Skipper Clint Hill is desperate for QPR to “seize the moment” – and their chance to atone for the club’s troubled spell in the top flight.
Much maligned for their big spending, Rangers were relegated last term with a squad of high-profile, highly paid players having stayed up the previous season by the narrowest of margins.
And veteran defender Hill, one of the stars of their 2011 Championship title triumph, hopes things would be different this time around were Rangers to win promotion via the play-offs.
Speaking on the eve of the semi-final first leg at Wigan, he said: “With the experience we had, maybe we could tweak a few things and do things better as a club.
“Being part of the club going up, managing to survive and then coming down, you can’t help feeling that you owe the club something – that you want to get up there and maybe do it a little bit better this time.
“Once you’ve tasted being in the Premier League, there’s no other place you want to be. The stadiums and players you come up against are different to anything I’ve experienced and that environment is where we want to be.
“The Championship is going to be even more competitive next year to go up, so it’s important that we seize the moment now and try and go up this year, because next year there’ll be eight, nine, possibly 10 teams in with a shout and it’ll be even more difficult to get up.”
But Hill, 35, has played down suggestions that Rangers’ spending means they are under added pressure to get out of the Championship.
In March QPR reported an annual loss of £65m, taking the total recorded debt to around £177m and prompting speculation about the possible financial repercussions for the club should they fail to win promotion.
“You hear all the stories of the money situation. I don’t know anything about it. I leave it to people who know these things,” said Hill.
“The plans for a new stadium and training ground are in place. It’s up to us as players to get the club into a higher league and hopefully do those projects.
“But it’s all about the here and now. We’ve got two games to try and get to the play-off final and that’s all we should be concentrating on at the moment.
“If I’m honest I think the pressure is on Wigan in the first game.
“They’re at home, I think they’ll need to score a few goals and I think they’ll feel they need to as well, because we’ve been strong at home.”
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This post was last modified on 09/05/2014