A crucial draw

You could argue (and I’m about to try) that tomorrow is the most important day of Watford’s season. If everything goes well at about 7.45pm, the team could be on the way to fulfilling its undoubted potential. If not (and lord knows we’ve had some disappointments in recent years), then 2018-19 will probably go down as the latest in a series of seasons that promised much but ultimately failed to deliver.

I’m talking, of course, about the FA Cup 3rd Round draw which takes place tomorrow evening. Thanks to our now traditional autumn slump, the chances of the Hornets ‘doing a Burnley’ and finishing as the best of the teams outside the so-called Big Six are looking distinctly remote. For all the talent in the squad, we seem to have lost the knack of putting the ball in the back of the net on a consistent basis (or, indeed, at all), and that is unfortunately a primary requirement for teams that aspire to finish high up the table.

No, I fear we’re destined for yet another season where we end up somewhere between 10th and 16th in the Premier League table. That wouldn’t necessarily represent failure, far from it – just a bit of an anticlimax after our excellent start.

The FA Cup, therefore, represents our only chance of glory. It’s a realistic one, too. We may not be playing consistently at the moment, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t win six one-off games between January and May. Do that and Troy will be lifting the cup at Wembley while we try to work out whether Brexit means we need visas for away ties in the Europa League. And after all, as a top-half Premier League team, we really should be aiming at the 5th Round (ie the last 16) as a minimum requirement; all but nine of the teams left in the competition are, statistically, worse than Watford.

But for all this to happen, we need the footballing gods to be kind. Ideally,we will draw the lowest-ranked team in each round, at home. Meanwhile the Big Six knock will each other out, or get punished for their hubris when they field third-string teams because they’re saving their star players for the all-important battle for fourth place.

And I reckon those gods owe us one. Since the turn of the century, we’ve drawn a Premier League team in the 3rd Round roughly every other year – and usually strong ones, too: Arsenal in 2002, Chelsea in 2004, 2010 and 2015, Manchester City in 2013. Where we have been given a kinder draw and gone through, we’ve invariably come up against one of the big boys sooner rather than later, and promptly lost.

Indeed, looking at our FA Cup record on Trevor Jones’s excellent site, it strikes me that the win over Arsenal in the 2016 quarter-final is the only time we’ve beaten one of the top teams in the competition this century. Our other two runs to the semis were achieved by beating a mixture of lower-division teams and middling-to-poor Premier League ones. In 2003 (when we were in the Championship) it was Macclesfield, West Brom, Sunderland and Burnley; in 2007 (a Premier League relegation season) we beat Stockport, Ipswich, West Ham and Plymouth.

I’d certainly take either of those runs again this season, given the chance. But really, we just want to be drawn against someone we can be confident of beating, even if Javi decides to rest the entire first team, as he will almost certainly do. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed, and I suggest you do the same. Our season could depend on it.