Albert McClenaghan’s Throw-In (and other stories)

Is it sad to care about stats?

2012-01-05T23:21:00.000Z

One of the odder sights during last Saturday’s game against Doncaster was that of Lloyd Doyley warming up on the touchline, instead of occupying his usual spot at right-back. He was a regular on the subs’ bench early in his career, of course, but for the past few seasons he’s been a fixture in the first team – one of the first names inked in on the team sheet, I’ve always assumed.

I’m sad for Lloyd (my favourite Watford player, as regular readers will know) that he’s lost his place purely because he had the misfortune to get injured – but also, I have to admit, because it leaves him marooned on 349 appearances, one short of a significant landmark.

I’m one of those people who spends half-times at Vicarage Road scanning the page in the programme that shows the players’ all-time stats. (Come to think of it, maybe I’m the only one.) I’m no statistician, but I am fascinated by statistical landmarks. A player who has made 100 first-team appearances is somehow infinitely superior to one who has made 99, in my eyes.

(There is a logical justification for all this, in that long-serving players help to strengthen the bond between the team and the fans. A team that has at least three or four players with over 100 appearances each to their name has a degree of stability and continuity that I value, whereas I instinctively distrust a first eleven where most of the players have an appearance figure that’s lower than their age.)

In Lloyd’s case, I’ve been eagerly tracking his progress up the all-time appearance list since he entered the top 20 a year or so ago. He’s currently 12th, having just overtaken Stewart Scullion. Assuming he continued in his rightful position, he was due to break into the top 10 next season, and after that, who knows? After all, he’s only 28, and plenty of defenders go on playing at a high level into their mid-30s.

For the time being, though, his statistical progression is on hold, and I find that obscurely distressing. Still, good luck to Lee Hodson, who is a fine young player (though not as good a defender as Lloyd) and deserves a chance. And with 77 starts to his name, he could make it to a century early next season. Maybe he’ll eventually join fellow right-backs Nigel Gibbs, Duncan Welbourne and Lloyd himself in the all-time top 20…

Addendum, 9/1/12:
I needn’t have worried: 350 it is, then. Not Lloyd’s finest game, but let’s be charitable and put it down to rustiness after his injury.

A pleasant change

2011-12-04T20:24:00.001Z

Bradford City at home in the 3rd Round of the FA Cup? That will do me just fine.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve drawn a series of Premiership teams in the 3rd Round, most of them from London: since 1999 we’ve gone out at the first time of asking to Tottenham, Arsenal, Everton, Fulham, Bolton and Chelsea (twice). The board may have been grateful for the gate money, but the logic doesn’t hold. Surely the whole point of a cup competition is that the further you progress, the more money you make?

On the occasions when we’ve been presented with a fairly straightforward 3rd Round draw, it’s been a lot more fun. A 2-0 away win at Macclesfield in 2003 was the start of a run that led us all the way to the semis, as was a 4-1 home defeat of Stockport in 2007. Both were both more enjoyable, and more profitable, than losing in the 3rd Round to a Premiership club that can’t even be bothered to play their best team in the early rounds, as so often happens.

So bring on Bradford, 22nd in League Two at the time of writing, and surely beatable by a Watford team that slowly seems to be finding its feet. And after that, let’s have another easy home draw in the 4th Round, and so on for as long as possible. Because that’s the other thing about cup runs: once the FA Cup is over for another year, no one remembers who you beat and by what score, only what round you reached. That’s the only figure that matters.

‘The 100 Greatest Watford Wins’ by Lionel Birnie

2011-11-27T23:34:00.000Z

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of list books. Whether it deals in fiction or fact, I like a book that tells a story – a book you’re reluctant to put down because you’re desperate to find out what happens next. Books that list things, however informatively or amusingly, tend to get kept by the loo in my house.

However, The 100 Greatest Watford Wins is a superior example of the genre. That’s because Lionel Birnie has avoided the temptation to cut corners. It would have been easy to fill the book with match reports recycled from newspapers, topped up with personal reminiscences and a bit of empty rhetoric. Instead, as in last year’s Enjoy The Game, Lionel has clearly spent a great deal of time interviewing primary sources – the players and managers who were involved in the matches he features.

From Tom Walley talking about key games in the late 1960s to Lloyd Doyley on his debut goal a couple of years ago, the contributions are uniformly entertaining and enlightening. To pick just one example, Ray Lewington’s detailed explanation of the financial constraints he had to work under makes the cup runs he masterminded even more remarkable in retrospect than they were at the time.

The other main strength of the book is the variety of treatment afforded to the 100 games. Some get one page, others five or six, depending on how much there is to say about them. A wide range of statistics help to put the games in the context of the season when they occurred, and of Watford’s overall history. There are league tables, details of cup runs, lists of bests and worsts and lots more, often with accompanying commentary.

Then there are panels on relevant issues, like the sad story of Lewington’s sacking, or the more amusing one about the letter writer to the Watford Observer in the summer of 1998 who complained vociferously about the signing of “a couple of Carlisle rejects”. The pictorial treatments also vary, from action shots to post-match celebrations and programme covers. Even the headlines that introduce each match are in a range of different typefaces.

A book like this isn’t going to find much of an audience beyond the Hornets faithful, but for that audience it is pretty much perfect. If it has a fault it is that, as with most lists of this kind, there is an inbuilt bias towards the recent past. Given that Lionel describes the book in the introduction as featuring “Watford’s finest post-war victories”, I can’t help wondering whether there really wasn’t a single game between 1945 and 1960 that merited inclusion. Last season’s 6-1 win at Millwall is included, presumably in the category of “a right hammering that came out of the blue and lifted everyone’s spirits”, but there must have been equivalent games in the 50s. A quick flick through Trefor Jones’s Watford Season By Season reveals that we had two 6-1 wins in 1953/54 alone, and a 7-1 the following season.

But now I’m being churlish. Much of the pleasure of this book comes from the memories it stirs up, and there aren’t many Watford fans left who can remember the 50s. I was at six of the top 10 games in Lionel’s list, and 12 of the top 20, and he evokes them all beautifully.

Noise annoys

2011-11-20T23:27:00.001Z

The ins and outs of yesterday’s win against Portsmouth are already being dissected in other forums, but one thing no one has mentioned yet is the extremes of noise we witnessed at the Vic yesterday.

At one extreme, the deafening volume of the new tannoy in the Rookery drowned out all attempts at pre-match chat with my neighbours. It was like being in one of those nightclubs where the music is so loud that conversation is reduced to miming and sign language.

Sure, it’s nice to have some proof that Mr Bassini is actually spending some of his money on the club. At the same time, as the bloke next to me said (this was after the match had started and the ringing in our eardrums had stopped), if you’d made a list at the start of the season of all the things at Vicarage Road that needed money spending on them, the tannoy would barely have scraped into the top ten.

Maybe the entire home end had been stunned by the volume of the pre-match entertainment, because once the game started, there was a depressing lack of any kind of singing, or even shouting, from the Hornets fans. Even a second-minute goal barely roused us from our collective torpor. I know we’re not renowned as one of the more passionate sets of fans in the Championship, but this was ridiculous.

I thought the announcement of the formation of the Yellow Order at the start of the season might go some way towards improving the situation, but since they moved to the bottom left-hand corner of the Rookery, it’s actually got worse. They seem to throw in the towel the minute they realise they’re outnumbered: “Look, lads, they’ve got a bloke with a bell, and someone who can play the trumpet out of tune for 90 minutes. We can’t compete with that. Maybe if we win a corner in the second half, we can have a go at ‘Come on you ’orns’…”

The thing is, I love singing, and will happily join in pretty much anything if it spreads to my part of the stand (near the middle, about halfway up). But in too many matches this season, the Rookery has sat in silence while the away end sings and chants throughout the match. Frankly, it’s getting embarrassing.

Colin who?

2011-11-12T12:23:00.001Z

One of the pleasures of reading Lionel Birnie’s excellent book The 100 Greatest Watford Wins, as I am at the moment, is looking at the team line-ups for each game and picturing that team in action.

Over the past 40-odd years I’ve watched hundreds of players representing the club, and in most cases where they played more than a handful of games, I can conjure up some kind of mental image of them. Sometimes it’s their appearance – a hairstyle or moustache, say – that I recall, sometimes a facial expression, sometimes just the way they ran, or jumped, or celebrated a goal. Sometimes it’s just their sheer uselessness that makes them stick in the memory. (Yes, Jamie Moralee, I am looking at you.)

But there are a few who remain resolutely anonymous, no matter how hard I stare at their name in a team line-up. Here are five of them, in order of the period when their Watford career took place:

1) Tony Geidmintis (60 games + 1 substitute appearance, 1976-78)
These were key years in my Watford supporting story, as the misery of successive relegations gave way to the joy of the GT era. I can picture most of the players from this period as clearly as if they were in the room with me now – Pollard, Downes, Mayes, Mercer, Rankin, Pritchett, Bolton, Jenkins… – but I have no memories of Tony Geidmintis. A right-back, according to Trefor Jones’s The Watford Football Club Illustrated Who’s Who; maybe anyone who had to step into Duncan Welbourne’s shoes was destined to pale by comparison.

2) Joe McLaughlin (53 + 0, 1990-92)

I know he was a centre-back and that we signed him from Chelsea, but his Watford career seems to have passed me by. I’m astounded to learn from Trefor Jones that he was actually the club captain in 1991/2.

3) Gerard Lavin (141 + 6, 1992-95)

Another right-back, and in this case it may be the fact that he apparently took Nigel Gibbs’s place during his long period out with injury that has induced some kind of amnesia. I’m looking at his picture now in Trefor’s book and it stirs no memories whatsoever. Presumably he must have something about him to play nearly 150 games, but I’m damned if I can remember a single thing he ever did.

4) Paul Okon (14 + 1, 2002)

Okay, maybe it’s stretching a point to call 15 games a ‘career’ at Watford, but Okon really was the epitome of an anonymous player. I remember watching games when he was playing and wondering where he was on the pitch and what he was doing. You could come away from a match and rack your brain for hours trying to remember a single thing he’d done in the 90 minutes. The most pointless of Vialli’s many pointless signings.

5) Jermaine Darlington (34 + 1, 2004-05)

It’s not that long ago, but beyond a vague memory that he played on the wing, his year at Watford seems to have vanished from my memory, even though I must have seen around half of those 34 games. The most interesting thing about him was the fact that he shared his surname with another football club. Sadly, he never played for Darlington.

Books do furnish a room

2011-10-26T22:48:00.000+01:00

A conversation with Lionel Birnie on Twitter today reminded me that I meant to finish off my inventory of the Watford-related items in my home with a list of the relevant section of my bookshelf. So here it is, in no particular order:

Drawn Game – Terry Challis
A selection from 25 years of weekly cartoons in the Watford Observer. The sports pages still don’t seem the same without them.

The Official Centenary History of Watford FC – Oliver Phillips
A magisterial (and often moving) account of the club’s history. I’m shocked to realise that it’s now 20 years since this came out. High time for an update.

Four Seasons – Lionel Birnie & Alan Cozzi
Subtitled ‘The remarkable story of Watford Football Club from 1997 to 2001’. In hindsight, maybe that should have read ‘Where did all the money go?’

You Are My Watford – various
A compilation of memories in aid of WST. Includes an account of the incident that gave this blog its name.

The Golden Boys – Oliver Phillips
Another lovingly crafted and beautifully produced official work from Oli. It’s a shame the club doesn’t commission books like this any more.

Watford: A Tale Of The Unexpected – Geoff Sweet & Graham Burton
The story of the 1982-83 season – much of which I missed by virtue of it being my first year at university.

Watford FC On This Day – Matt Rowson
On this day in 1889, Watford Rovers beat Buckinghamshire side Schorne College 2-1 in an FA Cup 2nd Qualifying Round tie. I love the fact that I can find that out from a book.

Enjoy The Game – Lionel Birnie
A great tale, superbly told. I refer you to my review.

Watford Season By Season – Trefor Jones
One of the standard works of reference for any Watford fan. Only goes up to the end of the 1997/98 season, though, so another that could do with an update…

The Watford FC Illustrated Who’s Who – Trefor Jones
… As could this, the other standard reference book, published in 1996. In an ideal world, the club would fund the publication of updated editions at regular intervals – say, every 10 years.

Team Shirts To Ticket Stubs – Nick Davidson
A real gem to finish with; a great idea, lovingly realised.

Although they’re not strictly books about Watford FC itself, honourable mentions also go to Nick Corble’s novel Golden Daze, and to Dave Hill’s thought-provoking biography of John Barnes, Out Of His Skin. As far as I know, it’s still the only biography of a player who is mainly associated with the Hornets. (All right, I know Liverpool have a claim too, but we had him first.)

As to what’s missing, the obvious gap in the market is for a biography of Graham Taylor, which would make for fascinating reading. Or maybe an autobiography, which would be even better – but maybe we’d better let GT concentrate on running the club for the time being.

And the winner is…

2011-09-18T13:38:00.000+01:00

Having just entered the competition on Lionel Birnie’s website to choose my top 10 post-war Watford wins, it seemed like a good idea to try to narrow it down to a personal top five:

5) Watford 1 Liverpool 0, FA Cup 6th Round, 21/2/70
The game that effectively turned me into a Watford fan. Up to that point, I vaguely supported Spurs, simply because my best friend did. (I should point out that I was only seven at the time.) I wasn’t even aware that there was a team in my local area until I saw the front-page story in the Watford Observer about the forthcoming FA Cup quarter-final against Liverpool. Dad wouldn’t take me, but once Watford had won, I was hooked enough to be upset when we got thrashed by Chelsea in the semis. I made my first visit to Vicarage Road the next season, and that was that.

4) Manchester United 1 Watford 2, League Cup 3rd Round, 4/10/78
Another seminal cup tie that I didn’t attend. But I managed to avoid hearing the score (it was much easier in those days) so that I could watch the highlights on Sportsnight without knowing the result. I can still remember my elation as Luther scored the two goals that launched him as a true Hornet hero, and the tension as I prayed that we could hold on. We did, and the feeling that Graham Taylor was creating something really special was starting to grow.

3) Watford 8 Sunderland 0, 1st Division, 25/9/82
This result (still astonishing nearly 30 years later) had much the same effect. Watford had started their first season in the top flight well, with four wins out of six, but this score made the country sit up and take notice. With four goals for Luther, two for Ross and two for Cally, it serves as the examplar of every demolition of unsuspecting opponents GT’s team unleashed in those glorious years. It was also the last game I went to before leaving for university – not a bad send-off.

2) Watford 2 Bolton Wanderers 0, 1st Division Play-off Final, 31/5/99
I’ve written about the personal significance of this game elsewhere, so let’s just celebrate the achievement of Aidy Boothroyd’s team in building a late run to the play-offs that culminated in what was actually a fairly comfortable win over a Bolton team that never really turned up. Nicky Wright’s overhead kick is the best goal I can remember a Watford player scoring in a high-pressure game, while Allan Smart’s second relieved that pressure in the most glorious, cathartic way imaginable.

1) Watford 7 Southampton 1, League Cup 2nd Round, 2nd Leg, 2/9/80
Again, I’ve already noted this as my most memorable game, all the more so for coming a week after we’d succumbed 4-0 in the away leg. If I ever forge a career as a motivation speaker (which is highly unlikely, frankly), I will use this tie as a prime example of the importance of not accepting the inevitability of failure when things go against you initially. And yet the same team lost heavily again in the 5th Round of the League Cup that season, 5-0 in a replay at Coventry (who were, admittedly, a 1st Division club at the time), as if to remind us that they were only human after all.

A house full of hornets

2011-09-04T17:26:00.000+01:00

The guys from From The Rookery End are currently on a mission to identify 100 objects that define Watford FC. Their quest reminded me that I’ve been meaning to compile an inventory of all the Watford-related objects in my house – so here it is, room by room.

Kitchen
4 coffee mugs

A white one mug with yellow stripes, with the old ‘angry hornet’ logo on one side. Early 70s?
A black one, originally with gold and red trim, probably from the 80s. The gold has all washed off
A yellow 1992-92 Official Centenary mug listing that season’s fixtures in red and black lettering. In this case, it’s the red that has faded to near invisibility
A mug depicting Watford strips through the ages, which my Mum bought me last Christmas from a stall in Watford Market

1 beer tankard

Bedroom
3 replica shirts

The classic long-sleeved yellow shirt from the early 70s, when I started watching Watford
A yellow home shirt with the CTX logo and a red stripe down the right, from the late 90s
A white away shirt with the Phones4U logo, from a couple of seasons later

These don’t get worn much; I’m not one of those who puts a replica shirt on over their sweater in the dead of winter, so they only get an outing when it is actually warm enough to wear a flimsy short-sleeved shirt. Oh, and none of them has got a name or number on the back.

2 scarves (striped)

2 bobble hats (striped)

1 BSaD 10th anniversary T-shirt

1 pair of football shorts
Red, naturally. Not worn for many years.

1 tie
Black with narrow red and yellow bands. I can’t imagine when I’ll ever wear this.

1 pair of cufflinks
Worn at my wedding.

Study
1 flag
Given out free at a game during Aidy Boothroyd’s reign; his signature adorns the bottom right-hand corner.

1 clock
Shaped like the club badge, complete with moose. Another of Mum’s purchases in the market.

1 plaque
About 4in square, with a reflective surface. One of the oldest items in my collection, and almost certainly the most pointless.

1 ashtray
Also pointless, as I don’t smoke and never have. Another of Mum’s Christmas presents.

1 framed photograph
Depicting Nick Wright’s goal in the play-off final against Bolton, and mounted with my ticket from the game.

1 water bottle
Given away at a home game a few years ago, adorned with the slogan ‘Watford ’til I’m dry’. I actually use this quite often, whenever I go on a long walk.

1 fragment of Vicarage Road terrace
Encased in perspex. Number 436 of a limited edition of 500.

1 key fob

2 videos

The Golden Boys – a compilation of clips of Watford on TV from 1969 to 1992, ie the days when these things were quite rare
… And Finally – the complete play-off final against Bolton from 1999. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually watched this

15 books
I’m not going to list them all here – a topic for a separate post, I think.

12 seasons’ worth of programmes
The other 28 seasons’ worth are in my Mum’s attic.

A pile of fanzines

Sundry badges and pens

Ten years burning down the road

2011-08-14T09:41:00.002+01:00

New season, same old favourite player. Of course it’s Lloyd Doyley. Do you even need to ask?

Yesterday’s performance was classic Lloyd. Solid, athletic defending; a few exciting forays up the wing (an increasingly important part of his game in the last couple of years), one of them ending with an exquisite cross to the far post that Craig Forsyth almost converted; and, yes, a couple of embarrassing slip-ups, though they didn’t do any harm.

