It was 40 years ago today

In an ideal world, my first Watford game would have been one of the greatest in the club’s history. But the truth is that until Watford were drawn at home to Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the 1970 FA Cup, I wasn’t even aware that there was a professional club in the area.

Where I grew up, in Bushey Heath, all my friends in the playground supported the big London 1st Division sides: Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea. Indeed, on the basis that my best friend when I was six was a Spurs fan, I decided that I was too. I even persuaded Mum to buy me a white football shirt and sew a Tottenham badge onto it. (The replica shirt business was still in its infancy.)

Then came that FA Cup draw and I realised that professional football wasn’t just something that happened in places I couldn’t possibly visit. We went to Watford every Saturday morning to do our shopping; surely Dad could take me there to see a football match, too?

Sadly, he demurred. I can’t remember his excuse, but it was probably something to do with the difficulty of getting tickets. He did, however, mollify me with a promise to take me to a game later in the year. And thus it was that, instead of seeing Watford beat Liverpool 1-0 to reach the FA Cup semi-final for the first time in their history, my introduction to the Golden Boys was a 0-0 draw against Carlisle United on September 12th, 1970.

In some ways, the matchday experience hasn’t changed much in 40 years. Yesterday, as in 1970, I parked in Watford Fields and walked over the railway bridge, along Cardiff Road, and then up Occupation Road to the ground, past the allotments. Then, as now, Watford were one of the poorer, less fancied teams in the second tier of English football, having finished 19th out of 22 clubs the previous season (at the end of which, incidentally, Blackpool had been promoted to the top tier). Even the result was the same.

In 1970, Dad and I sat in the Main Stand Extension. Now I sit in the Rookery, encased as it is in low-cost housing for nurses, having tried all four sides of the ground in the interim. At least the Extension is still there, and I spent some of the duller moments of the first half yesterday trying to identify the seat where I first experienced live football – or at least, what I could see of it round the pillars that held up the stand and through Dad’s pipe smoke, which always seemed to blow in my face those first few seasons.

My memories of that first game are chiefly of colour: the orange of the seats, the green of the pitch, the golden yellow of the Watford shirts, the royal blue of the opposition’s. (For a while I laboured under the misapprehension that all Watford’s opponents had to wear blue shirts and white shorts, as my next two games after Carlisle were against Cardiff and Birmingham.) The noise, too, made an impression on me – though in retrospect, I doubt that the crowd of 10,462 (I just looked it up) got too worked up over a nil-nil draw.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Dad, when he took me to the match that autumn day, what an important role Watford FC would come to play in my life (and, indeed, just how much money I would spend following them)? Probably not - he was more of a rugby man, though he claimed to have spent some time on the terraces at Sincil Bank in his younger days in Lincoln. Anyway, he’s not around to ask any more. I’m just grateful that he indulged my boyhood wish. I hope he knew that.