Glory days

With no new Watford games for us to watch for a while, it was nice of the BBC to show highlights of an old one last weekend: our 1987 FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal at Highbury. It’s still available on iPlayer if you haven’t seen it yet, and I heartily recommend it – not least for the lengthy opening montage tracing the Hornets’ rise under GT, cleverly soundtracked by Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ (“I just know that something good is going to happen,” indeed).

For those of us who were there, jammed into the open terracing at the Clock End, it was a memorable day. Watching it again 33 years later, there were a few things that immediately struck me:

• The shorts – good lord, how did they manage to run around in such short, tight shorts? The contrast with today, when some players’ shorts come down almost to their knees (and with tights under that on cold days), is stark.
• The pitch – I don’t know if it had been a particularly wet winter, but the Highbury pitch is in a dreadful state, with both goalmouths and the centre circle mainly consisting of sand. There are a couple of occasions when Gary Porter gallops forward on the break, and you can see him struggling to control the ball as it bobbles around on the uneven surface. The sides of the pitch, on the other hand, are fully grassed…
• The wingers – … which is fortunate, because Watford’s game plan is clearly built around getting down the wing and pinging crosses into the penalty area. John Barnes is on the left, while – with Nigel Callaghan having been sold to Derby the previous month – David Bardsley is on the right. I’d forgotten just how good he was, fast and skilful, and it was his crosses that led to both Watford’s first two goals. As for Barnesy, there’s one glorious moment when he tricks his way past Viv Anderson, leaving him flat on his backside, that has commentator John Motson purring: “That was a perfect piece of wing play.”
• The Arsenal goal – we (rightly) remember the great players for their best qualities, but the Arsenal goal is proof that even the best can get it disastrously wrong. John McClelland tries to shepherd the ball back to Tony Coton, but when he doesn’t come for it quickly enough, Macca belatedly tries to clear it, succeeding only in knocking it to Ian Allinson, who pokes it in the net. It’s one of those goals that would have been the subject of endless recriminations if the result had been different.
• Mark Falco – there are some players who are completely unmemorable, and for me, Falco is one of them. He only spent this one season at Watford, but he played 33 times and scored 14 goals, and I must have seen a fair few of them (having graduated the previous summer, I had become a regular again after four years of patchy attendance), yet I can’t remember a single thing about him. And in this game, he barely figures in the highlights.

My abiding memory of the game is of course that decisive third goal. Horror as the Arsenal players’ arms all go up, claiming a penalty, and the linesman flags; confusion as Watford play on, Porter hoiking the ball out to Luther Blissett; excitement as Luther steams towards us, past Arsenal defenders still expecting play to be stopped; despair as John Lukic gets a hand to his shot; ecstasy as Luther stabs in the rebound; tension as the Arsenal players surround the referee, demanding it be disallowed; and then overwhelming joy as the ref finally raises his arm to signal the goal.

It was a minute’s play that summed up the crazy exhilaration of being a football fan, and ultimately made the game a classic. It’s sometimes referred to as an upset, but it wasn’t really; yes, Arsenal were top of the table at the time (though they faded badly to end the season fourth, 16 points behind champions Everton), but Watford were a solid mid-table team and finished ninth – still the second-highest league placing in the club’s history.

What we couldn’t know at the time was that this would be the last great day of the Graham Taylor era (until he came back a decade later, but that’s another story). There’s a hint of it in Motty’s comment over the warm-up that Barnes’s contract is nearly up and Liverpool have made a bid (though Arsenal were apparently also interested – I wonder how that would have worked out?). The semi-final saw the Hornets thrashed 4-1 by Spurs with Gary Plumley in goal, and even though it was only the third time we’d reached that stage of the Cup, we didn’t sell all our allocation of tickets. GT noticed, and historians suggest it was a significant factor in his decision that he’d taken the club as far as he could. He left for Aston Villa a few days after the season ended, Barnes went to Anfield, and Dave Bassett duly arrived to ruin everything.

But thanks to the BBC, we can relive the last of the good times. I can’t stop watching. “Blissett’s away for Watford – controversy here looming. He’s onside, is Blissett – and Lukic has saved. Blissett again – a goal!”

Glory days.

Red letter days

It takes a lot to persuade me to put fingers to keyboard these days (to be honest, I still haven’t got over the shame induced by my idiotically complacent prediction of how this season was going to pan out), but I couldn’t let the incredible 3-0 win against Liverpool pass without comment.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, it was a victory against the Reds that started me on a Watford-supporting career that will reach the half-century mark later this year. I wasn’t at the 1-0 win in the FA Cup quarter-final in February 1970, but reading about it in the papers afterwards alerted the seven-year-old me to the fact that there was a professional football team just up the road, and my first visit followed early the following season.

There haven’t been many wins over Liverpool since then, but they’ve almost all been memorable ones. There was the 2-1 victory in the final game of 1982-83 that cemented second place in the First Division; the scrambled Tommy Mooney goal at Anfield in August 1999 to secure one of what turned out to be only six wins in our first visit to the Premier League; and the 3-0 victory in December 2015, with two goals by Odion Ighalo, that went a long way towards convincing the sceptics that this time, our stay in the top flight would last more than one season.

As Troy rightly pointed out after Saturday’s game, beating Liverpool won’t count for much if we get relegated. While the media have now unanimously decided that we will stay up (how could such a brilliant team not gather the necessary number of points in the remaining games?), I doubt I’m the only Hornets fan who isn’t quite so sanguine.

Unusually, we’ve got a decent record against the top teams this season (wins against Liverpool and Man U, draws against Arsenal and against Spurs, twice), but we’ve lost to all our relegation rivals apart from Bournemouth and Norwich. You can look at the fixture list and pinpoint the four games we ‘should’ win to secure our status: Southampton, Norwich and Newcastle at home, plus either Palace or West Ham away, is the most obvious escape route. But on the evidence of this season, we’re just as likely to drop points in some of those and beat Chelsea or Arsenal away.

That unpredictability is, ultimately, what we prize about football. There were plenty of Watford fans who gave Saturday’s game a miss, unwilling to put up with the disruption of a late kick-off time on a chilly day to watch what would inevitably be a dispiriting drubbing by the best team in the world. And besides, it was live on the telly. I’m just glad I wasn’t one of them.