Even though Lloyd seems to have been around forever, it still seems amazing that this is his testimonial season, celebrating 10 years as a professional. I think it’s because I associate testimonials with players who are close to retiring, whereas Lloyd could be around for a fair few years yet. He’s still only 28, after all.

While waiting for his second goal, I’ll be spending this season watching his progress up the Watford all-time appearance list. With 336 to his name, he’s now level with Fred Gregory in 15th place. He should overtake Skilly Williams, Frank Smith and Stewart Scullion in the next few weeks, but then it’s a long haul to Charlie Williams in 11th place, with 380. After that, who knows?

The rule of five

2011-08-09T23:05:00.004+01:00

It was good to see two of Watford’s new signings scoring on Saturday. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll turn out to be successful at Vicarage Road (I still remember Johann Gudmundsson scoring twice on his debut – the very definition of a false dawn), but it’s a start.

I have a theory, honed over 40 years of watching football, that the fate of every batch of new signings will cover the whole gamut from success to failure. More precisely, out of every five signings, you can reasonably expect to get one of each of the following:

McLenaghan – dear old Albert stands as the exemplar of the player who is signed and then disappears, rarely (if ever) to be seen again. We’ve had plenty of these over the years, visible only to the keen-eyed, or those who attend reserve matches. Richard Flash springs to mind, mainly because his name promised so much. Then there’s Sietes, Andy Ferrell, Adrian Bakalli… You can’t help wondering what happens: does the manager genuinely expect them to make an impact, only to be gravely disappointed? Or are they just the result of a cheap punt that doesn’t work out?

Mayo – one step up from the McLenaghan is the player who does at least get a run in the first team, only to be discarded again and vanish from view. Like Paul Mayo, who played 27 games at left back before Ray Lewington decided he wasn’t worth playing just for his long throw. A variation on the Mayo is the player whose Watford career is fatally hampered by injury, like David Barnes or ‘Bunion’ Ben Iroha.

Mackay – our former manager epitomises the middle of the range: the player who is neither a huge success nor a complete failure. Someone who plays a fair number of games, but never becomes an automatic choice, either because of age, injury or competition. Someone who divides the fans, in some cases – a Nordin Wooter, say (though I’ll forgive him anything for that goal against Norwich), or a Danny Webber.

Millen – this is what you want all your signings to be, really: a player who arrives at the club and does exactly the job they were intended to do. Like Keith Millen, who quietly racked up nearly 200 appearances in the centre of defence without ever becoming anyone’s favourite player. Marcus Gayle was another, though in his case he ended up doing a very different job from the one we’d signed him for. They don’t always stay so long, of course. Don Cowie was arguably a Millen, for example.

Mooney – and then, if you’re lucky, one of your five signings will go on to be a club legend. A Tommy Mooney, a John McClelland, a Heidar Helguson – add your own favourites here.

Obviously, this is all highly subjective, but it does provide a yardstick against which to judge a manager’s performance in the transfer market. Let’s look back at the summer of 1997, for example, when GT signed Micah Hyde, Peter Kennedy, Ronny Rosenthal, Jason Lee and Lars Melvang: I make that a Mooney, two Millens, a Mackay and a McLenaghan – an above-average return on our investment.

Now look at Aidy Boothroyd’s first batch of signings, in the summer of 2005: Marlon King, Jordan Stewart, Adam Griffiths, Martin Devaney, Sietes and Ben Gill: a Millen, a Mackay and four McLenaghans. He got better at picking players, obviously, but it wasn’t an encouraging start.

Right now we have six new players. Which will be a Mooney and which a McLenaghan? Only time will tell.

Confessions of the world’s worst ballboy

2011-07-31T19:04:00.004+01:00

Over the past 40-odd years, I’ve watched football matches from all four sides of Vicarage Road, and in varying degrees of comfort, from the rib-crushing exhilaration of a packed terrace to the cosseted luxury of an executive box. But only once have I watched a game while standing on the hallowed turf itself, and it’s an occasion my thoughts often turn to at this time of year.

It was the summer of 1973, I think, which would make me 10 years old. My father was in the Air Force and we lived on the RAF estate in Bushey Heath, a few roads away from a colleague of Dad’s who was a qualified football referee, and who had a son of about my age. In those days, Watford used to train at RAF Stanmore, and that summer they invited a team from the base to provide some gentle opposition for a pre-season friendly at Vicarage Road.

I only became aware of this unlikely combination of circumstances when Dad came home from work one day and asked if I would like to be a ballboy at a Watford game. His friend was going to be refereeing the friendly, and his son and I could help out if we liked. Well, as a Watford fan, I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity like that, even if I was a bit hazy on the details of what a ballboy was actually supposed to do.

The details of the day itself are equally hazy at this remove, but I clearly remember being stationed at the Vicarage Road End and instructed to return the ball to the appropriate team if it went out either side of the goal: to the goalkeeper if the attacking team had touched it last, and in the direction of the corner flag if it had come off a defender.

All this I understood. What I hadn’t bargained for was the wall that ran along the front of the Vicarage Road terrace. It wasn’t a particularly high wall: however, I should confess at this point that I wasn’t a particularly athletic 10-year-old. (This won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me.) In my orange Adidas rip-off tracksuit – two stripes instead of three – I looked a bit like a basketball with arms and legs.

The first time a shot fizzed over the crossbar and onto the terrace, I ran up to the wall and tried to vault over it. Then I tried again. And again.

It was no good. I couldn’t get my leg up on top of the wall so that I could swing over it, and I certainly didn’t have enough upper body strength to pull myself up and over. It was a pattern that would be repeated ad nauseam in gym lessons when I got to secondary school, where I never once managed to vault over the horse or climb a rope. But for now, I was just embarrassed when one of the players got bored of waiting, hopped effortlessly over the wall and retrieved the ball so that play could continue. This happened several more times during the course of the game, to the point where I stopped even pretending to try to get over the wall.

What else do I remember? It was a warm day, and during half-time my fellow ballboy and I sheltered from the sun in the Main Stand, where we were introduced to the manager’s son, who was slightly older than us and apparently quite good at football. In my memory he was called Kevin, but I’ve just checked and Kevin Keen would only have been six in 1973, so it can’t have been him. Maybe he had another son, or maybe I’ve just been harbouring a false memory all these years.

We kept to the same ends in the second half, so I never got a chance to discover whether I could have made it over the wall into the Rookery End. The match ended 4-2 to Watford – for some reason, I’m certain of that, though I’ve never been able to check. Afterwards, the referee told us to wait in the corridor outside the dressing rooms while he changed, and I took the opportunity to get out my autograph book (which, up to that point, had only seen service at the annual pro-am tournament at Hartsbourne Golf Club) and accost the Watford players with it as they emerged.

I’ve looked at the collection of scrawled signatures I gathered that day many times since, but I’ve never managed to match a single one with the name of a Watford player. This isn’t entirely surprising, since (as you’ve doubtless guessed, though I didn’t realise till much later) this was a reserve fixture. I mean, come on – it’s true that Watford were on the slide in the early 70s, but they weren’t so bad that they would have played a first-team match against a side from a local RAF base, and on a midweek morning at that.

I did make it onto the playing surface a couple of times in subsequent years – but only as part of mass pitch invasions when the Hornets had just sealed promotion. And so, all these years later, I still look back fondly on my day as a ballboy. Even if I was absolutely rubbish.

The story of a shareholding

2011-07-10T11:29:00.005+01:00

Back in the summer of 2001, I was relatively flush. I was single, with a decent income and a manageable mortgage. For the first – and probably last – time in my life, I was spending less than I earned each month, and thus building up some savings.

So when Watford announced that they were going to float on the Alternative Investment Market, the idea of owning shares in my beloved club was both attractive and achievable. I dutifully read the glossy prospectus - newly installed manager Gianluca Vialli with Elton John on the front, Tommy Smith and a kid with his face painted yellow and red on the back – but all the detail about cash in- and outflow and fixed assets didn’t make a lot of difference to me. I just liked the idea of having a stake in the club I’d been following since 1970. So on July 24th, 2001, I wrote a cheque for £1,000, and in return I received a certificate showing that I was now the owner of 100,000 shares in Watford Leisure plc.

By December 2002, Vialli (and Elton) had gone, as had ITV Digital, and new chairman Graham Simpson launched a further share offer to try to make up some of the shortfall caused by the combination of the two. By this time I was engaged and planning a wedding, and had to be a little more conservative with my cash. This time they were offered at just 0.1p a share, so for £350 I received a further 350,000 shares, taking my total holding up to 450,000 shares.

After this it gets a bit hazy, because I’m not a financial expert. I know that in late 2003, Simpson went back to the well again, but this time I didn’t participate. Like many fans, I was beginning to feel that I’d poured enough money into the club over the years, and that maybe the board should do their job and work out a way of making the club pay its way.

Because I didn’t buy any more shares, my existing holding was subsequently diluted (by a mechanism I still don’t really understand) by a factor of a thousand, to just 450 shares. Which seemed a bit harsh, somehow.

Fast-forward to 2006 and there was yet another financial crisis. This is the most confusing of all, because as far as I can see, even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t invest any more money, I received an additional 1,080 shares. The prospectus talks about a ‘12 for 5 Rights Issue’, and simple maths shows that 450 times 12 divided by 5 is indeed 1,080.

So, until recently, I was the owner of 1,530 shares in Watford Leisure plc. What I never factored in was the possibility that I could be forced to sell them, but of course, that’s just what has happened. Now I’m sitting here with a cheque for £15.30, which is all I have to show for my 10 years as a shareholder in Watford Leisure plc.

I suppose I ought to cash it. I could spend it on a takeaway pizza and some garlic bread, perhaps, or a couple of paperback books. It might even pay for my admission to a Watford cup tie, now that they’re no longer included in the price of my season ticket.

Looking back over the annual reports from this last decade, I notice that in both 2003 and 2004, one of Mr Simpson’s stated targets for the club was to ‘return value to shareholders’. That aim was quietly dropped in later reports, and in retrospect it’s easy to see why. It was a promise they were never going to be able to keep.

Everyone’s a winner

2011-05-12T20:16:00.000+01:00

Despite the disappointing run-in, there’s no doubt that 2010/11 was a good season for the Hornets. We were never in serious danger of relegation (a first in recent times), achieved a comfortable mid-table finish in a competitive division, and played some lively, entertaining and goal-strewn football. Oh, and we did all this with the youngest team in the Championship.

So, without further ado, here are my personal end-of-season awards – although, as the title of this post says, everyone’s a winner:

Player of the season

I can’t find fault with the official club award here. Plaudits to Martin Taylor and John Eustace in particular, but Danny Graham was the stand-out player, a striker who contributed off the ball as well as mastering the all-important skill of whacking it into the net at regular intervals.

Young player of the season

At the start of every season, there are a clutch of youngsters who seem to be on the verge of breaking into the first team, but most end up spending more time on the bench than the pitch. Of this year’s hopefuls, Matt Whichelow showed a lot of promise, giving new impetus to the attack when coming on as a sub, and Piero Mingoia showed signs of being the new Gary Porter. But the award has to go to Marvin Sordell: 15 goals in his first full season is not at all shabby, even if he couldn’t quite maintain his best form week in, week out. That will come.

Most disappointing player

This is all relative, of course, especially given the age of the players involved. Having said that, Scott Loach’s increasing flakiness as the season went on was worrying for a player who’d already appeared in a couple of senior England squads – although if it’s put off potential buyers for a while, that’s no bad thing. As for Will Buckley, his pace and trickery are so thrilling to watch (when he’s on song, at least, though there are also games when he vanishes) that it’s frustrating that he delivers so little end product.

But my biggest disappointment was Danny Drinkwater, the latest in a long line of loanees from Old Trafford, but the first to completely fail to ‘get’ it. He looked promisingly skilful for the first half an hour of his debut, but it soon became apparent that he just didn’t fit into this Watford team. The fact that Malky only gave him three starts and nine substitute appearances in half a season suggests that he agreed.

Invisible man

An honorable mention to Josh Walker, who arrived from Middlesbrough with an impressive pedigree, but made only five substitute appearances and spent most of the season on loan. Then there’s Liam Henderson, who didn’t appear in a Watford shirt at all, but kept up his record of failing to score for the first team (any first team) at Colchester, Aldershot and Rotherham. I doubt he’ll be back in August.

But the real invisible man was Tom Aldred, signed (or so it seemed) to provide much-needed cover for Taylor and Mariappa in the centre of defence. All he has to show for his first season as a Hornet is seven appearances for Stockport (the last of them in January) and a random 90 minutes on the bench against Coventry in April. And when we were desperate for a defender in the last game of the season, it was 17-year-old Tommy Hoban who Malky turned to, not the older Aldred, described on the official site as a “commanding centre-half” who we had to fight to sign, so coveted was he by other clubs. Very strange.

You’re gonna lose in the playoffs

2011-05-04T13:39:00.003+01:00

Having written in my last post about the logic of adopting Queens Park Rangers as Watford’s new rivals, there was a certain grim satisfaction in the way Saturday unfolded at Vicarage Road. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is already looking forward to their return, tail between their collective legs, in a couple of seasons’ time - or, indeed, next season, if the Football League impose the points deduction their own rules would seem to mandate.

It’s taken me a few days to get around to writing about the QPR game because I was just so angry at the time. Angry at the QPR fans who not only infiltrated the home end, but then brazenly celebrated their team’s opening goal, inviting trouble; angry at the Watford fans who rose as one to watch the ensuing shenanigans rather than the match; angry at the twats who invaded the pitch, and especially those who decided to taunt the Rookery at the end of the game; and angry at the stewards and police officers who made so little effort to catch the worst offenders.

Above all, I was angry that an occasion for celebration - the last home game of a fine season, on a sunny Saturday afternoon - had been hijacked, not just by another club, but by a reminder of the stupidity and nastiness of days gone by. The much-delayed lap of honour by the players and staff was less enjoyable than usual as a result – and from the general lack of singing while it was happening, I suspect many others felt that way too.

The campaign for real rivals

2011-04-11T13:37:00.004+01:00

[NB: this article also appears in the latest issue of Clap Your Hands, Stamp Your Feet]

Be honest now: do you miss derby games against Luton?

No, me neither. The news story a few weeks ago about a march through Luton by the racist thugs of the English Defence League (which was founded there) reminded me of the element among the Hatters’s support that always made derby days so deeply unpleasant.

The good news is that there’s a real chance that Watford and Luton Town will never meet again in a competitive football match. Luton are three whole divisions below us now, and every season they spend in the Conference weakens their finances and fanbase.

In the meantime, we’re free to start a new rivalry. After all, there’s no law that says two football teams have to be yoked together for all eternity, and there are plenty of cases where rivalries have shifted as circumstances changed. For instance, Nottingham Forest realised years ago that they weren’t going to meet their near-neighbours Notts County very often, and turned their attentions to another County in the next, um, county. Forest v Derby is now a bitterly contested, um, derby in the East Midlands, while Notts have fostered a more realistic rivalry with Mansfield Town.

So what does it take to create a new derby? I’d suggest that the two key elements are proximity and frequency. The perfect rivals are close enough for the two sets of fans to meet in everyday life, and of a similar standard, so that the two teams play each other most seasons. A bit of history helps as well, of course.

On that basis, let’s take a look at the five clubs that are based closest to Vicarage Road and assess their qualifications to be our new rivals:

Barnet

Distance from Vicarage Road: 9.01 miles
Previous league meetings: 0
Pros: It really isn’t that far from Watford to Barnet, and they’re even in the same county. They have a similar nickname (Bees) and strip (yellow and black) – it’s almost as if they aspire to be us.
Cons: Two cup ties (the only competitive meetings between the two clubs) aren’t enough to build a rivalry on. Unfortunately for Barnet, they’re only a few places higher up the pyramid than Luton, and the chances of the two teams ever meeting regularly are remote. Maybe they could take the Hatters off our hands, though…
Rivalry rating: 1 (out of 5)

Brentford

Distance: 12.07 miles
Meetings: 60
Pros: Like the Hornets, Brentford (another bunch of Bees – what is it with north-west London clubs and stinging insects?) have strong roots in their local community. As the only team in the western half of London outside the top two divisions, they’re sorely in need of a proper derby match. Oh, and Griffin Park has pubs on all four corners of the ground.
Cons: Fans who started supporting the two clubs since the 1970s will have few memories of previous meetings to draw on. There’s no sign of hostilities being renewed, either – though it only needs Watford to have one bad season or Brentford one good one.
Rating: 3

Queen’s Park Rangers

Distance: 12.18 miles
Meetings: 105
Pros: After the war, large numbers of bombed-out residents of Shepherd’s Bush were rehoused on the newly build South Oxhey estate, on the southern edge of Watford. As a result, Watford-QPR matches in the 1960s were extremely ‘tasty’. It was a proper rivalry, in other words, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be revived. Especially as we’ve played Rangers more than any other league club, as far as I can make out. Their sugar-daddy owners are a further reason to dislike them. And I haven’t even mentioned their manager…
Cons: That manager could be on the verge of propelling them out of the Championship and into the Premiership. If that happens, and they stay up in their first season, it may be a while before we play them again.
Rating: 4

Arsenal

Distance: 14.40 miles
Meetings: 16
Pros: In our Division One days, we had a satisfyingly good record against Arsenal, and the 1987 FA Cup quarter-final win at Highbury remains my all-time favourite away game. These days, of course, we’re nothing but poor relations, but that’s no bad thing when it comes to stoking the fires of enmity. Also, there’s no shortage of Gooners in the Watford area, so there’s plenty of scope for banter.
Cons: Sadly, the chances of Watford and Arsenal ever meeting regularly are remote. In any case, the Gunners’ long-established rivalry with Spurs isn’t going to end any time soon.
Rating: 1

Fulham

Distance: 14.46 miles
Meetings: 18
Pros: Yes, I was surprised to find that Fulham is the fifth-closest club to Watford, too. I’m really struggling to find anything to hate about them, beyond the obvious – and even the way Mohammed Al-Fayed bought success for Fulham pales in comparison with the more recent exploits of the owners of Chelsea and Manchester City. Noble history, glorious riverside location… Nope, I’ve got nothing.
Cons: See above.
Rating: 0

So there you go. QPR and Brentford look like our best bets, with the Rs front-runners, provided they don’t get promoted at the end of the season.

Obviously, I’m not expecting the boys at the back of the Rookery to sway their anti-Luton chants for anti-Rangers ones just like that. But over time, as new fans join the ranks who’ve never seen Watford play Luton, chances are they’ll turn their attention to another club. And why not? At least you can spend an afternoon or evening in Shepherd’s Bush without having to worry about getting your head kicked in.

Something to celebrate

2011-03-15T12:06:00.003Z

The concept of Tax Freedom Day - the day of the year when we start working for ourselves rather than the government, essentially - is well established. (This year it’s May 30th, by the way.) I think there should be an equivalent term to describe the day when Watford’s Championship survival is assured for another season.

