Queens Park Rangers manager Marti Cifuentes during the Sky Bet Championship match at the King Power Stadium, Leicester. Picture date: Saturday March 2, 2024.
Head coach of QPR Marti Cifuentes thinks his team has more work to do before they can be guaranteed a spot in the Championship for the upcoming campaign.
With just six games remaining, Rangers are already six points clear of the relegation zone after winning back-to-back games over the Easter weekend against Swansea City and Birmingham City.
When Cifuentes took over in October, the west London team was six points from safety, but he isn’t quite ready to start basking in the success of a job well done just yet.
Before Saturday’s match against another struggling team Sheffield Wednesday, he stated, “The biggest mistake we could make at this moment of the season is to think the job is done just because we got some decent results lately.”
“The staff now knows, the guys know.” Despite everyone’s best efforts, 46 points will not be sufficient to prevent relegation.
“The fact remains that many games remain to be played, and we must ensure that we play well, beginning on Saturday.”
Earlier in the season, QPR lost 2-1 at Hillsborough due to two goals in the dying moments from the home team.
Although Wednesday’s chances of avoiding relegation have increased since hiring Danny Rohl as head coach in the same month that Cifuentes moved to Loftus Road, they are currently two points from safety in 23rd place in the league standings.
With a win, Cifuentes hopes to further distance his team from the drop zone and make up for their loss in south Yorkshire.
“It’s possible that the Championship has been particularly captivating for supporters because Sheffield Wednesday and we have both performed incredibly well [since hiring Rohl],” he stated.
“It appeared that three teams would make it to League One four months ago, but now many teams are competing for a spot in the relegation battle.”
In my opinion, we have been better [since the Wednesday loss]. I want to believe that we are a defensively solid club that gives up few goal opportunities per game.
We also seem to have greater emotional maturity, in my opinion. Emotions played a major role in this game, particularly the sensation that the game was under control. In England, things may turn drastically even in a 1-0 or even 2-0 lead.
“The game blows up in the 87th minute after we gave up a counterattack goal and Sam Field had a great opportunity to score the second goal.
“The game was really frustrating, but I believe we gained some insight from it. It is something that we should consider, even if it is only 1%; a small amount of retaliation from this game.
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