Close of business after a day of seminars and lectures at St George’s Park and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink can finally relax. Tackling the various modules of the FA Uefa pro licence course would normally be draining enough but, between sessions, the Queens Park Rangers manager has been pounding the corridors of the national football centre overseeing club affairs from afar. He has made regular checks to his staff back at Harlington, not least seeking updates on the progress of Conor Washington’s £2.8m arrival from Peterborough, a move confirmed the following day.
The Dutchman, appointed on 4 December, has sanctioned the loan of Ben Gladwin to Bristol City, selected an under-21 side for a friendly against Chelsea and relayed to David Oldfield and Dirk Heesen, his assistant and first-team coach respectively, the drills that will await the squad in the morning. Fitting studies for his coaching badges around delivering first impressions, all in the middle of the transfer window a few days after his main striker forced through a move to Southampton, has left Hasselbaink dizzied. “It’s not ideal because, in a new job, the players need to see you every day and there are still lots of little things we are trying to do, so it is demanding,” he says. “But I love it. It’s something I need. I may have a lot of other things to do but I need to do this course. This is part of my education.”
Such is Hasselbaink’s reputation in the game as an elite Premier League player and the positive impression he made in charge of Burton Albion that it is easy to forget he is a novice manager still learning his trade. The pro licence course, an 18-month commitment that concludes in June, will prepare him to coach in the top flight. The task he has taken on at QPR will offer a proper schooling in the demands of management in the upper echelons. The club, relegated last season, loiter in 15th place in the Championship with realism steadily swamping optimism when it comes to talk of promotion. The new manager secured a first win in charge, at the ninth attempt, at Rotherham last Saturday, and confronts Wolves on Saturday, but he is setting targets for the long term.
Too much about QPR has been a circus over recent years, but Hasselbaink is not seeking to instigate a reinvention. Rather, his aim is restoration. “It is a nice club, a club everyone really likes, and it has always had a lot of talent: Les Ferdinand, Trevor Sinclair … that raw, urban kind of talent. That is what we have to bring back. We need people to be happy putting that shirt on to play for QPR. We are working with a group that is happy, but we need to bring in younger people and make this club proud.
“It is the ambition to get QPR back to the Premier League, of course. But this year we are just going to try to do our best, get as high as possible and build so that we are strong, so that the platform is strong and if we get to the Premier League we can stay there. It’s not just getting to the Premier League: it is about being able to stay there in the right financial way. That’s the most important thing and that’s what the fans need to know. It’s going to be done in the right way.
“We haven’t produced [our own players] for a long time and, for a club like QPR, that’s a disaster. For me, bringing kids through is a normal thing because I am from Holland, but I’ve been in England for almost 20 years and I feel I’m a little bit British. Three of my four kids were born here and have gone through the English system. They don’t speak Dutch, they speak English. My wife is English. In a way, I feel the obligation to give something back to the FA by trying to bring through young English players.”
The best player QPR have produced in recent years wears the blue of Manchester City, Raheem Sterling’s career now surveyed from a distance. So, too, will be that of Charlie Austin. The striker whose goals had been integral to this team over the previous two full seasons had been due to see out his contract before a summer free transfer. Instead, he seized an unanticipated chance to join Southampton last week for £4m. One of the fictional scenarios put to Hasselbaink in his media training centred on a striker, imaginatively named Peter Smith, being unsettled by the rebuttal of two bids from Manchester United to the extent he was moved to tweet: “My trust in the management has been shattered. If they mess with me, I’ll mess with them. My playing days here are over.”
It never reached anything approaching that level of social media outrage with Austin, but Hasselbaink, when tackling his role-play, was still able to call upon something akin to first-hand experience even after seven weeks in the role. “With Charlie it was a different situation,” he says. “He had six months left on his contract when I came in. He was one of the first players I spoke with to find out where he was, mentally. He told me he wanted to stay until the end of the season, so we made our plans with Charlie in the team. Then, last Friday, he told me he’d had an offer from Southampton and saw his future there. Our leverage of saying no was minimal, so the club and the owners made the decision to let him go. He went with our blessing and it opens up the space for someone else.”
Washington, a former postman during his time at St Ives Town, arrives with 13 goals in his last 15 games at Posh. At 23, he can help spearhead a new, rejuvenated Rangers.
The playing squad are adjusting to Hasselbaink’s methods, with training intensified and brought forward half an hour. “It was very comfortable before, but if you want to be successful, training has to be harder than the games. When I first came to England the sessions were just about maintaining [fitness levels] but now clubs train players to make them better. That is the mentality we need at QPR.
“The players understand what we are doing. I think they wanted it. You see it in their body language. Players want direction. I’m just a stubborn Dutch boy, really, and I know what I want. But, if you have a vision, you have to be able to demonstrate to the players why you are doing things a particular way and, if people don’t understand, I’m not scared to explain it.”
He has developed those ideas over a fledgling coaching career that began with Chelsea’s Under-17s and has since crammed a spell on the staff at Nottingham Forest under first Steve McClaren, then Steve Cotterill and Sean O’Driscoll, a year in charge of Royal Antwerp and a promotion campaign with Burton into the third tier.
The 43-year-old rates McClaren as “one of the best managers” under whom he has worked, yet Antwerp was the real eye opener. “A big club but in the second division in Belgium and I had to do everything,” he says. “We had no fitness coach, no assistant, no analysts. Just a goalkeeping coach and a first-team coach. I had to prepare matches on a little DVD machine which messed up my eyes … but I loved it.
“It was the best thing that I’ve ever done because I was struggling and had to prove myself. I had to put so many hours in. My family were still in London, leaving me just to get on with it in Belgium.
“The hardest job I had was managing up. We had three investors, of whom one [Saif Rubie] was effectively in charge of the football operation. He backed me, but after one bad result the other two [the chief executive Gunther Hofmans and Hofmans’ father-in-law, the investor Jos Verhaegen] were straight on top of me. It was very hard but it taught me a lesson: you need to work for good people.”
QPR will pose a different kind of challenge but one Hasselbaink will not shirk. The tag of Restoration Man is one he will embrace.