Passing the 52-point mark - universally agreed as ensuring that relegation is all but mathematically impossible - on Saturday was certainly a great relief, even if we did it in rather strange circumstances. Last season it took us until late April, so celebrating Championship Survival Day* in mid-March is a great improvement.

And there’s much more than that to celebrate, too. Leaving aside the imminent takeover - which may, if nothing else, lead to the Vicarage Road pitch being relaid - we currently have a club that seems to be functioning well at almost every level, from the CEO to the youngest youth trainees. It’s been particularly heartwarming to see the contribution Watford’s youngsters have made this season, from Marvin Sordell’s goals to Matty Whichelow’s impact as a substitute and Adam Thompson’s confident performances at the back. It’s a sign of how well the system is working that the likes of Ross Jenkins and Lee Hodson are viewed almost as veterans these days, despite being 20 and 19 respectively.

So now we can relax a little and enjoy the rest of the season. As I wrote a few months ago, it really wouldn’t be a good thing for us to get promoted, but a final league placing of around ninth or tenth, which is eminently achievable, would represent a successful season for a club of such limited means. It would also tie in with Graham Taylor’s oft-stated, and admirably realistic, ambition for Watford to establish itself as “a top-30 club in English football”.

*All ideas for a better name gratefully received…

If it sounds too good to be true…

2011-03-05T12:20:00.002Z

I got the call a few days ago. I’d been expecting it, having heard about this scam from other members of the Watford Mailing List. Because I was curious as to how it worked, I let the caller give me his entire spiel. I’m still none the wiser, though I have a couple of ideas.

The caller was from a New York-based firm called Harris James Associates. He was contacting me about my shares in Watford Leisure plc: would I be interested in selling them? He said his firm is representing a multinational company that wants to buy a majority stake (ie 51%) in Watford Leisure, on account of its “special assets and licences”. Later he also said that the deal was tax-related.

He claimed that 43% of the company’s institutional shareholders have already made a commitment to sell their shares, and wanted to know if I would do the same. The price would be between £8 and £17 a share, to be paid 30-90 days after the transaction was completed. There would be a requirement to lodge a bond as insurance against the deal falling through, but the “good news” was that the purchaser would pay most of that, and I would only be required to contribute a small amount.

Finally, he asked for my email address so that he could send me a confidentiality agreement that I would have to sign before proceeding any further with the transaction.

Now obviously I have no intention of going along with this scheme. As the old saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Watford Leisure plc shares are currently trading at 5p each, and their peak value in the past 12 months was 11.25p. So why would anyone possibly want to pay £8 each for them? It would have to be one hell of a tax dodge.

So, assuming it is simply a scam, how does it work? My initial thought was that it might be something to do with the bond that was mentioned, with the “small amount” eventually turning out to be a significant sum. That would fit the pattern of other well-known scams, such as the “You have won the [name of country] lottery” con, where you’re asked to send a fee to an intermediary, who will then pass on your winnings to you.

Alternatively, maybe it’s as simple as harvesting bank details. They already have my name and phone number, and presumably my home address as well; if I gave them the details of my bank account, they could wreak all kinds of havoc.

If anyone reading this has any other ideas, do post a comment below. I’m intrigued to know exactly what’s going on here.

Would you Adam and Eve it?

2011-02-08T22:55:00.002Z

I see that Watford defenders Lee Hodson and Adam Thompson have been called up to the full Northern Ireland squad for their game against Scotland tomorrow night. Obviously I’m pleased for them, and it’s further proof that our youth development system is working well. But what do their call-ups say about the state of British football?

Lee Hodson is a promising full-back, no doubt about it, and at 19, he’s got plenty of time to develop. He’s started 43 times for the Hornets – but most of those starts were last season. Yes, he’s in the team at the moment, but we all know that he’s only there until Malky can get Andrew Taylor back from Middlesbrough, or an alternative loanee who can play at left back so that Lloyd can move back to the right.

He looks like a wizened old pro, though, in comparison to 18-year-old Adam Thompson. I’ve seen Adam’s entire senior career, as it happens. It was the League Cup 2nd round game against Notts County at the start of the season. That’s it. One first-team game, in a team packed with similar tyros - and Northern Ireland think he’s ready for international football?

The thing is, that one League Cup tie is probably the only competitive match Adam has ever played against a team of grown-ups. Reserve team matches, as far as I can tell, are basically an opportunity for clubs to field a team of under-21s – the current youth team and recent graduates. The days when they were peppered with senior players trying to win back a place in the first team are seemingly long gone. So Adam’s entire career to date has consisted of games against players his own age, or a year or two older.

Like I say, this is no reflection on two talented youngsters who will hopefully have long and successful careers. I feel for Northern Ireland manager Nigel Worthington, though, whose talent pool is so shallow that he has to pick players with minimal experience just to make up a full squad. It’s a further indictment (as if any were needed) of the way the Premiership’s riches have largely gone into the pockets of foreign players, while reducing opportunities for talented youngsters from the British isles to play at the highest level. Heck, even Fabio Capello has been reduced to picking the odd Championship player. Where will it end?

It’s not a *@%&ing panto!

2011-01-30T18:40:00.004Z

Okay, I know people are strapped for cash at the moment. I certainly am, but I still wasn’t going to miss a home FA Cup tie, and £15 seemed reasonable to me for a 4th round clash with Brighton.

Obviously not to my fellow Rookeryites, though. Of the six seats to my left and right, only one was occupied by its usual resident. Taking the same block of seven seats in the row in front of me, there was only one regular; in the row behind, two. That makes five out of 21 season ticket holders who could be bothered to watch Watford play in the only major tournament we had any chance of winning this season.

In their place, for the most part, were families with kids. And I mean young kids – the ages of the ones around me ranged from five to eight, I’d say. I was nearly nine when I went to my first match, and I don’t think I’d have been able to concentrate on 90 minutes of football much before then. But I hope I wouldn’t have spent the entire game kicking the back of the seat in front of me, as the irritating brat behind me did. Or whining for a hot dog, or chasing a balloon up and down the row, like his pals.

The two boys directly in front of me were positively angelic by comparison. Possibly a bit wet, judging by the fact that their parents had brought a blanket to wrap round them, but fair enough, it was bloody cold. In the second half, though, whenever Watford were on the attack and people in the Rookery stood up, Dad would hoist one little lad onto his seat and Mum the other. This clearly took a lot of effort, so the parents were unwilling to lift them down again until the excitement was definitely over. As a result, I spent far more time than I wanted to staring at the backs of two little boys while the ball was down the far end of the pitch.

Don’t get me wrong: I know we need to encourage the next generation of fans to come along to Vicarage Road. But one of the reasons I choose to sit behind the goal in the Rookery is so that I’m surrounded by passionate, noisy fans (though those terms are relative when it comes to Watford fans, obviously). If I wanted to spent an afternoon surrounded by whingeing brats with short attention spans and an obsession with junk food, I’d go to my local multiplex. Now I understand why Graham Taylor created the Family Enclosure all those years ago.

Confessions of a groundhopper

2011-01-23T23:30:00.005Z

I’ve seen a few non-league games over the years, mainly featuring Kingstonian, who my friend Stuart supported for a while. I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of getting closer to the grass roots of football – the knowledge that everyone in the ground is there because they love the game, and their club, rather than being motivated by money or fame.

Yesterday my better half and I drove up to the town of Ossett in West Yorkshire, where she grew up, and where we’d been invited to a family party in the evening. I had the afternoon to myself, and I was pleased to discover that Ossett Town had a home game against Colwyn Bay in the Northern Premier League. Sorted.

So at 2.45 I strolled up to the gloriously named Stade France (formerly Ingfield, but now sponsored by local scrap merchant Eddie France), right in the centre of town – only to find the ground mysteriously empty. The game had obviously been postponed, for some reason.

Dispirited, I was walking back through the town square when I bumped into one of my wife’s friends and recounted my tale of woe. “Are Ossett Albion at home today?” she asked “You could watch them instead.” I said I didn’t know, but I was willing to go along on the off-chance if it wasn’t far. It wasn’t, and five minutes later I found myself outside the WareHouse Systems Stadium, where there was clearly a match going on. I paid my £3 at the turnstile (there was only the one) and asked the bloke behind the counter who Albion were playing. “Town,” he replied, as if I should have known that. Somehow I appeared to have stumbled upon a local derby.

I took up a position level with one of the penalty areas, on the top step (of three) of what I suppose you could call a terrace and surveyed the scene. There were roughly the same number of people on the pitch as there were around it (the small stand on the opposite site, with half a dozen rows of seats, had one solitary occupant), but all the noise was coming from the pitch. That’s one thing about football at this level; you can hear every word the players, manager and referee say. To be fair, the air didn’t turn particularly blue, though the Town coach did spend most of the match moaning at the referee, like a cut-price Alex Ferguson.

The standard of the football was… okay, I suppose. There were plenty of moments of skill from both sides, but rarely enough in a row to create the kind of football that’s pleasing to the eye. All too often the ball pinged back and forth as one team, then the other, conceded possession cheaply.

At half-time (0-0) I took a stroll round the ground, just because I could. I’d been too shy to ask anyone about the match, for fear of exposing my extreme southernness in this bastion of northern masculinity, but when I drew level with the occupant of the stand, I asked him how come this local derby was taking place. That’s when I learned that what I was actually watching was a reserve match.

It was tempting to leave at that point (I don’t even make the effort to watch Watford’s reserve matches, never mind anyone else’s), but I didn’t. For one thing, like any true football fan, I wanted to see who won. Besides, there was something evocative about the setting that I was keen to nail down. As the light dimmed and the Yorkshire accents clashed on the pitch (“Fooking ’ave ’im!”), with the moors looming behind the ground and the constant hum of the generator that powered the floodlights, I was oddly reminded of the legendary football match in Kes. (Yes, I know that involves schoolboys and takes place in broad daylight, but still, that’s what it felt like to me.)

The game opened up in the second half, as Albion pressed forward and Town’s defenders lost the plot. Albion scored two in a matter of minutes and could have had a hatful. Time and again they sliced through the defence to create a one-on-one or two-on-one situation, only to waste the chance with a poor shot or final ball. Town scored a very late penalty to make it 2-1, but there was barely time for the restart before the ref blew for full-time.

By this time the temperature had dropped several degrees, and the home fans’ joy at the result had been tempered by reports coming in of a 6-0 defeat for the first team at Chester, so no one was going to hang around to cheer the players off the pitch. I certainly didn’t, at any rate.

At the party that night, I told a few people that I’d been to watch Ossett Albion Reserves play Ossett Town Reserves, but I don’t think any of them got it. They doubtless thought that living in London had made me a bit soft in the head. Still, I reckon I’ll go back another time –preferably when the first team are playing. For one thing, Albion play in gold shirts and black shorts…

Wow!

2010-12-28T22:31:00.003Z

There’s no other word for it: this afternoon’s demolition of Cardiff City was simply stupendous. Add in a similarly stylish performance against QPR and the win against Leicester before that, and you have to conclude that this Watford team is in the middle of a purple patch.

There was so much to admire today: Will Buckley’s speed and trickery on the wing, leading to Lee Naylor’s humiliating substitution with less than half an hour gone; the strength and movement of Graham and Sordell up front; the tireless running and challenging of John Eustace and Jordan Mutch that stopped Cardiff ever dominating the midfield; and a solid 90 minutes from the whole back four, even if the Cardiff goal did highlight their unfortunate tendency to give opposing strikers too much room at times.

All this and not one but two penalties for the Hornets – and we even scored one of them, which is frankly remarkable. (Cudos to Danny Graham, too, for having the balls to take the second after making such a hash of the first.) Oh, and they actually scored three goals at the Rookery end, equalling the total for the season to date, I believe.

All in all, I haven’t enjoyed a football match so much in ages. As with last season, however it ends up (and I’m still not taking anything for granted), you have to give Malky credit for making Watford so damn good to watch.

Get with the programme, pt. 4

2010-12-02T23:21:00.004Z

And so, finally, to Stamford Bridge for Chelsea v Watford on Saturday November 1st, 1986, a Today League First Division fixture. I have no memory of Eddie Shah’s long-since vanished newspaper sponsoring the league, but I remember the match. A 0-0 draw on a cold, grey autumn afternoon. A dull game, made worse by being forced by the police to wait inside the ground for ages afterwards, supposedly for the home fans to disperse – though we suspected it simply gave the local bovver boys time to get in place for an ambush. It was raining by that time, and then they switched the floodlights off, and I vividly remember a sense of over-riding grimness that corresponds to so many accounts of football in the dark days of the mid-80s.

This may well have been the first Watford game I travelled to from my own home, as opposed to my parents’. Having graduated the previous summer, I’d moved into my first shared house in the autumn, a few weeks after starting my first job. I suppose I still used my parents’ house in Bushey Heath to store stuff, though, which is why this programme was there.

Like I say, Stamford Bridge was a grim place in those days, and Chelsea were anything but a glamour club. Some of the names that lined up against the Hornets that day mean nothing to me at all now – Tony Godden, Darren Wood, Keith Jones. There are no fewer than three who would go on to play for Watford (Keith Dublin, Joe McLaughlin and Kerry Dixon), but the most impressive name on the team sheet to me is that of Pat Nevin, the punk rock-loving, NME-reading exception among professional footballers.

Both teams were near the bottom of the table at the time, but the most striking statistic is the average home attendance listed there: Watford’s was 17,009 (close to our best ever), but Chelsea’s was just 15,528. Chairman Ken Bates’s column is full of phrases that suggest a beleagured club: “John Hollins [the manager] has my full support”; “I want the players to know that I am totally behind them”; “We have enjoyed the good times, let’s stick together in the rough”; “As for the knockers – stuff them”. You tell ’em, Ken.

Instead, it’s the Watford team that is healthily stocked with internationals – Barnes, McClelland, Jackett – not to mention classy players like Tony Coton, David Bardsley and Kevin Richardson. Indeed, I remember that we were disappointed not to win that day. Yet when Watford were drawn away at Stamford Bridge – now the closest ground to my home – in the FA Cup 3rd Round last season, I didn’t even bother to go, so certain was I that we would be soundly thrashed. It’s ironic to think that we were the club that used to get slated for buying success through our millionaire owner…

Get with the programme, pt. 3

2010-11-30T22:49:00.003Z

Finally, a programme from a home game: Watford v Notts County, a Division 1 fixture from Saturday September 10th, 1983. I have no memory whatsoever of the match, which must have been one of the few I managed to see before going back to university for the start of my second year. I can tell you that we won 3-1 (I wrote the score on the team page, as I continued to do for many years), with goals from John Barnes, George Reilly and Charlie Palmer – the only one he ever scored for the Hornets, according to Trefor Jones’s Watford Football Club Illustrated Who’s Who.

The Notts County team that played that day is studded with familiar names: future managers Martin O’Neill and Nigel Worthington, legendary hardman Brian Kilcline, a sprinkling of foreign exotics – Aki Lahtinen, John Chiedozie, Rachid Harkouk – and the late lamented Justin Fashanu. It’s odd, looking at the league table in the programme, to see County ahead of their local rivals, but behind ours – now a non-league club, of course.

Although the County game was Watford’s first win of the season, the really significant fixture was the next one: the first leg of the UEFA Cup 1st round tie at Kaiserslautern the following Wednesday. Graham Taylor’s editorial is headed ‘Many thanks – now Europe’ and he spends much of it appealing for Watford fans not to disgrace themselves in Germany. Very much a sign of the times, when hooliganism was at its height.

Meanwhile, the fixtures page is mostly taken up with details of travel packages still available for fans wanting to go to the tie. Prices range from £47 for an economy coach trip to £135, which gets you a charter flight from Luton to Saarbrücken, a night in a hotel and a continental breakfast. I wish I’d had the money, or just the gumption, to make the trip (I was studying German – maybe I should have offered my services to the club as a translator), but I stayed home and listened on the radio instead.

The programme as a whole is a lively affair, though surprisingly thin. It’s printed half in colour and half in black and white, and whoever planned the layout doesn’t appear to have thought it through. Thus the reserve team report (with no pictures) and the kit sponsors page are in colour, while the pictorial spread on the recent Open Day, and another two pages of photos from recent games, are in mono.

The overall impression, though, is of confidence: from the large logo on the front cover to the bold yellow and black on the back, this is the programme of a club that knows what it’s achieved and is proud of it. And why not? We’d never had it so good.

Get with the programme, pt. 2

2010-11-29T23:13:00.003Z

I remember more about this one: Hillingdon Borough v Watford in the 2nd Round of the FA Cup on Saturday December 11th, 1976. I went with a schoolfriend and his dad, who drove us there; it may well have been my first Watford away match. It was freezing cold – much like today, in fact – and I have a very clear memory of sitting in the car after the game, listening to the other FA Cup scores on the radio as we queued to get out of the ‘car park’ (a rutted field at one end of the ground) and waited for the ice on the windows to melt.

I remember the game, too. We were stood directly behind one of the goals (the Leas Stadium didn’t run to terraces), and Andy Rankin let in a soft goal right in front of us. It may well have been an equaliser, but the Hornets eventually won 3-2 against the Southern League side to go through to the 3rd Round – where we lost to another non-league outfit, Northwich Victoria, by the same score on an even colder day in January 1977. I can still picture myself huddled against the radiator in my bedroom, listening to the result on the radio.

The Hillingdon programme is written in an appealingly gauche style. “Here’s to an exciting win with preferably Boro’ going into the hat for the third round draw,” it says in the introduction (the pages aren’t numbered), while the Blues Corner column (written by ‘The Voice’) adds that “after the way our boys played against Torquay there is every valid reason for us to look forward to another league scalp”.

The gaucheness extends to the adverts. Who could resist ‘Dancing in the social hall’ on Saturday 18th December from 9pm to 11pm with Tangent, or the Christmas Eve Special from 9pm to midnight with Midnight Riders? Presumably these acts came from the Norman Jackson Agency, prominently advertised on the inside front cover: ‘For Dance bands, Hawaiian, Steel and Gypsy bands, beat groups, discotheques, toastmasters, folk groups and all forms of cabaret. Speciality: Stag shows and hen parties.’ The fact that they were still hiring out ‘beat groups’ less than a fortnight after the Sex Pistols’ notoriously sweary appearance on Bill Grundy’s ITV teatime show is almost impossibly quaint.

Mike Keen’s Watford team that day included players who would go on to play an important part in the glory years, such as Keith Pritchett and Roger Joslyn, but also long-forgotten journeymen like Tony Geidmintis and Peter Coffill. The ‘pen pictures’ give the birthplaces of the 18-man squad, and they’re all in London or the Home Counties, apart from Andy Rankin (Liverpool), Terry Eades (Cambridge), Arthur Horsfield (Newcastle) and Bobby Downes (Bloxwich).

