Questions, questions

Don’t worry, I’m not going to share any profound thoughts on being a Watford fan as 2014 dawns damp and dreary, mainly because I haven’t got any.

Instead, here are five rhetorical questions based around issues that bother me slightly, none of which is worth a whole blog entry in its own right. If you have an actual answer to any of them, please let me know, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

1) Why doesn’t Richard Short just ask the Watford players how to pronounce their surnames? I don’t have a problem with his performance as matchday announcer in general, though I know a lot of fans do. However, given that one of the main requirements of the job is to read out the teams before kickoff, I’d say the least he could do is to make an effort to pronounce them correctly.

The Pozzos have given him a lot of easy ones (Abdi, Anya, Cassetti, Ekstrand), but if there is a way of getting a name wrong, he generally does so – repeatedly. For example, I know enough Spanish to be fairly confident that our Spanish goalkeeper is not called ‘Al-moon-ee-ay’, and I’m pretty sure our Italian-Argentinian striker isn’t ‘Forest-airy’.

It’s not just the foreign players, either. On Sunday he managed to sidestep the tricky question of whether our Chelsea loanee is ‘Mac-keck-ran’ or ‘Mac-eek-ran’ by adding a superfluous ‘r’, making him ‘Mac-reck-ran’.

2) Does Lloyd Doyley ever get tired of having to introduce himself to yet another new manager? Mind you, at least Sannino hasn’t started by dropping him, like most of his predecessors, so maybe the message is finally getting through.

3) What is the point of that enormous car park at the bottom of Occupation Road? On most Saturday afternoons, there are two or three cars parked there and hundreds of empty spaces. Why can’t it be used for matchday parking?

4) What’s happened to poor Ross Jenkins? As far as I can tell, he’s still employed by the club (his contract runs out at the end of the season, according to wfc.net), but he hasn’t got a squad number. Does he still train with the other players, even though he apparently has no hope of getting a game (even in the friendlies they organise for the reserves), or is he left to do laps of the training ground on his own, like a kid who’s annoyed his PE teacher?

I understand that Zola didn’t rate him, but he looked a decent enough player under the previous regimes, so I don’t understand what he’s done to deserve being sent to Coventry.

5) Will Watford ever again have a manager who manages to stay in the job for three full years? Given the way football is going, you could ask the question about pretty much any club, but since Boothroyd (who managed three and half years), we’ve had a succession of one-season managers, and I don’t like that – I prefer stability and certainty.

Of course, in Pozzoworld the stability comes from the regime as a whole, not the head coach, or so we’re told. And from what I’ve read (particularly in the excellent chapter on the subject in Tales From The Vicarage Volume II, of which more soon), they’re prone to changing head coaches at frequent intervals. I’m not expecting Sannino to rival Arsène Wenger for longevity, put it that way. But I’d love to be proved wrong.