Luton 1-2 QPR: Rob Dickie's late winner gives visitors winner

The keyboard warriors out there had better be careful what they type.

Mark Warburton, it turns out, reads all the fan forum and social media criticism of his Queens Park Rangers team and pins it up on the dressing room wall as motivation.

If it was a Luton Town follower who wrote QPR were coming to Kenilworth Road as ‘lambs to the slaughter’, they may well regret it now.

We’ll know in a few weeks just how significant Rob Dickie’s late winner here will prove in an increasingly claustrophobic Championship play-off race.

The big centre-back can be described as only an occasional goalscorer but he certainly picked his moment here. It was Dickie’s fifth goal of the season but his first since the end of August.

It wasn’t initially clear which part of Dickie’s anatomy glanced Chris Willock’s inswinger into the net. Warburton described it afterwards as ‘a great shoulder.’ There were questions about offside and Luton keeper James Shea being blocked.

QPR, who rose to fourth as a result of this smash and grab win, are unlikely to be too fussed about such details and Warburton saw the opportunity for some mind games.

‘Lots of people expected us to lose today. Reading some of the comments this week we might as well have not turned up,’ he said.

‘You read some of them - QPR going there are lambs to the slaughter. Really?

‘I read the comments, I look at Newsnow. ‘QPR can be a decent team, QPR are in freefall’.

‘The players aren’t stupid, let them read them and the manager has to say nothing.

‘The table is going to keep on chopping and changing. It’s amazing how fickle people are with some saying we will be lucky to finish mid-table, all doom and gloom. Suddenly everyone is jumping around.’

On the other side of such razor-thin margins, and now the other side of the play-off line, Luton manager Nathan Jones was visibly distraught his side had lost.

‘This is hurting, it’s the wrong time to interview me,’ he said.

‘I’m bitterly disappointed, I really wanted us to do well today because it showed how far we’ve come.

‘If we had just done the basics well enough we would be fourth in the league, which would be the biggest over-achievement in history.

‘If we finish in the top six it would be like Leicester winning the Premier League.

‘We in the most amazing position but today was really hurtful and I’m struggling.’

With good reason because Luton were far superior to QPR in the first-half and should have been further ahead than Cameron Jerome’s strike.

Elijah Adebayo saw a goal disallowed for the most marginal of offsides after Jordan Clark played him through.

But any frustration at that moment was erased when Jerome swept home from the edge of the box, the shot fumbled by QPR keeper David Marshall.

Jones was unhappy that Ilias Chair was only shown a yellow card when he raised his hands to the face of Tom Lockyer as the half-time whistle sounded.

‘The referee said it wasn’t malicious. Do I agree with that? No. Whether it was the turning point, I don’t know, but it was a decision against us,’ he said.

With their full complement of 11, QPR slowly turned the game in the second-half and were rewarded with only a second win in nine.

Andre Gray won and then converted a penalty against his old club to equalise and, with seven minutes left, Dickie ‘shouldered’ a potentially priceless winner.

Those message boards will make for more pleasurable reading as a result.