As for Hillingdon Borough, they went bust in the late 80s, though they’ve since been resurrected and now play in the Spartan South Midlands League alongside the likes of Oxhey Jets and Tring Athletic. Still, as the programme I have in front of me notes, they did beat Luton Town 2-1 in the 2nd Round of the FA Cup in 1969, and you’ve got to say hats off to them for that, if nothing else.

Get with the programme, pt. 1

2010-11-28T22:27:00.003Z

I was at my Mum’s house the other day, and under my boyhood bed I found four random football programmes – I suppose they must have become detached from the bulk of my collection when it got moved up to the attic. The arbitrary nature of the discovery appeals to me, and over the next few days I’m going to write about each in turn, taking them in chronological order.

The funny thing about football programmes is that they have two distinct periods of usefulness. They give you something to read on the day of the match when you’re waiting for the teams to emerge, and then, years later, you can return to them and wallow in nostalgia. In between, in my experience, they are completely useless; I can’t remember ever having cause to refer to a recent programme, or even one from a recent season.

The appeal of old programmes isn’t just nostalgia, of course. There’s also something vaguer which you might sum up as ‘the benefit of hindsight’. For example, my junior school used to organise class trips to watch England Schoolboys play at Wembley, which was great fun; but it was only on examining the programmes years later that I discovered that I had seen the teenaged Ray Wilkins, among others, in action.

So it is with my first programme: Brighton & Hove Albion v York City, a 3rd Division match that took place on September 4th, 1971. My grandparents lived in Southwick, just outside Hove, and we used to go and stay with them for one weekend a month. Dad took me to this match on one of those weekends. It was less than a year after my first visit to Vicarage Road, and I must have been eager to grasp any opportunity of seeing a game.

My only memory of the occasion is a vague impression of the Goldstone as a pretty ramshackle ground – and this nearly 30 years before it was finally demolished. Still, Brighton were doing well, topping the Division 3 table at this early stage of the season. A quick scan of the teams on the back page doesn’t reveal any familiar names, but there is one in the York squad listed on page 5: Albert Johanneson, described here as “popular South African-born player who signed from Leeds United where he spent nine seasons”, but best known now for being the first high-profile black player to feature in the English league. See what I mean about hindsight?

There’s also a certain historical irony about the lead item in the ‘3rd Div Focus’ on page 7. “Halifax Town were disappointed about the departure of manager George Kirby to Second Division Watford,” it begins. “But there were no hard feelings. New chairman, Nottingham businessman Mr Arthur Smith has promised that the club will make a presentation to Mr Kirby in recognition of the splendid years [sic] work which resulted in Halifax finishing third in the table last season.” Sadly, Kirby’s time at Vicarage Road was to prove anything but splendid, and I doubt that anyone there was disappointed to see him go.

I could go on all night – the ads alone deserve their own post – but I will merely note that, according to Dad’s pencilled half-time scores, Chelsea and Coventry were drawing 3-3 after 45 minutes that day (sounds like a belter), while Albion’s rivals in Division 3 that year included three current Premiership clubs: Aston Villa, Blackburn and Bolton. It really was a very long time ago.

‘Enjoy The Game’ by Lionel Birnie

2010-11-21T22:00:00.003Z

When Graham Taylor arrived at Vicarage Road in the summer of 1977, I was 14 years old. When I took my O levels, Watford had just clinched promotion to Division Two, and I was on my gap year when they made the final step up to Division One. So for me, as for many Watford fans, Enjoy The Game is the story of my formative years.

Although its subtitle is ‘Watford Football Club: The Story of the Eighties’, Enjoy The Game is really the story of Graham Taylor’s first 10-year spell at the club, from 1977 to 1987; the rest of the decade is rushed through in double-quick time. Not that I’m complaining. If reading the first 300 pages is like wallowing in a warm bath, the final 40 are the literary equivalent of an icy shower.

In writing a book about the most successful period in the Hornets’ history, Lionel Birnie is pushing against an open door when it comes to winning over middle-aged Watford fans like me. But it’s worth pointing out that Enjoy The Game is an excellent book, expertly structured and written in a fluent, unobtrusive style that lets the story take precedence.

Birnie’s best decision was to base his story on the primary sources. So the bulk of the narrative is carried by candid and revealing interviews with the players who created history: not just the stars (Bolton, Blissett, Jenkins and many more), but also bit-part players such as Charlie Palmer and Neil Price.

There are fascinating insights from the management team, too, especially Graham Taylor, who is predictably frank throughout. I was particularly intrigued by his admission that he screwed up by naming the starting eleven for the 1984 FA Cup final a week in advance; he subsequently wanted to change the team, but realised he couldn’t go back on his word. Who would he have dropped, and who would he have replaced them with? I suspect we’ll never know.

More impressively still, Birnie seeks out voices that can tell the other side of the story. A number of Everton players provide a new perspective on the FA Cup final; bogeymen Dave Bassett and Trevor Senior tell their side of the six months that sealed Watford’s fate in 1987/88; and there’s even an interview with Roger Milford – the referee who denied Wilf Rostron a place in the Cup final, and then robbed the Hornets of a place in the semis of the same competition two years later. Predictably, Milford still thinks he was right on both counts, and I still hate him. But I do also respect him for taking the time to talk to a writer who might have been expected to have an axe to grind.

Borne along by judiciously chosen extracts from these interviews, the story proceeds at a brisk pace. Every now and then Birnie changes gear and inserts a chapter on a particular topic: how the fearsome Tom Walley nurtured the youth team, for example, or Watford’s pioneering role as a ‘family club’.

Quibbles? I’d have liked an index, though I understand why this wasn’t practical. I only spotted one factual error – moustachioed winger Bobby Downes is confused with his Wimbledon namesake, Wally – and a handful of typographical lapses, but certainly not enough to spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Ultimately, much of that enjoyment comes from sharing in the happy memories of the players and staff. I particularly like the story of the day GT told the squad they were going to start their regular cross-country run with a walk. He duly led them to his home near Cassiobury Park, where his wife, Rita, was waiting to serve the players tea and cakes. It’s anecdotes like this that demonstrate why Watford was such a special club in the Eighties – not just to support, but to play for as well.

Everything I know is wrong

2010-11-03T21:51:00.004Z

I’ve started reading Lionel Birnie’s excellent, evocative book Enjoy The Game, and I’ll post a proper review when I finish it. On the train home this evening, I started the chapter which tells the story of the legendary 7-1 League Cup win against Southampton, and when I got to the bit when Nigel Callaghan talks about looking up at Vicarage Road after he scored his goal and seeing a bus stopped there with everyone on the top deck celebrating, I suddenly found I had something in my eye…

But here’s the thing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve told everyone who cared to listen that when Watford achieved that epic win, we were in the Third Division. That’s how I’ve always remembered it, and I’m rather taken aback to find out now that we were actually in our second season in the Second Division at the time. I wonder what else I’ve been wrong about all these years?

Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more

2010-10-19T23:35:00.003+01:00

I was fully intending to go to tonight’s game against Ipswich, until the FPO phoned up in distress at about four o’clock and persuaded me that I was urgently needed elsewhere. So it was no surprise to me that Watford won: clearly, it was because I wasn’t there.

Indeed, it is now mid-October and I still haven’t seen a Watford victory this season. I’ve been to every home game bar three – and two of those have been our only home wins. I didn’t even get to see us beat Norwich on live TV, as I was on holiday abroad at the time.

The bad news is that, unless another extreme emergency occurs, I will be at the Scunthorpe game on Saturday. Sorry everyone.

The rivals

2010-10-17T22:49:00.004+01:00

It all started innocently enough, with an email from my Brentford-supporting friend Stuart. He’d just worked out that the Bees had played more league games against Southend than any other club, and idly wondered if I knew who Watford’s most frequent opponents had been.

I didn’t, of course, but I had to find out. So, taking his tip and using statto.com, I spent a lunch hour at work looking up how many times Watford had played a variety of opponents – all the teams I could think of who had a shot of making the top 10, basically. I reckoned it had to be a club who we’d have played in the days of Division Three (South), where we spent nearly 40 of our 90 years in the Football League, so I didn’t bother with anyone north of Coventry.

It struck me in the process that this ought to be a fairly good guide as to who Watford’s natural rivals are. After all, most of the great derbies are fought out on a regular basis; think of those in Liverpool, Manchester, north London and so on. Conversely, even teams in the same city can cease to hate each other if they never meet; Nottingham Forest, for example, regard Derby County as the sworn enemy, while Notts County have presumably been forced to forge a rivalry with Mansfield Town, or another vaguely local club who tend to play in the same division as them most seasons.

This is all extremely relevant right now, given that our so-called rivals aren’t even in the Football League any more. I for one would be very happy to forget all about Luton and embrace new emnities.

So, without, further ado, here are the five (well, seven actually, because of ties) teams Watford have played most often in the Football League – in reverse order, naturally, for dramatic effect:

5= Brighton, Crystal Palace & Reading – 92 meetings

4 Bournemouth – 94

3 Southend – 98

2 Swindon – 100

1 Queen’s Park Rangers – 104

(Luton, incidentally, are way down the list with 76 league meetings, and don’t even make the top 10.)

I find this rather pleasing, as I’ve often thought QPR would make excellent arch-rivals. I know other league clubs are closer as the crow flies, but Rangers are the ones we tend to play most seasons, as the statistic shows. And although it was before my time, I believe that during the 1960s they were seen as our sworn enemies, before they became First Division regulars and thus literally out of our league.

Maybe that’s going to happen again, if their early-season form holds. All the more reason to get in there now – there’s nothing like a hefty dose of jealousy to stoke a good rivalry.

Memories are made of this

2010-09-16T22:01:00.003+01:00

While I’m in reflective mode, I thought it was about time I came up with a list of the five most memorable games I’ve attended in my 40 years as a Watford fan. It says something about how spoilt we Hornets have been in that period that I’ve been able to leave out an FA Cup final, several semi-finals and promotion-clinching matches, three UEFA Cup ties and two 8-0 victories!

5) Arsenal 1 Watford 3, FA Cup 6th round, 14/3/87

Of all the glorious FA Cup ties I’ve witnessed, this is the one I remember most vividly – more so than the semi-finals, which were generally anti-climactic (or, in the case of the one game we actually won, unbearably tense). I’ve written about the game at Highbury before, but it’s worth repeating the sheer exhilaration of watching Luther Blissett steaming towards the Watford fans in the Clock End in the final minutes, completely alone (the Arsenal team up the other end having stopped in expectation of a whistle that never came), and scoring the third goal that sealed victory.

4) Watford 4 Bolton Wanderers 3, Division 1, 23/10/93

Doubly memorable, both as the last Watford match my younger brother (a West Ham fan, for reasons I’ll go into another time) attended with me, and as the greatest comeback I’ve ever witnessed. After an hour, Bolton were 3-0 up and Watford hadn’t had a shot. The atmosphere in the ground was flat as we waited patiently for the referee to put us out of our misery. Except that it didn’t work out that way. A scrambled Gary Porter goal heralded the start of a miraculous recovery, which Porter fittingly finished with a last-minute penalty, to seal the only hat-trick of his long Watford career and a 4-3 victory. I could tell that Chris was impressed, despite himself.

3) Watford 4 Hull City 0, Division 3, 14/5/79

As I say, we’ve been spoilt, especially in terms of promotion games, but this is the one that stands out for me. Watford went into the game needing a win to be sure of promotion (having been top for most of the season, before a late wobble), but it turned out we needn’t have worried. On a gloriously sunny spring evening, the goals came easily (Blissett, Jenkins, Bolton, Joslyn – a roll call of heroes of the Golden Age) to seal promotion to the Second Division for only the second time in the club’s history. At the end, I ventured onto the hallowed turf for the first time to join the jubilant throng in front of the Main Stand.

2) Watford 2 Bolton Wanderers 0, Championship Play-Off Final, 31/5/99

I didn’t have to look up the date of this one, for the simple reason that it was two days after my father’s death from a sudden heart attack. I talked it through with Mum and there didn’t seem to be any reason why that should stop me going to Wembley (as it was a bank holiday weekend, it wasn’t possible to start taking care of the formalities until the following day anyway), so Watford’s big day was one of churning emotions for me. Nicky Wright’s overhead kick was special, but it was Allan Smart’s second goal that did it for me, as I cheered and cried simultaneously. Football as catharsis? No question about it.

1) Watford 7 Southampton 1, League Cup 2nd Round, 2nd Leg, 2/9/80

When I started thinking about this list, I knew at once what would be number one. How could it be anything else? Having attended the depressing 4-0 defeat in the 1st leg, I went to this game with low expectations, only to be blown away by the best display of sustained attacking football I’d ever seen, even from a Watford team that had come to specialise in such things. Unless my memory is playing tricks, I watched this from the terracing in front of the Shrodells Stand, because I’m sure I kept looking at the electronic scoreboard to check that the score really was what I thought it was. In a typically innovative move, the club handed out yellow biros at the next home game that had ‘Watford 7 Southampton 1’ printed down the side, and I still haven’t quite got over the loss of mine.

It was 40 years ago today

2010-09-12T21:25:00.004+01:00

In an ideal world, my first Watford game would have been one of the greatest in the club’s history. But the truth is that until Watford were drawn at home to Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the 1970 FA Cup, I wasn’t even aware that there was a professional club in the area.

Where I grew up, in Bushey Heath, all my friends in the playground supported the big London 1st Division sides: Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea. Indeed, on the basis that my best friend when I was six was a Spurs fan, I decided that I was too. I even persuaded Mum to buy me a white football shirt and sew a Tottenham badge onto it. (The replica shirt business was still in its infancy.)

Then came that FA Cup draw and I realised that professional football wasn’t just something that happened in places I couldn’t possibly visit. We went to Watford every Saturday morning to do our shopping; surely Dad could take me there to see a football match, too?

Sadly, he demurred. I can’t remember his excuse, but it was probably something to do with the difficulty of getting tickets. He did, however, mollify me with a promise to take me to a game later in the year. And thus it was that, instead of seeing Watford beat Liverpool 1-0 to reach the FA Cup semi-final for the first time in their history, my introduction to the Golden Boys was a 0-0 draw against Carlisle United on September 12th, 1970.

In some ways, the matchday experience hasn’t changed much in 40 years. Yesterday, as in 1970, I parked in Watford Fields and walked over the railway bridge, along Cardiff Road, and then up Occupation Road to the ground, past the allotments. Then, as now, Watford were one of the poorer, less fancied teams in the second tier of English football, having finished 19th out of 22 clubs the previous season (at the end of which, incidentally, Blackpool had been promoted to the top tier). Even the result was the same.

In 1970, Dad and I sat in the Main Stand Extension. Now I sit in the Rookery, encased as it is in low-cost housing for nurses, having tried all four sides of the ground in the interim. At least the Extension is still there, and I spent some of the duller moments of the first half yesterday trying to identify the seat where I first experienced live football – or at least, what I could see of it round the pillars that held up the stand and through Dad’s pipe smoke, which always seemed to blow in my face those first few seasons.

My memories of that first game are chiefly of colour: the orange of the seats, the green of the pitch, the golden yellow of the Watford shirts, the royal blue of the opposition’s. (For a while I laboured under the misapprehension that all Watford’s opponents had to wear blue shirts and white shorts, as my next two games after Carlisle were against Cardiff and Birmingham.) The noise, too, made an impression on me – though in retrospect, I doubt that the crowd of 10,462 (I just looked it up) got too worked up over a nil-nil draw.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Dad, when he took me to the match that autumn day, what an important role Watford FC would come to play in my life (and, indeed, just how much money I would spend following them)? Probably not - he was more of a rugby man, though he claimed to have spent some time on the terraces at Sincil Bank in his younger days in Lincoln. Anyway, he’s not around to ask any more. I’m just grateful that he indulged my boyhood wish. I hope he knew that.

The myth of home advantage

2010-08-31T23:25:00.003+01:00

[NB: this article also appears in the current edition of Clap Your Hands, Stamp Your Feet]

There’s no such thing as home advantage.

There, I’ve said it, and now I feel like that kid in the fairy story who notices that the emperor is parading around in his birthday suit. But can I really be the only person to have questioned the assumption that it’s somehow easier for the home team to win a game of football than it is for the away team?

I can tell you’re going take some convincing, so let’s run through the factors generally viewed as contributing to the phenomenon of home advantage:

The pitch

I’m sure there are plenty of park pitches where there’s a genuine advantage to be gained by knowing, say, that there’s a large pothole over by the corner flag that’s never been properly filled in, or that one side of the pitch is liable to turn into the Somme after five minutes of light drizzle.

But at the professional level, pitches are much of a muchness, generally well tended and flat. Ever where there are local variations, it’s hard to see how this gives an advantage to the home team. Take Vicarage Road. Does playing on a boggy quagmire once a fortnight during the winter months help the Hornets? I rest my case.

The ground

We’ve all heard about the dastardly ruses teams employ to cause their visitors maximum discomfort: ‘forgetting’ to turn the hot water on in the away dressing room, neglecting to mend the wonky leg on the massage table and so on.

Maybe this really does have an effect. But you’d have to hope that professional sportsmen, with all the expensive training and psychological conditioning they receive, can rise above the trauma of having to wait a bit longer than usual for their pre-match massage.

The travelling

On the face of it, this is more plausible. We all know what it’s like sitting on a coach for three hours, and it’s easy to imagine that by the time you get off, the last thing you feel like doing is playing a game of football against a bunch of players who’ve just strolled over to the ground from their nearby homes.

But that’s not how it works, is it? For one thing, players don’t live locally any more. To give just one example, during his playing days, Alec Chamberlain lived in Northampton – so when we played Luton* at Vicarage Road, he had to travel further to get there than they did. Did he therefore forfeit home advantage on an individual basis? It’s a nonsense.

The idea that travelling in itself puts you at a disadvantage would be more acceptable if it wasn’t assumed to apply equally across the board. When Liverpool play Everton, they can get there by ambling across Stanley Park if they want. Dundee and Dundee United are famously sited on the same street, and it’s not that long. So why is the away team at a disadvantage in that fixture?

The crowd

Ah yes, the famous ‘12th man’, the passionate home crowd that can spur on a team to great heights. And I don’t doubt that this is true, sometimes at least.

But shouldn’t that logically mean that the clubs with the loudest, most fanatical supporters ought to win everything? Clubs like Newcastle, Man City, Sunderland, Wolves... By the same token, the grounds where the singing is occasional and tentative ought to offer easy points to the visitors – grounds like the Emirates and Old Trafford, for example.

So the idea that having the home crowd on your side gives you an automatic advantage is plainly tosh. Again, look at Vicarage Road. Yes, we can make a bit of noise when the mood takes us, but I don’t believe that any footballer ever looks at the fixture list and shudders at the thought of having to play in front of the naked aggression of the Upper Rous.

