Neil Warnock is in hysterics. He is sitting in the dugout at an empty Loftus Road and casting his mind back two decades to his first taste of top-flight football, as manager of a Notts County team in the shadow of Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest.
“He used to walk his dog past our training ground,” the Queens Park Rangers manager says. “We only had a postage stamp of a pitch, 40 or 50 metres square, and he had to come past to get to Forest’s salubrious 50 acres, grass like Wembley. He’d walk across with his Labrador and there was us, knee-deep in mud, pads on, kicking each other. We’d all freeze and he would look across and just shake his head like this [affects