It’s funny how quickly I’ve forgotten about the Premier League.
This thought occurred to me one Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago, when I realised that it was the end of the weekend and I only knew a handful of the Premier League scores.
That wouldn’t have happened last season. For the past five years, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say my weekends during the football season were structured around the Premier League, I was certainly aware of what was going on most of the time. As well as attending all of Watford’s home games and half a dozen away fixtures each season, I watched bits and pieces of various PL matches most weekends. Some of them had a direct bearing on our league position, others featured a team we were due to play in the near future. More generally, as a fan of an established PL team, it felt natural to take an interest in the division as a whole – the players, the coaches, the formations, the lot.
Even I’m a bit surprised how little of that interest has survived Watford’s relegation. I suspect much of it is down to the current circumstances – all professional football now has the whiff of a training session about it, however cleverly the broadcasters overlay fake crowd noises. That makes it that much harder to care about what’s going on when you haven’t got any skin in the game, even if that game involves the champions shipping seven goals against a team who only got one more point than Watford last season.
Probably for the same reason, I haven’t replaced my interest in the PL with an in-depth appreciation of the Championship. I’ve watched most of Watford’s games on Sky Sports or Hornets Hive, wishing I could be there, but I’m not much interested in the opposition. There’s been a lot of churn since we were last in this division, and most teams are full of players I’ve never heard of. Maybe that will change as the season progresses; if we build on our steady start and make a concerted push for promotion, I dare say I’ll be tuning into Sky Sports on a Friday night in the hope of watching our rivals drop points.
In the meantime, most of my non-Watford interest in football these days is being channelled into non-league football, where you can actually go and watch proper competitive matches. (Well, not this month, but hopefully normal service will resume in December.) Since the trip to Leatherhead I wrote about last time, I’ve made a couple of visits to the rather less leafy surrounds of King George Field in Tolworth, just off the A3, to watch Corinthian-Casuals in cup action. First up was an FA Cup qualifying tie against Dulwich Hamlet which ended 2-2; that meant a penalty shootout, carried out at the goal right in front of where we standing, which the visitors won. A few weeks later I went to an FA Trophy tie against Hendon, an end-to-end thriller where Casuals triumphed 5-4.
Both games were lots of fun, and apart from a few telltale signs of pandemic compliance (I particularly liked the carefully marked-out 2m intervals on the ground in front of the burger van, snaking around the forecourt like something you’d see in an infant school playground), it felt pretty much like a normal football-watching experience. And oddly enough, I didn’t feel any need to check on how Burnley or Brighton were getting on.
