little time off from that he put on his QPR hat and scarf to reveal a few home truths about the geezer now wallowing in dignity and traditions with a 10-year-old Tribute Act that has won less than St Johnstone.

In The Times he writes:

This column comes to you from the heart rather than the head. It may be irrational. It will stray, unapologetically, into bitterness and resentment. In other words it is about football and fandom.

Or, to put it another way, Michael Beale is a duplicitous git guilty of a terrible betrayal. At home, we call him much worse.

The byline at the top says “senior sports writer” but it should probably read: by the man who sits in row Q, block R of the Stanley Bowles Stand at Loftus Road simmering with rage at finding his club without a head coach.

With a World Cup going on, you may not be closely following how Beale, the aforementioned git, has left Queens Park Rangers to head elsewhere. I believe they are called Glasgow Rangers. Scottish, apparently. I won’t be rooting for them any time soon.

Should I care? Should you? Managers come and go. They look after themselves, knowing that the game eventually chews up all but the very best.

I should know better than most how managers say one thing and do another. After three decades of covering football I have been told enough times that player X is fit when he is in a treatment room down the corridor with a broken leg, and that manager Y has no intention of moving while his agent is completing the deal and hammering out the bonus structure.

I take that as a reporter, and it is part of the job to see through the shit. But, of course, as a fan — especially a paying fan — it is different. It is personal. It is, as Nick Hornby wrote peerlessly in Fever Pitch, the stuff that gets into our blood and our bones.

“Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic,” as he wrote of one particularly bad day as a supporter. A righteous anger seethes through fans of QPR because we feel used, fooled, betrayed — and, perhaps worst of all, because of the nagging hope-turned-dread that Beale might actually be very good. Too good for us, the bastard, unless his treachery is evidence that overweening ambition is a flaw that, Macbeth-like, could undermine his abilities.

Beale had us believing. He had us refreshing the Sky Bet Championship table on our phones in astonishment that we were top. Promotion? We were giddy at the thought.

And then Wolverhampton Wanderers came calling for him in November. Chatting with Giles Coren — The Times has its own QPR section — when news of an official approach from Wolves broke as we battered Cardiff City and Lyndon Dykes played like Hot Shot Hamish, I mustered all my worldly cynicism to explain sadly that a club like Wolves would not initiate formalities unless the deal was already done. Because that would make them look stupid.

But then something truly astonishing happened. Beale turned down their money. He talked about weird stuff like integrity and loyalty. “If those are the things you live by . . . you have to be strong by them,” he said.

He explained that he had persuaded so many players to join his project at Loftus Road that he could not just abandon them.

“I have been all-in here and I have asked other people to be all-in so I can’t be the first person to run away from the ship,” he said. And, stupid fools, we dared to imagine that he might have meant it. Or meant it for more than 36 days, anyway.

We could ignore inconvenient contradictions — Beale claiming that he did not have direct talks with Wolves even though a Midlands correspondent with impeccable contacts reported that Beale was seen two times and made an outstanding presentation, whoops — because he had told us he was staying. He was building a career, a team, a reputation. He was patient. A man of loyalty and integrity. His words.

“The only reasons for leaving QPR right now would be selfish ones around ego, status or finance. And that’s not really me,” Beale told The Daily Telegraph. Oh, Michael. The worst of it all is you had us fooled.

A pot-bellied man in an ill-fitting tracksuit, Beale initially won hearts and minds at Loftus Road

Yes, I know, foolish him for saying it, and even more foolish us for thinking that he might have meant it. “Loyalty will always be rewarded,” as the banner, bearing his face, said at the next match away to Birmingham City. Someone should put it in a museum: it says more about the messy realities of life than Tracey Emin’s dishevelled bed.

Of course we should have known that football always kicks you in the teeth but supporting a club is also an act of faith, hope and optimism. QPR was not the club I first followed but — to cut a long story short — my wife worked there, my children took it up and, almost ten years of season tickets later, it is mine even on those days when I really wish it wasn’t.

I have grown to love it and we quickly loved Beale: a pot-bellied man in an ill-fitting tracksuit who looked as though he walked off your local rec but could be a rising star.

Giles’s son was so elated when Beale turned down Wolves that he cried. I thought that it at least showed someone who had the sense to see that staying for a season, minimum, was good for Brand Beale.

So forgive us, after all this, for not being seduced by the narrative that Rangers was the one club he could never turn down, and that he could not know the job would come up so quickly. There are some rejections that are not going to be understood, even if your wife has run off with George Clooney.

And Rangers are not Brad Pitt, even if Beale has a house by Loch Lomond and his family loved it there during his time working as assistant to Steven Gerrard, and he loves nothing better than a pint in a Glaswegian pub.

Hurt is not going to be assuaged by knowing that he was always desperately ambitious and amply convinced of his own abilities, even from his days at Chelsea and Liverpool academy, and when he moved boldly to work at São Paulo in Brazil in 2017, before joining Gerrard at Rangers and Aston Villa.

That Villa sank, and Gerrard was sacked, after Beale moved to QPR in the summer has done wonders for a reputation that he must believe can withstand any amount of opprobrium.

He has been left in no doubt how this has gone down with QPR fans, which may explain why he has deleted his Twitter account. It is a bruising world out there.

The excellent QPR blogger, @LoftForWords, wrote an eviscerating piece quoting Groucho Marx: “The two most important words in the world are honesty and sincerity. If you can fake these, you’ve got it made.”

Except I am not sure you can fake sincerity for long in elite football or leadership of any high-level sport. Flaws tend to be exposed over time by the relentless scrutiny, the pressures and strains.

Is this one single act of capriciousness or revealing of some characteristic in Beale? Was he just too eager to please, to say the right thing? Or guilty of something worse?

Or, most depressingly, is it not even seen as a flaw in football? Say one thing, do another. Loyalty, integrity, blah blah blah.

If things don’t work out for Beale at Ibrox, if he does a van Bronckhorst, he won’t find many doors opening again to him in England.

The great imponderable still, why he felt the need to give it the big ‘un post Wolves when he surely knew the Rangers call was in the offing? Seems he preferred to bask in the short term adulation rather than worry about the consequences.???? Lying prat!

— Donald Mc Donagh (@Sligohoop) December 1, 2022