We’re going to Wem-ber-ley – again

I’m sure there are plenty of football fans – particularly those who follow unfashionable clubs in the provinces – for whom a trip to Wembley Stadium is a rare treat, maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime event. But for those of us who grew up less than 10 miles away, it’s really not that special.

My dad took me to Wembley for the first time, to watch England play East Germany in 1970. England won 3-1, but I mainly remember the night for the hour or more it took to get out of the car park afterwards. I honestly can’t recall if Dad took me to any more internationals, but I’m pretty sure that if he did, we didn’t drive .

After that, there were a couple of England schoolboy internationals in the early 70s. Presumably the FA offered bulk deals to schools; at any rate, Ashfield organised cheap class trips. Rediscovering the programmes years later, I found that I’d unwittingly had my first sight of a certain John Wilfred Rostron, as he was then listed.

I went to a few more full internationals over the next decade, culminating in Luther’s glorious full international debut against Luxembourg in 1982, when he scored a hat trick and could have had at least as many again. Then, two years later, I finally got to see Watford play at Wembley in the FA Cup Final – and it was one of the most anticlimactic days of my football-watching life.

For the rest of the 80s, I was more often at Wembley for rock concerts than football; U2, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones. (I missed Live Aid, though; I was on a year abroad, studying in Hamburg, where I watched the proceedings on TV.) I did go to the Football League v the Rest of the World match in 1987, where Hornets centre-back John McClelland had to contend with Maradona, Platini and Lineker and still kept a clean sheet, the League winning 3-0.

In the 90s there were more concerts, and also a rugby union international, for a change. While the Millennium Stadium was being rebuilt, Wales played their home Five Nations (as it then was) matches at Wembley. My friend Andy came up from Cardiff and we watched the Welsh get roundly thrashed by a skilful France team.

Towards the end of the decade, I was working for a running magazine, which involved reviewing local events. You did this by running in them, so one Sunday morning I found myself lining up on the running track inside Wembley Stadium for the inaugural Wembley 10K. After puffing round the streets for an hour, the finish on the same track at least allowed me to indulge in some Olympian fantasies, even if I was struggling to finish in the top 500.

And then there was the Play-Off Final against Bolton in 1999, one of my most emotional footballing memories – for the result and performance, of course, but also because my father had died two days earlier. That year, and again in 2000, I also went to the FA Trophy Final to watch Kingstonian, who my friend Stuart supported. In the first one, they beat a little team no one had heard of called Forest Green Rovers.

Coming into the present century, I can say that I was present at the first concert held in the rebuilt Wembley. Okay, it starred George Michael, who wouldn’t have been my choice, but I was married by then. There have been more Springsteen concerts, too, though it’s really not the best place to see him. And more recently, of course, I’ve doubled my tally of Watford games at the home of football with those two dismal defeats against Crystal Palace, first in the Play-Off Final and then in the FA Cup semi-final.

So when I rock up for the Spurs game tomorrow evening, you’ll excuse me if I don’t look too impressed. I’ll be a lot more impressed if we come away with three points, mind you.

A game of frustration

Older readers may remember playing Frustration as a child. It was a fairly basic board game where you rolled a die and moved your pieces around a circuit; the first player to get all their pieces home was the winner. The twist was that, if another player landed on a spot that one of your pieces was occupying, yours got sent all the way back to the start, even if you were only one place from home. Hence the name of the game.

It’s as apt a metaphor as I can think of for Watford’s season, a season in which, again and again, a promising beginning has been undone and we’ve ended up back at square one. The games where we’ve played well, taken the lead and then ended up drawing or losing. The players who’ve lit up the pitch for a handful of matches and then picked up an injury that kept them out for months on end. And, of course, the head coach who looked like he might be the one to take Watford to the next level, only to have his head turned by a rival club and lose focus.

Yesterday’s opponents provided a timely reminder of how things could have been, like the ‘here’s what you could have won’ reveal on a TV gameshow. In a parallel universe, we could have been where Burnley are, sitting in 7th place, dreaming of winning a place in Europe.

Imagine for a moment that, throughout the season, we’d been able to field Chalobah, Cleverley and Doucouré in the centre of midfield, in front of a defence anchored by the strength and experience of Kaboul and Cathcart. Imagine we’d had access to the speed of Femenía and the skill of Hughes and Pereyra in every game. Imagine (and admittedly, this is a bit more of a stretch) that we’d managed to find a way to make a pairing of Deeney and Gray work up front. I know ‘what if’ is one of the most pointless phrases in the lexicon, but you can’t help wondering, can you?

The fact that, despite all these frustrations – all the leads chucked away and the absurdly lengthy absences through injury – we’re still sitting fairly comfortably in mid-table,almost makes it worse. So near, and yet so far.

Hopefully we’ll pick up a few more points before the season ends (although you can look at our remaining games and make a plausible case for us losing every one, given the form and/or desperation of the opposition), and then regroup in the summer, ready for the season we should have had this time round. But of course, somehow it never works out that way.