Beale plays down significance of QPR’s loss to Palace

QPR head coach Mick Beale played down the significance of his side’s 3-0 loss at home to Crystal Palace. 

Former Rangers attacker Ebere Eze opened the scoring before Wilfried Zaha netted two second-half goals in the final pre-season friendly before Rangers take on Blackburn Rovers on the opening day of the Championship season next Saturday.

But Beale believes they can take lessons from the defeat to Palace into the game at Ewood Park.

“I’m a little bit disappointed if I’m honest,” he said.

“I’m not disappointed in terms of the effort, I’m a bit disappointed in terms of the belief and quality.

“But I feel that we’re in good shape. We defended well, we got the ball back easy, but we let in poor goals especially the first and the third one. The second one is a great finish to be fair.

“I thought we had good moments but we didn’t execute, and we never troubled their goalkeeper enough.

“But I do think the players we’ve got missing will give us an extra impetus in the final third. We really do miss Chris Willock, we miss Tyler Roberts and now Taylor Richards as well who I’m really excited about.

“Let’s not get carried away with the result. Of course we would have liked the result to be better and closer, but in terms of the general play I saw enough there that I think we just need to show a bit more belief and quality.

“If we do that then we’ll be alright, but it doesn’t matter who you’re playing against, when you get the ball back you have to be a little bit better with it than we were today.”

Palace named a strong team which, along with Zaha and Eze, also included regular first-team players Marc Guehi, James Tomkins, Jeffrey Schlupp, Christian Benteke and new signing Cheick Doucoure.

And Beale insists there were some positive individual performances among his team despite the result.

“I thought there was a couple of strong performances. I thought the back four actually defended well. Jake (Clarke-Salter) and Kenneth (Paal) showed what they are going to bring,” he said.

“I thought Ozzy (Kakay) had a decent game. He’s up against a top Premier League wide player in Wilfried Zaha and I thought he had a good game. I thought Andre Dozzell looked good again.

“It’s not all fantastic or all terrible, it’s somewhere in between and we needed that feedback to be fair. It was a good friendly for us before the season starts.”