At the beginning of the current football season, I thought there was a real chance that QPR would get promoted. We refreshed our squad with some smart recruitment over the summer, brought in a couple of strikers and hired a new manager in the form of Julien Stéphan, who’d steered Rennes to victory in the Coupe de France. The Hoops have been languishing in the second tier of English football for more than ten years and it looked like we might finally escape.

I’d even begun to fantasise about launching a campaign to get rid of VAR in the Premier League, where it’s been in use since 2019. Earlier this week, a poll by the Football Supporters’ Association revealed that three-quarters of fans want to scrap it, with 97 per cent saying it hadn’t made watching football more enjoyable. Given its unpopularity, you would think VAR wouldn’t be much longer for this world, but to date only one of Europe’s top leagues – Sweden’s Allsvenskan – has refused to introduce it. The closest European football has come to a full-blown revolt has been in Norway, where fans objected to its introduction in 2023 by throwing fishcakes, croissants and tennis balls on to the pitch. I was looking forward to hurling inflated armbands at officials every time a match was stopped to review a decision.

Fast-forward eight months and I’ve had to put my campaign on hold. In the fourth game of the season we lost 7-1 to Coventry, our worst defeat in eight years. We went on a little run after that, climbing to the dizzying heights of eighth in the league in December, only to plummet back down again after Christmas. We were knocked out of the FA Cup in the third round, as we always are, and the Carabao Cup in the first. By the middle of last month, after losing four on the spin, we fell to 18th, but having won the last two, including a 6-1 victory over Portsmouth last week, we’re now back up to 12th.

In short, this season is looking a lot like the previous three. With seven more games to play, the summit of my ambitions is for QPR to finish in the top half of the table, which is the bare minimum Stéphan will have to achieve if he’s to survive. The Championship is one of the most volatile leagues in Europe, with managers enjoying an average lifespan of about ten months, although that will be lower this season, with 15 of them having been replaced already. To be fair to Stéphan, our mediocre performance isn’t entirely down to him, with half our frontbench currently on the injury list. Few Championship clubs can afford to have the bench strength of top-tier teams, so their promotional hopes can be dashed by a handful of injuries, as ours have.

Whenever my sons complain about being born into a ‘QPR family’, with little choice about who to support, I tell them that watching the Hoops bounce up and down the league every season is good, character-building stuff. By now, they’ve learnt to treat those two imposters – triumph and disaster – just the same. If they were Chelsea or Arsenal supporters, I point out, they’d be cursed with a gargantuan sense of entitlement, expecting to win every contest, which is hardly a good preparation for life. And God forbid they’d pledged their allegiance to Tottenham, where they’d now be in the seventh circle of hell. Watching Spurs flirting with relegation this year has been a genuine source of pleasure for fans of Championship teams, who sing about visiting the £1 billion stadium next season.

What if, instead of instilling my sons with a valuable degree of stoicism, supporting QPR has accustomed them to failure?

But I’m beginning to have second thoughts. What if, instead of instilling my sons with a valuable degree of stoicism, supporting QPR has accustomed them to failure? Like all football fans, they cannot help but begin each season with a renewed sense of hope, only to come crashing down to earth somewhere along the way. If the enduring lesson is that hope is a soul-destroyer, won’t that teach them not to aim too high in their own careers? How do you preserve optimism of the will if pessimism of the intellect is drilled into you every Saturday?

The solution, obviously, is for QPR to get promoted soon. At that point, the positive life lessons will start to materialise. Dance with the one that brought you. Good things happen to those who wait. Be true to the one you love. I recall taking my family to the play-off final at Wembley in 2014 and watching Bobby Zamora score a last-minute winner which meant QPR got promoted to the top flight. A glorious day in which 40,000 Rangers fans saw their loyalty rewarded, even if we went straight back down. But my sons were just nine, seven and five, so they can barely remember it. We need another occasion like that to restore their faith in life – and soon.