Queens Park Rangers

It’s in north-west London but the club is based in Shepherd’s Bush in west London. 

 

In the club’s early years, most of the players came from around Queens Park. The team played at 14 different grounds before moving to Loftus Road in Shepherd’s Bush in 1920. By the way, most fans just call the team by its initials QPR. It’s easier and quicker to say!

 

Yes it is. The name probably comes from the time when shepherds used the land there to rest with their sheep on the way to market. Today, all that’s left is a large triangular area of grass and trees called Shepherd’s Bush Green.

 

It’s very cosmopolitan with people from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Poland, the West Indies, Pakistan, Bangladesh and many other countries, making it very culturally rich. 

 

Because of the team’s blue and white horizontal striped shirts. A hoop is a circular band of metal, wood or plastic, like the hula hoop. In English football very few teams wear hoops. Vertical striped shirts are much more common. But many rugby teams use horizontally striped shirts, perhaps because hoops make you look broader or stronger, but vertical stripes make you look taller. 

 

“A plastic pitch” was the name used in England for artificial or synthetic turf. QPR replaced their natural grass pitch with an artificial one in 1981, the first English club to do so. But the change was not popular with fans or players. In 1988 all plastic pitches were banned in England and QPR went back to using real grass. 

 

No. The team was there for 4 seasons, from the inaugural 1992-93 season until 1996. For the first 3 seasons, QPR always finished in the top half of the table!