Above all, it’s hard to take the concept of home advantage seriously when it’s applied so indiscriminately. If someone came up with a formula that took into account the distance the away team had to travel, the average decibel level generated by the home crowd and other factors, and then calculated the home advantage as a percentage, say, then I might be prepared to accept it.

Now I know what you’re going to say: if there’s no such thing as home advantage, why are there more home wins than away wins most weeks? The answer brings us to the crux of the problem, and the reason that it matters: tactics.

The myth of home advantage relieves managers of the stress of having to think too much. If you’re at home, you know you’re expected to win, so you line up in an attacking formation and batter the opposition until they concede. If you’re away, you play defensively, avoid taking risks and hope you might snatch a goal on the break. The reason there are more home wins is that most away teams’ defences simply aren’t good enough to withstand the pressure they’re put under.

In an ideal world, I’d take one of those memory-wiping devices Will Smith used in Men In Black and use it on every footballer and every manager to rid them of the notion that there is any such thing as home advantage. Then they’d be forced to approach every match on its own merits – work out how to neutralise the opposition’s best players and devise a system that allowed their own to shine.

For proof of how this can work in practice, think back to the 2006 Championship Play-Off Final. On neutral territory in Cardiff, Aidy Boothroyd went toe-to-toe with Kevin Blackwell, and only one of them got their tactics right. Imagine how much more fun football would be if you could turn up every week and have no idea how each team was going to play.

*Come on, you must remember them. They’re a non-league club now, but they used to be quite big.

The benefits of being boring

2010-08-22T12:03:00.002+01:00

There’s an article in the latest edition of the ever-excellent When Saturday Comes in which a Coventry fan bemoans the (remarkable) fact than in the last 40 years, the Sky Blues have never finished in the top six of any division. They spent years battling relegation from the top division, and since they finally succumbed, they’ve been similarly mediocre in the Championship.

Coincidentally, 40 years is also the amount of time I’ve been following Watford, and we’ve finished in the top six of various divisions a total of eight times in that period. Partly as a result, the longest period we’ve spent in a single division since 1970 is the eight seasons from 1988/89 to 1995/96 when were in what was initially called Division Two, then League One (and is now the Championship, of course).

The naming system isn’t the only thing that’s changed in English football since the early 90s. I haven’t got the time (or the energy) to go into the financial inequalities that increase with each passing year, but suffice to say that they’ve led me to an uncomfortable conclusion: we need to beat that record.

Promotion to the Premiership is clearly not a good thing for a club like Watford. Twice we’ve gone up, and twice we’ve been driven to the brink of financial ruin as a direct result. A third time might finish us off, at least in our current financial circumstances.

Relegation to League One is equally undesirable. The idea of going down, rediscovering the joy of being one of the big clubs in the division, and coming back stronger, is a nice one, but it’s not always that simple – look how long it’s taken Leeds. And the latest change to parachute payments means the gap between the Championship and League One is only going to get bigger.

So what Watford need is a nice long stay in the Championship: 10 years ought to do it. That would give us time to complete the financial reorganisation that already seems to be fairly well advanced, and then to re-establish the club on a sustainable footing. That will depend largely on the Harefield academy producing a steady stream of young players who can contribute to the first team for a few seasons before being sold on for a fee to a bigger club. The model that Dario Gradi established at Crewe, in other words.

Boring? Perhaps. Unambitious? Well, no, actually. Because I think the football bubble is going to burst in the next few years, and the chances are that some professional clubs are going to go to the wall. I’ll be happy to witness 10 years of mid-table stability (hopefully leavened by the occasional cup run) if it means the club is still there to compete at the end of it. And that is a worthwhile ambition, in my book.

We’ve (still) got Lloydinho

2010-08-11T22:05:00.004+01:00

As usual, it falls to me at this time of year to name my favourite Watford player. And as usual, it’s Lloyd Doyley. Need I say more?

Well, apparently I do. A couple of weeks ago I read a comment on WML about the threadbare nature of our squad (no argument there) which said something like, “If Hodson gets injured, we’ve only got Doyley as back-up”. It seems that after 300-odd first-team appearances, there are still some Hornets fans who haven’t realised that Lloyd is the best defender at the club, has been for several seasons now, and hopefully will be for a few more years to come.

Indeed, I confidently expect to be writing much the same blog post this time in 2013, by which time Lloyd will still only be around 30. After all, that big move to the Premiership probably isn’t going to happen now, and anyway, why would we sell our best (and best-loved) defender?

Watford win European Cup!

2010-07-08T13:53:00.003+01:00

And the season before that they did the Premiership and League Cup double. Well, they did on my computer, anyway. I’ve been spending an excessive amount of time recently playing the Excel version of Championship Manager. Someone sent it round the office where I worked a few years ago, and a couple of weeks ago I found it online and downloaded it again.

For those who haven’t seen the game, it’s a far better demonstration of the power of Excel than anything work-related I’ve ever seen. You start off at the bottom of the 4th division and work your way up the leagues, using gate receipts to build up your transfer funds and increase the ratings of your players. But there’s enough randomness build into the program to ensure frustrating defeats to teams with hugely inferior rankings.

It’s not going to keep me occupied much longer: in my ninth season, I’ve already run out of players to buy and won almost everything that’s on offer, though I’m still chasing that elusive quadruple. But if you’re looking for a simple, free game to while away the long summer nights, I recommend it. Just Google ‘Championship Manager Excel’ and you’ll find it.

Random World Cup memories no.2

2010-06-29T23:04:00.004+01:00

1970 was Year Zero as far as my football education was concerned. True, I was aware of the professional game – I even professed to be a Tottenham fan for a couple of years, on the basis that my best friend in the playground at Merry Hill Infants said he was one, so I wanted to be one too.

Then Watford reached the FA Cup quarter-final and I suddenly realised there was a proper club right near where I lived. Dad wouldn’t take me to the Liverpool game, but I read in the paper the next day that Watford had won and would play Chelsea in the semi-final. That was the first game I ever listened to on the radio, and it set a painful precedent (fleeting hope, swiftly replaced by despair) that has been repeated many times since.

But by the end of the 1969-70 season, I still hadn’t actually seen a live game of football, either in person or on TV. The former would have to wait for the autumn, but in the meantime there was the World Cup in Mexico. I watched England’s group games in all their technicolor glory, not fully understanding what was going on but gripped nevertheless.

Then came the quarter-final against West Germany. It was great – England were 2-0 up at half-time, and to my eight-year-old mind, nothing could possibly go wrong. Of course, it did, horribly so. Alf Ramsey took Bobby Charlton off to rest him for the semi-final, substitute keeper Peter Bonetti had a mare (Gordon Banks having succumbed to food poisoning), and the Germans won 3-2 after extra time. And thus was established a pattern that’s been repeating itself ever since, with subtle variations each time.

So forgive me if I can’t get too worked up over England’s latest debacle against the Germans. I’ve seen it all before.

Random World Cup memories no.1

2010-06-12T22:30:00.003+01:00

Watching Jay Demerit playing for the USA against England just now reminded me of the first time I ever saw a Watford player in the World Cup.

It was the summer of 1982 and I was living in a village in (West) Germany called Rüchheim, just outside Ludwigshafen, where I was supposedly perfecting my German, prior to going to university, by working in a printing works. (All that really happened was that I acquired a Rhineland accent, which is roughly the equivalent of a nice middle-class boy from Berlin coming to the UK and learning to speak English like Noddy Holder.) It was a miserable, lonely few months for a teenager who’d never spent more than a fortnight away from home before, but at least the owners of the house where I was boarding allowed me to watch their TV occasionally.

It wasn’t an offer I took them up on very often (if you’ve ever seen German television, you’ll understand why), but when the World Cup rolled around I was grateful. Which is how I came to be watching when Northern Ireland played Spain in a fateful group match. And when Gerry Armstrong scored what turned out to be the only goal of the game, I practically leapt out of my seat. “Der spielt für meine Mannschaft - für Watford!” I gibbered, flabbergasted at seeing a Watford player not only appearing in the World Cup (and I’m pretty sure he was the first one ever to do so), but playing a leading role there. I spent the rest of the match trying to explain to my baffled hosts why I was so excited.

Since then I’ve seen John Barnes come within a whisker of putting England level against Argentina (‘hand of god’ notwithstanding), but apart from that, Watford-related World Cup highlights have been thin on the ground. The funny thing is, I can’t remember a single goal Gerry Armstrong scored for Watford, even though I must have seen plenty of them.

All’s well that ends well

2010-04-25T23:35:00.003+01:00

Random thoughts from a very welcome final home win of the season:

Lucky for us that Reading had already left for their summer hols, mentally at least. The last time I saw such slack defending, Watford were doing it
Danny Graham may never get a better chance to score a hat-trick; it’s a good thing the two shots he volleyed high over the bar didn’t affect the final score
The Mexican wave has no place in a football ground, and I will refuse until my dying day to take part in one
And those red, yellow and black balloons someone in the Rookery blew up in the second half and chucked around were fun for about two minutes, and then became extremely annoying
I wonder what Arsène Wenger thinks about Henri Lansbury? He sent us a promising, ball-playing midfielder, and after nine months at Vicarage Road he’s about to take return delivery of a first-rate hoofer - some of Henri’s clearances upfield yesterday were positively agricultural. I blame the pitch
I really hope that’s not the last time I see Heidar Helguson in a Watford shirt, but I fear it will be. For what it’s worth, I’d sign him like a shot if it were feasible: with his injury record, he’s unlikely to be available for a full season, but he’s worth a place in the squad for his effect on opposing defenders alone

Hope reborn?

2010-04-10T22:10:00.003+01:00

I said in my last post that I couldn’t see the Hornets winning another game this season: I’m happy to be have been proved wrong this afternoon. It was scrappy and ugly, and Plymouth offered precious little in the way of resistance (it’s odd to see an opposing team play with even less confidence than Watford), but still, a win’s a win.

As it stands, the maximum possible target for safety is 54 points (the most that Sheffield Wednesday, in the last relegation place, can get), which would meaning winning two of our last four games. Then again, if we beat Leicester next week and Wednesday lose (they’ve got their derby against United, incidentally – not a good time to be playing your arch rivals), our real points total and their maximum possible will be the same, making us as good as safe. Statistics can be comforting sometimes, can’t they?

Finally, in the style of Match Of The Day 2, here’s my ‘2 Good, 2 Bad’ from today’s game:

2 Good – Dale Bennett. God, that boy is a good defender. I think he won every single header he contested, and dealt with everything that came his way simply and effectively. I’ve never been so reassured by the presence of a teenage centre-back.

2 Bad – Liam Henderson. Has there ever been a Watford substitute whose arrival on the pitch leads to such a collective lowering of expectations? That was his 21st substitute appearance, and I honestly can’t remember him doing a single thing in any of those games that led me to believe he’s ever going to be worth a place in the starting line-up. I know it’s tough, being sent onto the pitch with 10 or 15 minutes to go with instructions to make things difficult for opposing defenders (at least, that’s what I imagine Malky tells him) – but does he have to do it in such a lumpen, clumsy and downright incompetent fashion?

The death of hope

2010-03-30T23:38:00.003+01:00

In the 15 minutes between the end of the first half of tonight’s game against Palace and the start of the second, all the hope drained out of me. It was the strangest thing. Like everyone else, I’d spent the first half leaping out of my seat every couple of minutes, clapping and singing and yelling and generally trying my damnedest to spur the Golden Boys on to glory.

And when none of it worked, something inside of me just gave up the ghost, in tacit acknowledgement that this was it. Those 45 minutes had been our chance to save our season, and we hadn’t taken it. I can’t pretend to have foreseen the second and third Palace goals, but they didn’t come as a surprise either.

It’s odd, because I’m normally a glass-half-full person when it comes to Watford, able to glimpse hope in the darkest hour. But during the second half tonight, I couldn’t even raise the energy to clap or shout. I wasn’t the only one, either. When Danny Graham scored our consolation goal, most of the people around me didn’t even stand up to celebrate. (I did, out of some kind of residual reflex.)

Maybe I’ll feel differently by the time the next home game rolls around. But right now, that feels like the defining game of our season.

Bees hate Hornets

2010-03-27T23:01:00.003Z

My friend Stuart, who is a Brentford fan, sent me an email a few days ago headed ‘33 years of hurt’; apparently March 23rd, 1977 was the date of Brentford’s most recent victory over Watford.

This matters a lot to Stuart, who regards Watford as one of Brentford’s natural rivals. It’s not just the similarity in the town names and nicknames; when we both started watching football, in the mid-70s, Brentford and Watford played each other a lot as we both bounced around the bottom two divisions. Back then, they had the greater claim to being a big club, having spent some years in the First Division before World War Two, while we were still trying in vain to escape the Third Division (South).

Brentford’s ongoing inability to beat Watford is one reason they harbour a grudge against us. The other is the quality of the ex-Hornets who have subsequently pitched up at Griffin Park. To this day, I only have to mention the name Ian Bolton to send Stuart into a lather. Evidently GT extracted every drop of talent and effort from Bolton before selling him to the Bees, because the hapless figure Brentford fans remember bears no relation to the defensive colossus we hold dear to our hearts.

Since then, a steady stream of former Watford players have enjoyed (if that’s the right word) inauspicious spells at Brentford. They currently have Lionel Ainsworth and Toumani Diagouraga on loan (neither of them any closer to being the finished article than when they left us, by all accounts), while Steve Kabba has been shipped out on loan to Burton Albion. The only honourable exception to this dismal litany is Dean Holdsworth, who established himself as a goalscoring hero at Griffin Park.

So while we smugly patronise non-league Luton (and I confess I smiled as I typed that) and idly debate who we should now regard as our arch rivals, spare a thought for Brentford fans, who may well be secretly hoping our current struggles continue, and that they finally get a chance to end their 33-year wait for a win over Watford next season.

Commercial break

2010-03-21T22:24:00.003Z

If you’re reading this, the chances are that you’re a Watford fan, which means that you may enjoy my new novel, First Time I Met The Blues.

The story starts in 1964, when three teenagers meet on the terraces at Vicarage Road. Bonding over their shared love of football and music, they form a blues band, and the novel charts their erratic progress over the next 25 years.

As the title suggests, the book is more concerned with music than football. But supporting Watford is a thread that runs through the central characters’ lives, to differing degrees – and that leads directly to a pivotal moment in the lives of one of them.

If you’re interested in finding out more, check out my other blog, First Time I Met The Blues, which also forms part of my website. And if you like the sound of it, please buy a copy while you’re there.

And that’s the end of the commercial break. Normal service (ie inconsequential ramblings about Watford and related matters) will resume shortly.

These little town blues

2010-03-11T23:12:00.002Z

Recently I’ve been dipping into The Book Of Watford, a lavish publication that my friend Stuart found in a second-hand shop and gave me for my birthday last year. Subtitled ‘A portrait of our town’, it’s a collection of historical photographs of Watford accompanied by extracts from the local papers, and it makes for fascinating reading.

But while the details of the evolution of the town are lovingly covered (with particular emphasis on roads and buildings), there are some glaring omissions. In the entire section on the 1960s, for instance, there’s only one mention of the local football team (a cup tie against Liverpool towards the end of the decade – and not even the most famous one, though admittedly that took place in 1970).

It doesn’t get any better in the 70s and 80s. I may be biased, but I was under the impression that Graham Taylor’s propulsion of the club from Division 4 to Division 1 helped to put Watford on the map, giving the town a recognisable identity to people who previously only knew it as the last town on the railway line before London, or the first major junction on the M1 heading north. At one point in the 80s, the local tourist board was even marketing weekend minibreaks in Watford, with a trip to Vicarage Road as the focal point.

But apart from a brief mention of the celebrations that followed the 1984 FA Cup final, all this goes unrecorded in the book, which seems quite bafflingy. I don’t think it’s just that I’m so wrapped up in my support for the Hornets that I’ve lost all sense of perspective. The fact is that, even when the team weren’t doing so well, 10,000-odd citizens of the town spent alternate Saturdays at Vicarage Road, their moods rising and falling with the fortunes of the team. How can you create a ‘portrait of our town’ and not take that into account?

Is half a game worse than no game at all?

2010-02-11T12:37:00.005Z

For the first time that I can remember, I missed a Watford goal – two of them, in fact – on Tuesday, having only arrived at half-time. Not my fault, but the result of one of those hugely frustrating cock-ups that only the British railway system seems capable of, which meant that I spent the best part of an hour on an overcrowded train at Euston, waiting for it to leave. I won’t bore you with the details.

Having arrived at Watford Junction at 8.15 and run/power-walked to the Vic just in time to hear the half-time whistle, I then had to sit through a second half that made a mockery of the effort I’d made to witness it.

I was going to write that this was the first time I’d ever missed the entire first half of a football match, but then I remembered that it wasn’t quite true. Back in the late 80s I went Interrailing with my friend Andy, and we spent a hectic (and sweltering) August day in Munich: Dachau concentration camp in the morning, the obligatory visit to a beer hall in the evening, and in between, what else but a trip to the Olympic Stadium to watch Bayern Munich in action. (I’m sure the city has some fine museums, galleries and historic buildings, but we only had one day and you’ve got to get your priorities right.)

It was a cunning plan, and I thought I’d cracked it when I consulted a tube map and found there was a station right by the ground. True, there was an asterisk leading to a note that said ‘only open on matchdays’, but that was no problem; this was a matchday, wasn’t it?

I don’t know if I misread the map, or if there was some exception to the rule I wasn’t aware of. I just remember the train ending its journey at the station before the one we wanted and the conductor turfing us off. Okay, we’ll get a bus, we thought – except that there weren’t any due at the stop outside the station for hours. The whole area was deserted, in fact, as only German towns can be on Saturday afternoons, when the shops close and everyone stays at home.

And so we ended up walking to the Olympic Stadium, through a vast residential area that was originally the 1972 Olympic Village, arriving – yes – in time to see the second half of the match (though we still had to pay the full ticket price,). I can’t remember who Bayern were playing, but I do remember that the inside of the stadium was unlike any I’d been in before and since –and that the 45 minutes of football I saw that day was a damn sight more entertaining than the second half against Bristol City.

Next time I’ll be getting an earlier train, that’s for sure.

This is getting ridiculous

2010-02-03T23:17:00.003Z

Having finally seen (and thoroughly enjoyed) my first Watford game since mid-December last night, I was disappointed to hear that the Palace match on Saturday 13th has had to be postponed because of their continued involvement in the FA Cup.

It can’t be helped, I suppose, but it does mean that Watford’s first home game on a Saturday afternoon in 2010 will be on February 27th - which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. I enjoy midweek games, but they are a bit of a chore to get to and from, especially in the depths of winter. Then there’s the inevitably smaller attendance for midweek games (I’m sure Sheffield United would have brought more fans down on a weekend), which hits the club’s bank balance at a time when every penny counts.

