Yes, but...

I mentioned in my last post that I’d been interviewed outside the ground before the FA Cup quarter-final for the Dream Team website, and the results were published during the week. You can read the article here and watch the video on their Twitter feed @dreamteamfc.

As a journalist, it’s always interesting to be on the other end of the microphone. The journalist, Sam, asked me a series of questions about Watford’s Premier League adventure to date, covering each of the head coaches but focusing particularly on Javi Gracia and his similarities to a certain famous former Watford manager whose statue I happened to be standing next to at the time. Sure enough, the only quotes of mine they used were about how great Javi is and how he has the human touch, just like GT did.

Now I can’t speak for the other two people interviewed for the piece (Andy Lewers of The Hornets’ Nest and Mike Parkin of From The Rookery End), but I couldn’t help feeling that this rather misrepresented what I tried to get across during the interview. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not that bothered – I know how these things work, and at the end of the day I was just blethering on about a football team. But it is annoying that, even when the mainstream media (Dream Team is an offshoot of The Sun, so I think they count) are being complimentary about Watford, then still don’t get us.

As the interview proceeded, it became clear from the way Sam pressed me on certain questions that there were two things they wanted me to say: (1) that Javi’s success meant that the ‘managerial merry-go-round’ at Vicarage Road has hopefully stopped, to be replaced by a period of long-overdue stability; and (2) that he is a modern version of GT. To both of which assertions my answer amounted to “Yes, but...”

On the first point, I certainly agreed that Javi is a highly talented coach, the best we’ve had since we arrived in the Premier League. But I pointed out that a lot of his success can be attributed to the structures Scott Duxbury and co. have put in place around him, which enable him to do his job to the best of his ability. I mentioned, for example, that Mazzarri and Silva were both hampered by the long injury lists during their time in charge, and that the club had addressed this by hiring a new Head of Injury Prevention & Rehabilitation, who has done his job so well that Javi had a completely fit squad to pick from for the Palace game.

I also pointed out that these structures (and the meticulous planning that underlies them) meant that if Javi leaves the club tomorrow, the club will almost certainly have a new head coach in place within days who will have a framework around him that will allow him to take over with minimum fuss. To talk of a managerial merry-go-round is to fundamentally misunderstand the Pozzo way of running a club, where the head coach isn’t the be-all and end-all and stability comes instead from that carefully constructed framework.

That’s also where the comparisons with GT are misguided. Yes, Javi does appear to be a likeable, warm, humane and thoughtful person, as GT was, and he’s certainly easier for the fans to relate to than either Mazzarri or Silva. But GT was a force of nature who (backed by Elton’s money) transformed our football club from top to bottom, leading Watford up the divisions not once, but twice. The days when the manager of a club was the beating heart of it are long gone, though. Even if Javi stays at Watford for 10 years (which is highly unlikely), he’ll still be just a cog in the Pozzos’ machine, albeit a very important one.

But like I say, most of the football media still don’t understand this. Maybe they don’t want to understand, since the way they talk about football is still based on the idea that everything good or bad that happens to a club is down to the manager. And maybe it is, in some places – but not at Watford.

It only occurred to me after the interview (as the best ideas often do) that there’s a very simple way to explain all this with reference to the Premier League club we’re most often compared with. When Eddie Howe leaves Bournemouth, it’s highly likely that they’ll be screwed: when Javi Gracia leaves Watford, it’s highly likely that we’ll simply carry on as before.

Quarter masters

The quarter-finals of the FA Cup have provided some of the most memorable moments of my Watford-supporting life. Indeed, it was the TV and press coverage of the unprecedented 1-0 victory over Liverpool in the 1970 quarter-final (the first in the club’s history) that first made me, aged eight, aware that there was a local football club I could actually go and watch in person. The rest, as they say, is history.

There have been six further quarter-finals since then, and I’ve been present at all but one (Plymouth in 2007 – family commitments). I was in the away end at St Andrews when John Barnes curled the first goal past a helpless Tony Coton in 1984. I watched with growing glee as Luther Blissett sprinted towards the Hornets fans jammed into the Clock End at Highbury in 1987 while the Arsenal defence stranded up the other end of the pitch belatedly realised that the referee wasn’t going to blow his whistle, and went crazy when Luther slotted the ball into the net (albeit at the second attempt) to make it 3-1. I was at Arsenal’s shiny new ground in 2016 when Adlène Guedioura scored his piledriver. And let’s not forget Stephen Glass’s gorgeous free kick against Burnley in 2003, as covered extensively in yesterday’s programme.

Brilliant goals and dramatic finishes have been the defining feature of Watford’s games at this stage of the competition, then. The game against Palace didn’t really have either of those, to be honest. True, the second goal was a very good one, and it was great to see Roberto Pereyra providing the decisive pass, after being a rather peripheral figure over the past couple of months. But one thing I’ve become increasingly aware of this season is that the majority of Premier League teams are so evenly matched, and so aware of what each other are going to do, that games tend towards the stalemate, decided either by a moment of extra quality or a defensive error. We witnessed both yesterday, and I’m just thankful that the extra quality came from players in yellow and black.

I was interviewed before the game by a couple of guys from the Dream Team website, who asked me about Watford’s Premier League years and where the club goes from here. I said I wanted us to win trophies, which realistically means domestic cups, and to qualify for Europe.

I think I concluded with something like this: “Some fans may turn up their noses at the Europa League, but I love the idea that I might be spending the autumn looking up the times of flights to obscure Eastern European cities.” Those of us who were too young and impoverished to travel to Kaiserslautern, Sofia and Prague in 1983 (I was a student, barely able to afford the coach fare home from college, never mind flights to the continent) have been waiting a long time for a second bite of the cherry. Now we’re just two wins away.