I’ve just worked out that of our 17 remaining league games, a maximum of five will take place on a Saturday afternoon at Vicarage Road - and that’s assuming that none get moved for TV. Like I said, ridiculous.

You’re my favourite

2010-01-06T20:57:00.006Z

Trying to think of something to write to usher in the fourth year of this blog, I realised that I’ve never listed my all-time top five Watford players. Those who’ve been reading carefully won’t be surprised to find that all five came through the Watford youth system (albeit that one of them signed fairly late) - somehow I can never feel the same affection for a player we’ve bought as I do for those we’ve raised.

5) Lloyd Doyley

No surprise here, either. A Watford legend in the making, and (I suspect and hope) destined to be an example of that increasingly rare phenomenon, the one-club man. The thing about Lloyd is that, unlike far too many footballers, he actually gets better as he gets older. Who’d have thought he’d be so good playing on the left, for example, or that he’d produce so many useful crosses this season. And as for the goal - no let’s not go there, the memory of missing it is still too painful.

4) John Barnes

Only number four? It’s true that if this was a list of the best footballers I’d ever seen in a Watford shirt, Digger would be right at the top, no shadow of a doubt. From the moment he came on a sub in a game against Oldham (I was there), it was obvious we had something special on our hands. So many memorable goals - one at home to Liverpool in the league (mentioned on WML today, funnily enough) sticks out in particular - and the kind of sublime skill most players can only dream about. And yet, churlish as it may seem to point this out, he wasn’t the most consistent of players. Maybe that’s inevitable - maybe gifts like that don’t lend themselves to consistency - but he’s the only player in this list who was capable of disappearing for a game or two.

3) Keith Mercer

Ah, my first favourite. I’ve written at length on Keith in an article that appeared in BSAD’s ‘Tributes’ section (you can read it here), so I won’t repeat myself. But I will repeat the description of the goal that typified his never-say-die attitude:

“One-nil up in a Second Round FA Cup tie against Colchester in 1977, Watford were still looking shaky when a clearance went bouncing harmlessly towards the Colchester penalty area. As the left back sauntered across to collect the loose ball he became aware of a bulky yellow and black object bearing down on him like a jet-propelled battering ram. Having sprinted half the length of the pitch, Keith had built up enough momentum to run straight through a brick wall, never mind reach the ball first. The hapless defender went flying like a skittle and Keith slotted the ball past the startled goalkeeper.”

2) Nigel Gibbs

I don’t need to explain to Watford fans why Gibbsy is so high on this list: say the phrase ‘model footballer’ and he’s the one I picture. Having said that, I think my championing of him was largely born of frustration with a succession of managers who relegated him to the sidelines in favour of ‘wing-backs’ who were better than him at getting forward and crossing the ball – and, repeatedly, worse at doing the job the full back is actually there for, ie defending. Darren Bazeley, Des Lyttle, even Patrick sodding Blondeau - they all kept Nigel out of the team, and thus denied him the all-time appearance record his ability and loyalty had earned him.

1) Luther Blissett

Still, if Nigel had to be kept off the top of the appearance list by anyone, it might as well be Luther (also the man who took Keith Mercer’s first team place, incidentally). As with Gibbsy, there was perhaps an element of protectiveness in my attitude to Luther, a reaction against the papers that labelled him ‘Luther Miss-it’, ignoring the fact that for every chance he missed, he scored from another. Even when he hit a hat trick on his England debut (in a 9-0 win against Luxembourg at Wembley - and yes, I was there), the press focused on the chances he spurned. He couldn’t win. But those of us who watched him every week knew his essential qualities: a born trier who would never let you down. The fact that he came back to the club twice after leaving only enhanced his legend.

What the hell is going on?

2009-12-16T23:29:00.003Z

Watford FC apparently stands on the brink of administration. Three key board members, including the chairman, have resigned, the club needs to find millions of pounds in a very short space of time in order to keep trading, the ground may have to be sold…

And at this critical juncture, it’s almost impossible to find out what’s going on. It’s become a cliché that the internet has made it possible to find out anything you want, at any time, but of course that isn’t true. You can only find out what someone wants to tell you.

I’ve just spent half an hour online trying to get an update on the situation. Normally I would rely on the WML, where you can normally get the inside track on events at club, or at least knowing hints about what’s going on. Not today – I haven’t had a digest for more than 24 hours. Whether it’s melted down under the weight of concerned messages (not to mention expressions of schadenfreude over the departure of Brendan Rodgers from Reading), or – conspiracy theory ahoy – it’s been shut down by the club somehow, I have no idea. I only know it’s not there when I need it.

Meanwhile, the national news outlets – the BBC, Reuters, the newspaper websites – haven’t updated their stories since around 11 o’clock this morning. The official club site is still carrying the statement that was posted after the AGM last night. The Watford Leisure site has the official announcements (including the suspension of trading of shares on the AIM), but nothing more.

So thank goodness for the Watford Observer, which has been updating the story throughout the day, as I just discovered. I’m not at all comforted by what I’ve read there – if Graham Taylor is worried, I’m terrified – but it is at least reassuring to know that the local paper is on the case if no one else is. If the worst does happen, I suspect we’ll hear it there first.

?@%&*!$ typical!

2009-12-07T22:43:00.005Z

Over the years, I’ve very rarely missed a Watford home game through illness. Maybe once every five years, on average. But yesterday I came down with a rather unpleasant bug of some kind – I won’t go into the details, let’s just say I can’t stray too far from the bathroom – and although I’ve been a bit better today, I’m still not eating, and I didn’t feel up to the trip to Vicarage Road.

Oh well, I thought, at least it’s on TV. Little did I know that I would thus be condemned to witness the most astonishing event seen at the Vic in years on a small screen in my living room, rather than from my usual vantage point in the Rookery. Lloyd Doyley scored, and I wasn’t there to see it.

They loved it on Sky, of course. “They’ll be printing up T-shirts saying ‘I was there when Doyley scored’,” said one of the commentators. And all I could think was: if they do, I can’t buy one, because I wasn’t there, was I?

Life really sucks sometimes.

An idiot writes

2009-11-29T14:23:00.003Z

A common definition of intelligence is the ability to learn from one’s mistakes. By that measure, I’m an idiot. I’ve been to Selhurst Park before – seven or eight times over the years, at a guess – to watch Watford play Palace, Wimbledon and even Charlton, and the experience has invariably been a miserable one. A trip to Selhurst is like going back to the 1970s, only grimmer.

That’s partly due to the Arthur Wait Stand, surely the crappiest accommodation for away fans in the top two divisions. I would rather stand on an open terrace than sit in those uncomfortable wooden tip-up seats (wooden seats – in the 21st century!) with just enough leg-room for a sickly 10-year-old. Yesterday, to complete the experience, my allotted seat was in the back row of the centre section, so I had the lip of the roof and a couple of pillars blocking my view of the action.

Meanwhile, on the pitch, Watford did as they always do at this sorry excuse for a ground and capitulated meekly. It wasn’t quite as bad as the 5-0 defeat against Wimbledon here in our first Premiership season, but it was just as dispiriting – the chaotic defending, Danny Graham’s pathetic penalty, the half-hearted attempts at attacking… I actually left before the end, something I’ve only ever done a couple of times in nearly 40 years of watching Watford.

As the Hornets chorus put it, in one of the few moments to bring a smile to my face: “Gone Christmas shopping, we should have gone Christmas shopping…”

Terry Challis RIP

2009-10-13T13:47:00.003+01:00

I’ve been on holiday for the past 10 days, and it hasn’t been a good time to be a Watford fan. First we lose 4-0 at home to Cardiff (a good one to miss, from the sound of it), complete with a howler from Scott Loach; then Scott repeats the trick in the England under-21 international, helping to inspire a Macedonian fightback; and now, just to put the tin lid on it, Terry Challis has died.

For anyone who doesn’t know (though what you’re doing reading this if you don’t, I can’t imagine), Terry ’s topical cartoons about Watford adorned the sports pages of the Watford Observer for many years – he was already there when I started reading it as a child, and still going until a couple of years ago, I believe.

As a result, he’s one of those people who have always seemed to me to be part of the very fabric of Watford FC, along with the likes of Elton John, Graham Taylor and Oliver Phillips (whose heartfelt tribute to Terry is well worth reading). His affection for the club was obvious in every cartoon he drew, and his mischievous take on the previous week’s game was always the first thing I read in the paper.

A couple of years ago, the paper mentioned the possibility of reprinting Terry’s classic poster, first published in the early dawn of the Elton and GT era, depicting the road ahead for the Hornets in an allegorical manner. I put my name down for one, but nothing ever happened. I hope they reconsider now – I suspect it would sell out. And I hope the club finds a suitable way to commemorate him. He deserves it.

On the boos

2009-09-21T13:32:00.004+01:00

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was rare for the Watford fans to boo the team off the pitch at half-time. It was a sanction that was reserved for those first-half performances where the team really didn’t look like they were trying, or where they just looked clueless.

There was more half-time booing last season than ever before, though – some of it justified, some of it arguably not. And when it happened again on Saturday, I did start to wonder what’s going on. Okay, it wasn’t our greatest ever first 45 minutes, but it was far from our worst. The formation wasn’t working, Henri Lansbury’s tricks and flicks were stubbornly refusing to come off, and we’d given away two soft goals against muscular, more than competent opposition. Not the end of the world, and – as the second half so gloriously proved – by no means irreversible. So why boo?

My only conclusion is that to some people in the Rookery, booing as the players go off at half-time is merely their way of saying they’re unhappy about the score, rather than a criticism directed at the players or manager.

Either that, or they’re morons.

It’s good to be back

2009-09-13T23:21:00.004+01:00

Finally, my first game of the season, and a corker too. A few miscellaneous observations from the 1-0 win over Barnsley:

- Henri Lansbury - wow! He must be a nightmare to play against, what with his incessant running and pressing, not to mention his skill on the ball. And the showboating must get on their nerves too.

- Was that really Dale Bennett’s first start for the first team? A fine example of a young player grasping his chance with both hands.

- And how satisfying that our first league clean sheet of the season came with a back four composed entirely of Academy products.

- That nurses’ home they’re building on the back of the Rookery is considerably larger than I was expecting. Still, it should be less drafty this winter now that both corners have been filled in.

- Cudos to Richard Walker for the new-look programme, and in particular for bringing back the section on the statistics page that shows each player’s total number of Watford appearances. It disappeared for the last two seasons, to my immense frustration. (I know. Humour me.) Just to confirm how new this squad is, we now have only four players with more than 100 Watford appearances - and one of those is Richard Lee, who’s unlikely to feature until we sell Scott Loach in the January transfer window.

The phoney war

2009-08-12T23:39:00.004+01:00

For the second year in a row, the misalignment of my holiday dates and the fixture list (ie when Watford are at home, I’m away) means that I’m not going to see my first game of the season until mid-September. As a result, these early weeks have an unreal quality, as if the matches the team are playing, and the movements of players in and out of the club, don’t really apply to me as a Watford fan.

Thus the departure of Tamas Priskin to Ipswich last week, while I was eating cheese and drinking red wine in France, seems more like a dream than a news story. Not that it was all that unexpected. He joins the likes of Lee Cook and Hameur Bouazza in being promising, but largely underwhelming, for a couple of seasons, finally fulfilling that promise for six months, and promptly buggering off at the first sign of attention from a rival club. Mind you, the fates of Cook and Bouazza suggest that we’re likely to be seeing a lot of him at Championship level - and no higher - in the years to come.

One thing all three players mentioned above have in common is that they were signed at a relatively young age from elsewhere, and I like to believe that a player who’d come up through the Watford Academy wouldn’t treat us so shabbily. Which brings me, as ever at this time of the year, to the naming of my favourite player. Well, obviously it’s Lloyd Doyley again, the player who gets better with each passing year*. And this season he’s going to score a goal. No, really.

*You’d think this would be true of all footballers, given the amount of expensive coaching they receive, yet that’s manifestly not the case.

Are you ready for this?

2009-07-28T23:59:00.003+01:00

The new season, that is. Because I’m not. I can’t believe it starts a week on Saturday. Apart from anything else, I haven’t been on my summer hols yet. By the time I get back, the first team will already have played five games. (Well, four actually, assuming that Malky upholds the tradition of giving the reserves a run-out in the 1st Round of the League Cup.)

In my mind, the football season should start on the third Saturday in August. (Pauses to consult the bible, aka Trefor Jones’s Watford Season By Season.) Hah! In 1977, when I was 15 and GT was our new manager, the first league game was on Saturday August 20th. That sounds about right. In fact, in the early 80s the season started even later – it was August 29th in 1981, and I see nothing wrong with that.

I suppose the early start is something to do with all those blank international weekends – that, or the megalomania of football administrators, who are seemingly determined to trample over every other sport. Personally, I’d like to enjoy the drama of the Ashes a bit longer before I start having to worry about the exact composition of the Watford defence, or who’s going to score our goals this season. But maybe that’s just me.

To-do list

2009-05-26T22:54:00.002+01:00

A bit late I know, but I just wanted to say well done - to Brendan, to the players, to the board, hell, even to the fans. To have got through the past 12 months and come away with a 13th-place finish in the Championship is quite an achievement, all things considered. And to finish with a smile on our faces is, if anything, even more of an achievement.

Last season (2007/08) was, as I kept saying at the time, a very strange season - and so was this season, albeit for different reasons. Above all, because, no matter what was happening in the boardroom or the dugout, the goals kept flowing (at both ends). Who’d have guessed, after the tedium of last season, that Vicarage Road would see more goals than any other Championship stadium? And that the last game of the season would see us so far ahead at half-time that the Rookery could spend the second half yelling ‘Shooooot!’ at Lloyd Doyley every time he got the ball in the opposition’s half? (Mind you, I was so confident that Lloydinho was finally going to break his duck that I put a tenner on him to score. Maybe next season...)

Others have reviewed the season gone by a lot more thoroughly than I can. So for what it’s worth, here are a few things I think Watford need to do to build on the progress made in 2008/09:

1) Sort the pitch out
A few years ago, the club boasted about some new technology they’d used whereby the grass was interwoven with plastic or something, making it stronger and more resilient. I can only assume the plastic melted, because for the last couple of seasons, the Vicarage Road pitch has been a disgrace. I’m sure the Saracens are partly to blame, but I can’t believe it’s entirely down to them that the pitch is bumpy and skiddy, often both at the same time. Bottom line: if we want to play proper passing football, we need to lay a new pitch and look after it properly.

2) Buy Gregor Rasiak
A tricky one, this: reports repeatedly stress that he wants a hefty sum in wages, the sort of sum we really can’t afford these days. Only this morning I read that Sheffield Wednesday have given up hope of signing him for precisely that reason. So I can only hope that he’s developed enough affection for Watford in his time here to take a pay cut, because he makes a real difference to our front line: strong in the air, skilful on the ground, able to hold the ball up and gobble up the slightest of half-chances, Old Greg is the kind of all-round striker we’ve seen all too rarely in recent years. Especially if Priskin buggers off elsewhere (as I suspect he will), we need Rasiak.

3) Give youth a chance
Our youth, I mean. Brendan keeps talking about his passion for developing young players, but so far he’s preferred to give match experience to other clubs’ young players. It’s hard to object to Jack Cork, who is clearly a star in the making and already out of our league. But Bridcutt, Hoyte, Rose - why did these players get game time ahead of the likes of Jordan Parkes and Lewis Young? And how many loans does Theo Robinson have to go on before the Watford hierarchy makes up its mind as to whether he’s worthy of a place in OUR team? I don’t pretend to know whether these youngsters are going to make it, but I do know that we’ll only find out by playing them in the Watford first team in serious competitive games.

4) Keep talking
An obvious point really, but after the secrecy and mistrust of the Simpson-Ashton regime, it’s essential for the new board to keep talking openly and honestly to the fans. We know that there are difficult decisions to made, and that we’re not out of the financial woods just yet. All we ask is that you tell it like it is.

The best trip I’ve ever been on?

2009-03-09T21:56:00.003Z

As someone who generally only manages to get to two or three away matches a season, Saturday’s game at Charlton gave me the relatively rare experience of witnessing an away win, and an entertaining one at that. But when I got to thinking about my most memorable awaydays as a Watford fan, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that they all occurred in my youth...

5) Southampton, 26/8/80
A balmy August night on the south coast, and a comprehensive 4-0 defeat in the League Cup 2nd round, 1st leg. The main thing I remember is a defiant chant of ‘Elton John’s Taylor-made army’ that seemed to last for the entire second half, long after the game, and thus presumably the tie, was lost. That, and the fact that my friend and next-door neighbour Nigel, who drove me to most of the away games I attended in those days, couldn’t make the 2nd leg the following week – not that he was going to miss much...

4) Hillingdon Borough, 11/12/76
Coming a week after my 14th birthday, this FA Cup 2nd round tie at Yeading’s ground in west London must have been one of my first away games, if not the first. It was absolutely perishing, and where we stood behind the goal we had a perfect view of Andy Rankin letting a goal through his legs. For a time it looked as though the Hornets were going to go out to non-league opposition, but in the end they scraped home 3-2. Fat lot of good it did them - they lost by the same score to Northwich Victoria in the next round on an even colder day. I wasn’t in Cheshire to see it, but I remember sitting in my bedroom in Bushey Heath, huddled against the radiator, despairing as the final score came through on the radio.

3) Luton, some time in the early 80s
I don’t remember the date, or the score (though we probably lost – we usually did). I do remember being squashed onto a primitive terrace in a dump of a ground, and afterwards, standing trapped among hundreds of Watford fans as bottles and bricks started raining down on us... One of my more seasoned companions led us on a breakaway down a side street and then an alley that, miraculously, led us back to our car and the chance to escape back to the M1 without further drama. I’ve never been back.

2) Arsenal, 14/3/87
A rare example of an away game I actually remember for the football. This was Graham Taylor’s Watford in excelsis, beating one of the great teams on their own ground and deserving to do so. But mainly I remember that astonishing third goal, when the entire Arsenal team stopped playing in expectation of the referee’s whistle while Luther Blissett galloped towards us, the ball at his feet, and duly scored the goal that secured the win. What a moment.

1) Coventry, 9/12/80
Nigel and his mates picked me up straight from school for this Tuesday-night fixture, a League Cup 5th round replay following a 2-2 draw at the Vic the previous week. We had high hopes, but somehow it all went horribly wrong and we lost 5-0 - still the (joint) worst defeat I’ve seen the Hornets suffer. On the way home we stopped in a lay-by, where Nigel retrieved some cans of lager from the boot. We drank them as we made our way back down the motorway, listening to John Peel on the radio. John Lennon had been murdered the day before and Peel played nothing but Lennon and Beatles songs all night, which we sang along to, at first mournfully, and then with growing gusto. I was just 18 and I’d never felt so grown-up – so alive.

A helluva week

2009-03-01T23:39:00.003Z

There are some weeks you just want to get to the end of. On Monday my employer announced a programme of redundancies and financial cutbacks designed to steer the company through the choppy waters of the next year or so. My job is safe for the time being, but the atmosphere around the office has been a bit tense all week, as you can imagine. Meanwhile, a family member went into hospital for an operation on Wednesday, and that’s been the cause of plenty more stress, for reasons I won’t go into here.

So I really needed a trip to Vicarage Road yesterday – especially as a combination of postponements, family commitments and holidays meant I hadn’t seen a game for a month. The last game I saw was the FA Cup tie against Palace, but a lot has changed in the interim. The defence looks more solid with Williamson at its heart, Cowie was impressive on the left wing... but you know all that. The really big news is that we have a song! I’m sure ‘Hoist up the Watford flag’ (a nifty adaptation of ‘Sloop John B’) has been nicked from another set of supporters, but who cares – as chorus after chorus rang out from the Rookery, I felt my spirits lift.

In truth, it wasn’t a great game, thanks mainly to Palace’s constant niggling – charmless nerks, the lot of them, as Norman Stanley Fletcher would have said. But to me, it was one of those afternoons that epitomise the joy of supporting a football team. I got to celebrate two goals (one of them possibly offside, the other untidily bundled over the line), bite my fingernails as our defence indulging in some last-ditch clearances, abuse Neil Warnock (always a pleasure), sing a rousing new song... and, for 90 minutes, forget all about life outside the stadium. And that, for me at least, is a big part of what football is for.

That was the month that was

2009-02-04T23:42:00.003Z

The trouble with being an occasional blogger is that sometimes there’s simply too much going on. Over the past month, every time I’ve started to compose a new post in my head, it’s been superceded by some fresh event that seems worthy of comment before I’ve managed to crystallise my thoughts on the last one.

January 2009 brought big stuff for Watford fans - big, BIG stuff, like, ooh, I don’t know, the departure of the chairman and chief executive, the subsequent revelations (courtesy of the Watford oracle, Oliver Phillips) about what went on while they were in charge, and then the announcement of a new board featuring Graham Taylor. There was small stuff that seemed to deserve comment as well, like Brendan Rodgers’ ludicrous substitutions in the FA Cup tie against Palace, decisions that almost cost us the game. That had me spitting feathers, I can tell you. There was nerve-jangling stuff, like the agonising wait for the transfer window to shut before any important players could be lured away from Vicarage Road. There was even some football played, of gradually increasing quality as the month went on.

So for now, I’m just going to comment on one small story: the departure of Moses Ashikodi, released from his contract without another club to go to. His is a typical enough story: promising young player arrives, plays a couple of games, picks up an injury, recovers, goes out on loan and then leaves again, having barely made a mark on the club. Moses only started one game for the Hornets – the 4-1 win against Stockport in the FA Cup 3rd Round a couple of years ago, in which he scored – yet I was impressed enough by his performance to be hopeful that he’d be an integral part of the first-team squad this season.

The stats from his loan spells at Bradford, Swindon and Hereford since then suggest that was wishful thinking - a return of three goals in two years in the lower divisions doesn’t exactly make a powerful case. Injuries played a part in that, I gather, and who knows what else. I’ve watched enough football to understand that sometimes, talent and athleticism can be undermined by other factors, factors that are covered by words like ‘temperament’ and ‘personality’.

Maybe that was the case with Moses – I don’t know. Either way, he now joins the list of those who gave us the briefest glimpse of their potential while they were at Watford before fading from the scene again. And that always makes me a little sad.

Why do it the hard way?

2009-01-04T23:10:00.003Z

One thing that really annoyed me at yesterday’s cup tie against Scunthorpe (even more than Jobi McAnuff’s continuing inability to deliver a cross when he has the ball in an attacking position) was something I overheard. “I hope we beat this lot today,” said someone in the row behind me, “and then draw Manchester United in the next round.”

This kind of witless statement really gets my goat. The point of entering a cup competition, surely, is to win it. To do so, you need to beat a series of teams. Therefore it follows that you want the opposition set in front of you to be as beatable as possible, yes? Not Manchester sodding United, who would doubtless field their junior team and wipe the floor with us.

I can just about understand this attitude from players (I heard it repeatedly on Five Live in the post-match interviews with plucky lower- and non-league victors on the way home from yesterday’s match), who recognise that a tie against a ‘glamour’ club is a rare opportunity to put themselves in the shop window. But from fans? I don’t get it.

And before you object that the value of a cup run is somehow proportional to the status of the teams you beat, answer me this: who did Watford beat on their way to the final in 1984? I had to look it up myself, even though I was at most of the ties: Luton, Charlton, Brighton, Birmingham and Plymouth. All decent enough clubs (well, with one notable exception, soon to be non-league no-hopers), but hardly the A list. But who remembers, and who cares? The record books say that we reached the final, and that’s all most of us know, or need to.

So if we get to the final this season by beating Scunthorpe, Leicester, Kettering, Crewe and Hartlepool, I for one won’t be thinking: “Isn’t it a shame we didn’t get to play Chelsea or Arsenal?” Cobblers to that. If Cardiff can get to the final, so can we. Bring it on!

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time...

2008-11-30T23:22:00.003Z

I can’t bring myself to write anything about yesterday’s farrago. I’m just going to keep reminding myself that Brendan Rodgers has been waiting to manage a football club for 15 years, so maybe it’s understandable if he’s behaving like a kid with the key to a sweetshop right now. With a bit of luck he’ll calm down soon.

Instead I’m just going to post the link to a wonderful YouTube video that takes me right back to my teenage years. Enjoy!

You’ve had your fun

2008-11-03T23:17:00.002Z

Well, so much for that. Forget everything I’ve written in the past couple of weeks. With Aidy gone, so is the fun – and the hope of greater things for Watford. I’d love to be proved wrong, but common sense says that with money as tight as a gnat’s chuff, our chances of hiring a half-decent manager are on a par with Russell Brand’s chances of taking over Jonathan Ross’s chat show.

The benefits of amputation

2008-10-26T21:36:00.004Z

When I drive to Watford games, I always park in the same place: a school playground in Watford Fields. For as long as I’ve been parking there, the bloke who takes the money at the entrance has had something wrong with his left foot. It’s invariably been in bandages or plaster, and sometimes he’s needed a stick to help him walk.

When I arrived yesterday, he didn’t have a stick – he had a wheelchair, and a bandaged stump where the bottom half of his left leg used to be. As I wound down the car window, he greeted me as he always does: “How are you today?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” I replied. (Actually I’ve got a touch of ’flu at the moment, but it didn’t seem appropriate to mention it.) “You don’t look so good, though.”

"No, no – I feel better than I have done for years,” he assured me. “Don’t worry about me. I’m still alive and kicking – well, maybe not kicking,” he added with a smile, nodding down at his stump.

As I was walking up Occupation Road a few minutes later, it occurred to me that this wasn’t such a bad metaphor for what’s happened to Watford in the last few months. The limb that we initially thought was indispensible was the piles of filthy lucre we were promised when we won the play-off final. But as it turned out, it was diseased from the start, riddled with raised expectations and pressure to succeed at all costs. The ultimate result was the creeping ossification that was last season [apologies if I’m muddling my medical terminology here; I’m a writer, not a doctor].

Then, over the summer, came the amputation, as signalled by the sales of Darius Henderson and Danny Shittu and the admission that we needed the money more than we needed decent players. For a few weeks we all fretted and wrung our hands and wondered where all the money had gone.

Then the season began, and what do you know? It’s the most fun we’ve had in years, with entertaining, incident-packed games, a committed squad full of spirit, and a general sense that anything could happen at any time. Unfortunately, you get the feeling that Aidy won’t be happy until we grind out a succession of efficient but dull 1-0 wins, but I doubt he’ll get his wish any time soon.

Of course, this feeling of joyous unpredictability will probably only last until the transfer window opens in January and the asset-strippers move in. I doubt we could survive a second amputation quite so cheerfully. So let’s enjoy it while we can. I know I am.

The pantomime season

2008-10-21T23:17:00.003+01:00

That’s surely how we’re going to remember 2008/09 if it goes on the way it’s begun. Bizarre injuries, the goal that wasn’t, Watford conceding ridiculous numbers of penalties, a Watford keeper actually saving a penalty (never mind three in a row), sendings-off, deflected goals, unlikely comebacks – it’s not even November and there’s already been enough incident for two or three seasons.

And I’ll tell you what – it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than last season. Aidy might be tearing his hair out, but for me at least, Watford matches have become something to look forward to again.

A question of balance

2008-08-30T13:23:00.003+01:00

If a footballer is lucky enough to have a full career, they’re probably looking at about 18 years of first-team football, divided into three phases:

Promising – from around 18, when a player is likely to break into the first team, to 23, they’re still developing and learning their trade. But if they haven’t become a first-team regular by 23, they’re probably never going to be one
Prime time – most footballers (apart from goalkeepers, who mature later) are be at their peak between the ages of 24 and 29
Past it – anyone over 30 is liable to be referred to as ‘grandad’ by teammates and fans alike. In fact, modern fitness regimes mean that plenty of players are capable of delivering the goods well into their 30s if they don’t get injured

I’ve always thought that as a manager, you probably want a squad that’s composed of roughly equal numbers from these three categories: a group of eager youngsters to give the team energy; a core of players in their prime who can be relied on to perform week in, week out; and a few wise old heads who can slot in when experience is required.

So how does this year’s Watford squad measure up? Here’s a breakdown by age on the first day of the season (August 9th):

19 – O’Toole, Robinson
20 – Loach, Ainsworth, Bangura
21 – Mariappa, Ashikodi, Avinel
22 – Hoskins, Priskin
23 – Sadler

25 – Doyley, Lee
26 – McAnuff, Williamson, Williams
28 – Bromby, Demerit, Eustace, Harley, Smith
29 – Francis, Rasiak

36 – Poom

I’ve only included players who’ve already appeared in the first team in the league or FA Cup – obviously, if you take into account the likes of Lewis Young, Liam Henderson and Jordan Parkes, all of them regulars in the League Cup squad, the picture becomes even more skewed towards the younger end of the scale.

But even without them, you can see the problem: plenty of raw young talent, a solid bunch of players in their prime – but not a single outfield player over 30, someone Aidy could put on the pitch to shore up a hole or calm down a tricky situation, not to mention using their experience to mentor younger players. I’m thinking of the role played by Chris Powell, for example, when he was at the club.

Then again, it’s good to know that most of the first team are at their professional peak, or should be. And looking at the squad listed by age helps to make sense of Aidy’s transfer policy since the turn of the year, with Bromby, Eustace, Harley and Rasiak all helping to bulk out the experienced end of the squad, and only Sadler and Collins John under 24.

The other thing that becomes painfully obvious is something we already knew: the lack of experience up front. Last year we had King, Henderson, Ellington and Kabba, all of them in the prime of their careers: this year we’ve got Rasiak (currently injured) and then a selection of promising strikers with very little pedigree. A pessimist would wonder where the goals are going to come from: an optimist would say the opportunity is there for one or more of the youngsters to make a name for themselves…

Thank the Lloyd

2008-08-13T23:17:00.003+01:00

It was a great relief to return from my summer hols and discover that Lloyd Doyley is not only still at the club, but was first-choice right back for the opening game of the season. What’s more, he was even captain for the League Cup tie last night. You just can’t keep a good man down, and thank god for that.

So I don’t have to worry about choosing a new favourite player this season: Lloyd has held the title for a few years now, and maybe this will be the season when he finally scores that goal.

Hey, we can all dream...

A few good men

2008-07-29T22:55:00.002+01:00

I’m old enough to remember when foreign players were a novelty, and having one in your team was a sign of daring. In 1981, when Graham Taylor signed Dutchman Jan Lohman from Belgian club Sporting Lokeren (which was confusing as well as exciting), it was only three years since the arrival of Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa at Spurs had alerted English clubs to the fact that it was actually legal to sign players who weren’t natives of the British Isles.

Still, it’s only in the past decade or so that buying foreign players has become commonplace, at Vicarage Road as elsewhere. And you have to say, Watford managers haven’t generally made the best choices. There have been a few foreign imports who’ve started well and then faded away, either through injury (Ronnie Rosenthal, ‘Bunion’ Ben Iroha), a drop in form (Espen Baardsen, Johann Cavalli) or general lunacy (Xavier Gravelaine). There have been plenty who have been, well, not very good in the first place, such as Johann Gudmundsson, Pierre Issa, Paul Okon, Ramon Vega and my all-time least favourite Watford player, Patrick Blondeau. And there have been far too many who have been all but invisible to all but the most dedicated followers of the reserve team - award yourself a point if you ever saw Lars Melvang, Sietes, Herwig Walker, Adam Griffiths, Adrian Bakalli or Tony Meola in action.

So choosing my all-time favourite foreign Watford players wasn’t actually all that difficult when it came down to it. Here they are, in reverse order. (NB: For the purposes of this list I’ve ignored anyone from the British Isles - sorry, Dominic Foley - and anyone whose international selection was achieved using the Jack Charlton “You like Guinness, you must be Irish” principle – sorry Micah, sorry Marlon):

5) Nordin Wooter (Netherlands, 1999-2002, 70 games, 3 goals)
Look in the dictionary under ‘flattering to deceive’ and you’ll find a picture of Wooter – but by God, it was fun watching him deceive us. For much of his time at Vicarage Road he seemed on the verge of becoming the best winger in the world, handicapped only by a mystifying unwillingness to actually cross the ball or shoot at the goal. Just once, it all came together: a home game against Norwich on a sunny spring day when he picked up the ball around the halfway line, dribbled around the entire Canaries defence (or so it seemed at the time) and thumped the ball into the net with the aplomb of a man who knew he was capable of it all the time. For that goal alone, he makes my top five.

4) Allan Nielsen (Denmark, 2000-03, 113 games, 19 goals)
One of those midfielders you only really appreciate when they’re no longer there (from Les Taylor to Gavin Mahon, Watford has a history of them), Nielsen ran his socks off for Watford during some tough times, providing unparalleled commitment and a handy knack of appearing in the six-yard box in time to get on the end of a cross. But what I really remember is his final game, and the moving farewell the Rookery gave him when Ray Lewington substituted him a few minutes from the end. Not many players get that kind of send-off.

3) Filippo Galli (Italy, 2001-02, 29 games, 1 goal)
Vialli signed a lot of rubbish, but Galli was his one undisputed gem, a central defender of true class and grace, capable of snuffing out an attack and redistributing the ball with the minimum of fuss. Not for him the clumsy foul or the hurried booting of the ball into the back of the stand. Seeing Galli play in the heart of Watford’s defence was like turning up at the pub to watch your local blues band and finding that the guitarist has been replaced by Eric Clapton. In that miserable season, he was one of the few players I truly admired.

2) Richard Johnson (Australia, 1991-2003, 278 games, 22 goals)
It’s the goals I remember most – above all, a last-minute screamer to beat Wolves in a midweek game when GT was in charge of the opposition. Looking at the stats, I’m surprised to find he only scored 22, or around 2 for each season he was at the club. I suppose the fact that those he scored were mostly spectacular long-range efforts that left goalkeepers looking foolish tricks the memory. As for his midfield skills, I don’t have the appreciation of tactics necessary to do justice to them. I only know that his enforced absence due to injury for the majority of that first season in the Premiership was one of the main reasons we went down. If only...

1) Heidar Helguson (Iceland, 2000-2005, 199 games, 64 goals)
What can you say about Heidar? There have been better strikers at Watford - you wouldn’t bet on him in a one-on-one with the keeper, for instance – but few who were more whole-hearted. His heading ability still astounds me when I recall it, the way he could outjump defenders who were a foot taller than him. He never stopped running, never stopped trying, even when he was inexplicably stuck out on the wing by Vialli. I’d take him back in a flash, even now. You want strikers in your team who look like all they want to do is score goals, and that is Heidar Helguson.

Au revoir to the French connection

2008-07-14T23:47:00.004+01:00

As far as I can tell, the sale of Toumani Diagouraga to Hereford a couple of weeks ago puts an end to the much-vaunted ‘French connection’ that saw talented young players plucked from the Parisian suburbs and whisked off to Vicarage Road (or London Colney, at any rate). There were articles in the Watford Observer and on the club website, and a general sense that we’d stolen a march on bigger clubs by scouting players they hadn’t spotted.

But what did it all amount to in the end? Diagouraga, touted a year or two back as ‘the new Vieira’, only managed six first-team appearances – and three of those were in the League Cup. Now he seems to have found his level a couple of divisions lower down the league.

Then there were Marvin Homand and Gauthier Diafutua, neither of whom got within a sniff of the first-team squad, disappearing quietly out of the back door after a season or two in the reserves. A quick Google reveals that Diafutua is now with AFC Tubize, newly promoted to the Belgian 1st Division, while Homand is nowhere to be found.

The exception, of course, is Hameur Bouazza, who we got one half-decent season out of before he decided he was destined for bigger things and buggered off to Fulham. (I noticed the other day that they’re thinking of lending him to Charlton this year - so much for bigger things...)

Maybe the money we got for Hameur paid for the whole operation, and a one in four success rate – however briefly we got to enjoy that success – isn’t so bad. But I can’t help feeling sad that what was talked up as a potential injection of gallic flair into the Hornets squad ended up producing about as much invigoration as a couple of cans of Red Bull.

Thank God it’s all over

2008-05-20T22:18:00.004+01:00

I’ve had a week to digest it, and I haven’t changed my opinion that 2007/08 was one of the most unpleasant, and strangest, seasons I can remember in thirtysomething years of supporting the Hornets. Unpleasant because of the combination of hopeless football on the pitch and seething rancour in the stands – how many times were the team booed off the pitch at half- and/or full-time? And strange because for much of this time, in the midst of the mindless hoofing and the angry jeering, we sat at the top of the table and dared to dream of promotion. Even despite the painful end-of-season slump, I make this the 13th most successful season in Watford’s history (behind eight years in the top flight, three promotion seasons and one previous failed attempt at the play-offs).

It was also strange for being so utterly joyless. We football fans, hardened cynics as we are, can usually find something to laugh about, even in the pit of despair. Take the Vialli season: it was absolute pants, but I still have fond memories of the uselessness of Blondeau, Vega and Hughes (you had to laugh or else you’d cry), Pierre Issa falling off the stretcher, the inability of Paul Okon to make any impression whatsoever on a match...

Yet the hardened cynic and the incurable optimist live side by side, often in the same person, and the spirit Watford displayed in those two play-off games has given us a reason to dream again, and to utter that deathless phrase: there’s always next season. Even while acknowledging that the standard of the Championship is unlikely to be so low again for a while (well, at least until this season’s three promoted teams come back down in a year’s time), there are grounds for optimism.

For me, the main one is Aidy’s public acknowledgement that he needs to give the younger players in the squad a chance to show what they can do. He’s said this before, of course, without necessarily keeping his promise. This year only John-Joe O’Toole broke into the first team, though it seems likely that Jordan Parkes would have done the same if it weren’t for an untimely injury that ultimately forced Aidy to buy a replacement for Jordan Stewart rather than using the player he’d been grooming for the role.

Next year I hope to see, at the very least, Parkes and Theo Robinson making the matchday squad regularly. Moses Ashikodi ought to get a chance, too, and there’s been much talk of Scott Loach taking over the goalie’s jersey (though it’s a brave manager who pitches a 20-year-old with half a season of 4th division football behind him straight into the maelstrom of the Championship). Then there’s Tamas Priskin, who’s still only 21 – his status as an international makes it easy to forget that he’s still learning his trade.

Add to them a fit Gareth Williams, and maybe an experienced striker and centre-half, and you’ve got the makings of a decent squad. We’ll see. And we’ll also see if Aidy can keep another of his promises - to freshen up the playing style. God knows he needs to.

Must we throw this filth at our kids?

2008-04-27T14:43:00.005+01:00

On my way to the game yesterday, I found myself walking along Liverpool Road and up Occupation Road behind a man and his young son. From the questions the boy was asking, it was clear that this was his very first football match. For instance, he asked if there would be commentary, like on the telly, and his dad had to explain that no, there wouldn’t, but they would announce the names of goalscorers and substitutes.

Mind you, dad was clearly far from an expert himself: when his son asked what time the match kicked off, he answered with a rather hesitant “Three o’clock – at least, I think so.” Apparently he’d only been to two football matches before: a Bristol derby when he was a student in that city, and a Liverpool v Everton FA Cup final at Wembley which ended in a draw, which must therefore have been the 1989 final.

The main question going through my head at this stage was: why now? Why break an 18-year gap between matches with Watford v Scunthorpe? Dad wasn’t dressed smartly enough for one of the corporate hospitality areas, so they were presumably attending as paying punters. And it seemed unlikely they were armchair Hornets who’d finally decided to see a match in person, especially as dad reeled off a list of all the replica shirts the boy owned, which included those of Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea.

In contrast, after the match, the main question that occurred to me was: would either of them ever return to Vicarage Road? Why would anyone want to sit through another 90 minutes of the tentative, unimaginative football currently served up by Aidy’s team, unless (like me) they had years of emotional investment in the club?

Then again, my first game at Vicarage Road was in 1970, a season when we only won six games and scored 18 goals at home. From there it got steadily worse, with two relegations in the next four seasons - but somehow it didn’t matter to me, and I was still there when GT arrived to make everything better.

So maybe that innocent little six-year-old won’t have been put off by the shower of shite he witnessed yesterday. As for me, I just want the season to be over now.

The joy of bets

2008-04-07T23:20:00.005+01:00

The HornetsBet link is one of the better features of the official site – which, let’s face it, no one would bother with if it wasn’t for the occasional snippet of genuine news lurking among the marketing messages.

I usually have a few punts before each home game, betting a maximum of five quid on various items, at anything between one pound and two pounds fifty a time. First goalscorer is one of my more successful categories, as the odds are so crudely calculated (not surprisingly, since the Bet365 site as a whole carries odds for a bewildering variety of sporting possibilities). Strikers get the shortest odds, then wingers, central midfielders, centre-backs and finally full-backs – okay, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but not a lot. So if your side has a regular penalty taker who doesn’t play up front, for instance, the odds on him getting the first goal will be longer than they should be.

In Watford’s case, this means that Danny Shittu is usually a decent 16-1 to score the first goal in a game, despite his record this year; ditto John-Joe O’Toole, who looks to have more goals in him than most Hornets midfielders of recent years.

Since I’m putting on such small amounts, it’s barely worth betting on anything where the odds are shorter than 10-1. I often have a punt on a slightly unlikely score - usually 3-1 (NB: I never, ever bet against Watford), since we’ve won a few games by that score this season - and sometimes I try one of the ‘Match specials’, things like ‘Watford to score a penalty’ (actually, I don’t think I’ve ever put money on that) or ‘Watford to win from behind’.

And finally, just for fun, I usually do a ‘Scorecast’, where you have to predict not only the first goalscorer, but also the final score. It’s a bit like a horse racing accumulator, and just as unlikely to come off. So if I could work out why, when I sat down to place my bets on Saturday morning, I selected ‘Nathan Ellington’ and ‘Watford win 2-1’ from the dropdown menus - what mystical force was influencing my mouse hand, what powerful visions of the future I was subconsciously channelling – I’d gladly tell you. The truth is, it seemed as likely as any other eventuality in this topsy-turvy season, and as a result I’m now £35 richer.

PS: Well, you didn’t expect me to write about the actual match, did you?

No one likes us...

2008-02-17T22:35:00.004Z

Having seen two of the three games in what may turn out to be a defining week in Watford’s season (one of the oddest I can remember in my 38 years of supporting the ’orns), I’d like to make two observations about Aidy Boothroyd’s team.

The first is that we are *not* one of the two best teams in the Championship this season. West Brom made mincemeat of us at the Vic in the autumn, and in both games against Charlton, they’ve managed to make us look very pedestrian at times. Indeed, though it pains me to say it, numerous visitors to Vicarage Road – some of them nowhere near the promotion places – have shown far more attacking flair than the Golden Boys.

The second is that it doesn’t matter, because this Watford team has a quality of sheer cussedness that makes it more than capable of overcoming its limited ability. Defending a one-goal lead with 10 men for an entire half; coming back from the dead to steal two points from a promotion rival – these are feats not to be underestimated, feats that not many teams are capable of.

What’s also clear is that it irritates the hell out of opposing fans and managers, who – in the past week alone – have variously accused us of being boring, lucky and favoured by the referee. But who cares? We’ve already beaten 13 of the other 23 teams in this division, and we’ve got a second crack at eight of the remaining 10.

I still don’t feel qualified to predict where Watford will finish this season, but I’m pretty sure it will be somewhere between first and sixth. I just can’t see this dogged, bloody-minded (and occasionally brilliant, let’s not forget that) team letting even a play-off place slip out of its grasp.

Oh, and the two teams who’ve definitely escaped a beating this season? QPR and Charlton. And guess which two away games I’ve been to...

The pecking order

2008-02-07T23:14:00.000Z

One thing we can’t complain about this season is a lack of strikers. Even with Marlon gone, the hefty Hornets squad still contains eight of them by my reckoning (and that’s not counting young Liam Henderson, who made the bench for the Southend League Cup tie in August). What’s so fascinating is the constant ebb and flow in the pecking order among our would-be goal aces. Here’s my take on the current placings:

1) Darius Henderson
The top scorer in the squad since Marlon’s departure, Doris is the closest we’ve got to an automatic pick up front. I’m not his biggest fan (shouldn’t someone that tall score more headed goals?), but there’s no denying his workrate, his tenacity and his valuable ability to be in the right spot to knock them in from inside the penalty area.

2) Nathan Ellington
Finally getting the run in the first team he so obviously needed. Let’s hope his two goals to date are just the start, and that he goes on to make a key contribution in the run-in. He’s certainly got the pedigree to do so.

3) Steve Kabba
I know, I know. Who’d have guessed it? He’s never been so high in this list before, and he may never be so high again, but right now Steve is making a serious bid for a starting berth. As the commentator on Sky pointed out during last Saturday’s game, all that running rarely results in any worthwhile end product (and let’s face it, that far-post header isn’t going to win Goal of the Season) – but still, Watford fans love a trier, and Steve is trying with all his might right now.

4) Collins John
He hasn’t even made the squad yet, so he’s there purely on reputation and potential. And because he’s got to be better than...

5) Tamas Priskin
I'm sorry, Tamas. I've given you the benefit of the doubt for a year now, excusing your ineffectual performances on the basis that it’s hard to show what you can offer when all you get is the odd 10 minutes here and there at the end of a game. Aidy said earlier this season that of all his strikers, you had the potential to be the very best, and I usually believe what Aidy says. But this time I’m going to have to take issue with him. After watching that gutless performance against Wolves in the Cup, I just don’t think you’ve got what it takes.

6) Theo Robinson
I suspect (and hope) that if I compile this list in a year’s time, Theo will be several places higher. Aidy recognised the skinny youngster’s potential by giving him a debut at Loftus Road two seasons ago, and he didn’t look out of his depth then. A season on loan at Hereford has given him the chance to show he’s a genuine goalscorer (he’s got 10 so far), and I reckon he’ll come back next year and make a strong case for a place in the matchday squad.

7) Moses Ashikodi
I almost put Moses ahead of Theo, but in the end, his injury-plagued time at Vicarage Road counts against him. Put simply, he’s hardly played, though when he has (notably the FA Cup tie against Stockport, where he scored a classic poacher's goal) he’s looked pacy and hungry. If his current loan spell at Swindon works out well, he should be challenging Theo for that spot on the bench next year.

8) Will Hoskins
Would have been higher, but this week’s loan move to Forest (with an option to buy in the summer) signals that Will’s time at Vicarage Road is pretty much up. He was unlucky in that Aidy pitched him straight into a hopeless battle against relegation last year, and he never really got a chance to show the skills in front of goal that we’d signed him for. If he’d only had to step up one division instead of two, it might have been a different story.

It was a nice theory...

2007-11-27T23:48:00.000Z

A few theories that were disproved by tonight’s beating by Burnley:

1) Under Aidy, Watford always bounce back after a defeat
2) Our poor defensive showings in the last three games have been purely down to Jay Demerit’s absence
3) We always play with extra verve in a midweek home game under floodlights
4) Steve Kabba is a winger

Actually, only Aidy ever seemed to believe that last one - Steve himself certainly didn’t seem convinced.

Marlon/toys/pram

2007-11-05T22:38:00.000Z

Before I forget, another candidate for those alternative end-of-season awards. In the ‘Best Strop’ category, Marlon gets a nomination for his reaction to West Brom’s third goal. After everyone had stood stock still for a good 10 seconds, looking at each other, Marlon started jumping angrily up and down on the spot in the manner of a three-year-old who’s just been told he can’t have an ice-cream. And to be honest, you can’t really blame him

An attempt to look on the bright side

2007-11-04T23:37:00.000Z

Um... Well, I suppose it’s better to lose one game 3-0 than to lose three games 1-0. And we are still five points clear.

Hallelujah!

2007-10-21T23:24:00.000+01:00

The Hull game, though generally short on interest, saw an early contender for the alternative end of season awards, in the ‘Most Sarcastic Gesture by a Watford Player’ category: Darius Henderson’s reaction to finally being given the benefit of the doubt, a clenched-hands, eyes-raised-towards-the-heavens pantomime that clearly translated as “Thank you o lord for this benison you have bestowed upon your righteous servant.”

I told you it was sarcastic. A more intelligent referee would probably have booked him for it.

Just once, oh lord…

2007-10-15T23:05:00.000+01:00

I know it’s going to look as if I’m obsessed with Lloyd Doyley, but the excellent interview with Jordan Stewart on the official website does highlight once again the remarkable fact that Lloyd has never scored a goal for Watford at any level. Surely this calls for some targeted chanting on Saturday: “Doyley, give us a goal”, perhaps, coupled with a lustily bellowed “Shooooot!” every time he gets within 20 yards of the Hull penalty area.

Lloyd’s predicament reminds me in a roundabout way of my own experiences of playing rugby at school. I was overweight, unfit and uninterested, so it’s not particularly surprising that I managed to get through four winters of weekly games lessons without ever scoring a try. Like the other fat kids, I was always forced to play as a forward, so I spent every game trudging from scrum to lineout to scrum, watching from a distance as slimmer, faster boys scored all the tries.

Still, even though I was aware of my limitations, I did have a slender competitive streak, and in my final term of playing rugby (the point at which the school finally accepted that any dormant stars must have revealed themselves by now, and allowed us duffers to go off and play other sports instead) I started mentioning to anyone who would listen that it might be nice if I scored a try before ‘retiring’.

Nothing came of it for a few weeks, apart from one tantalising opportunity when I managed to grab a loose ball a few yards from the line, only for some obstinate bastard on the opposing team to put his body in between me and the ground, making it impossible for me to touch down. Then, one week, we were playing one of those games that occasionally happened when one team proved far superior to the other - and I was on it. We were already about 60 points up when a teammate intercepted a pass and hared towards the try line. I was jogging in the same direction, just for form’s sake, when I realised that he was calling to me and suddenly understood what he intended. So I picked up speed, took the ball he handed me (he didn’t bother throwing me a proper pass – I’d only have dropped it if he had) and launched myself spectacularly over the line for my first (and last) try. Seconds later I was being mobbed by my teammates, and I can honestly say it was one of the most joyful moments of my sporting career. (Not that there’s much competition, mind you.)

So what point am I trying to make? Well, Darius, Marlon: if you’re reading this, and if at any point this season you find yourself with the ball at your feet and an open goal in front of you, just before you boot it in, have a quick look around and see if Lloyd is anywhere nearby. You know he needs it more than you do.

The loan rangers

2007-09-19T13:46:00.000+01:00

I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about loan signings; given the choice, I’d rather give one of our young players a chance to show what they can do rather than bus in someone from outside. But occasionally, as with Adam Johnson on Saturday, a loanee makes such an immediate impact that even I can’t find fault with the manager’s decision.

Watford have made full use of the loan system in the past 10 years or so, with mixed results. It would be easy to list the failures – well, I say that, but actually, so many have come and gone without leaving an impression that I’m struggling to remember all their names. Darren Caskey, Trevor Benjamin, Steve Morrow, Danny Hill – there must be dozens more. Then there are those who make a brief, startling impression before returning whence they came: Michael Chopra’s bizarre four-goal burst at Burnley in 2003 springs to mind.

But I’m just going to concentrate on the successes. So here, in reverse order, are my top 5 Watford loan signings:

5) Jermaine Pennant (from Arsenal, 2002-03: 23 games, 3 goals)
Okay, so he didn’t score as often as he should have, and he spent a fair amount of time running down blind alleys. But his twinkle-toed wing play brought a touch of class to a team that was lacking it, and he did lay on a few goals when he remembered to deliver a cross.

4) Tommy Mooney (from Southend, 1994: 10 games, 2 goals)
Obviously, if we were judging Tommy on his Watford career as a whole he’d be higher up the list. But even on loan he made an impact, helping to bring about an unlikely escape from what looked like certain relegation. The battling qualities we were to come to know and love were obvious enough for Glenn Roeder to bring him back full-time at the start of the following season.

3) Marlon King (from Nottingham Forest, 2005: 21 games, 12 goals)
Possibly the shrewdest loan deal we’ve ever done: half a season, with first option to buy, and at a preset price to boot. If Forest had been able to predict how prolific Marlon would turn out to be, they surely wouldn’t have agreed to that last part.

2) Ben Foster (from Manchester United, 2005-07: 81 games, 0 goals)
While Marlon was banging them in at one end, Ben was keeping them out at the other throughout the promotion season we weren’t expecting. Even Ben couldn’t keep us in the Premiership – but think how much worse it could have been without England’s best young keeper between the posts...

1) Dennis Bailey (from Queen’s Park Rangers, 1994: 8 games, 4 goals)
Dennis makes no. 1 because no other loan player I can remember has been so directly responsible for a turnaround in the club’s fortunes. When he and Tommy arrived in March 1994, Watford looked dead and buried, but the pair of them somehow managed to score the goals we needed to win 6 of the last 10 games and finish 3 points clear of the drop zone. Dennis’s contributions usually came off the bench, and his goals seemed all the more heroic for it at the time. But it was Tommy (the younger of the pair by 6 years) who went on to be a Watford legend, while Dennis continued to be a roaming striker for hire; Soccerbase lists stints at 18 different clubs in a 20-year career that only seems to have ended last year. I wonder if he had such a dramatic impact at any of the others?

Which one’s your favourite?

2007-08-22T23:14:00.000+01:00

Yesterday’s endearing interview with Lloyd Doyley on the official site just confirms his status as my current favourite player. He has been for a few seasons, actually, and I hope he will be for a few more to come.

I always have a favourite Watford player, and although I don’t hold formal elections for the post, I tend to review my choice at around this point every season. I should point out that it’s not a scientific process by any means. Sometimes the chosen one has obvious qualities that it’s impossible to overlook – John Barnes’s mesmerising ball skills, Tommy Mooney’s furious competitiveness – but as often as not it’s something to do with an impression you get of the player as a person from the way they play. Does that make sense?

Nigel Gibbs came into that category, and it’s no coincidence that Lloyd has a great deal in common with him. They’re both right backs, for a start, and both manifestly the best defender at the club in an age where such skills are criminally undervalued. Poor Gibbsy would have smashed Duncan Welbourne’s club appearance record if he hadn’t been dropped by a succession of managers in favourite of ‘overlapping full-backs’ who couldn’t defend to save their lives (don’t get me started on Des Lyttle), and Lloyd has similarly suffered from a lack of managerial confidence in his passing and crossing. And of course, both joined the club well before their voices broke (I’m making assumptions here, obviously), and had put in more years in yellow before they even made their first-team debut than most players ever manage.

In Lloyd’s case, apart from his defensive abilities, he’s so obviously a worker, a trier - Aidy said as much early last season, when he explained why it was no coincidence that Lloyd had made more appearances in Aidy’s Watford teams than any other player. Okay, he was found wanting in the Premiership last season and lost his place, and with many players that would have been the last we’d have seen of him. But Lloyd has kept on working and won his place back, and I hope he keeps it for years to come, if only to prove that a proper full-back is always a better option than a winger who puts in the occasional tackle (James Chambers, come on down). And I hope I’m there when he finally scores his first goal in a Watford shirt. The celebration should be something to behold.

Oh well

2007-08-14T23:41:00.000+01:00

So much for my powers of prediction. Sod’s law, I think they call it. Though I was right on the first point, at least.

What I won’t be doing tomorrow night

2007-08-13T23:52:00.000+01:00

After winning his fourth Olympic rowing gold medal, Steve Redgrave famously said in an interview that if anyone ever saw him near a boat again, they had his permission to shoot him. I feel much the same about the first round of the Carling Cup. And this year, I really mean it.

It’s the sheer mind-numbing predictability I can’t stand. Every year we get drawn at home in the first round of what I still like to think of as the League Cup, and every year I go because, well, it’s the first or second home game of the season and I’ve been starved of live football all summer. And besides, we’re playing some inferior outfit from a division or two lower down the league, so it’s bound to be a goal-fest, isn’t it? Ah, the joys of watching football on a balmy August evening...

Except that it doesn’t turn out like that, does it? At the risk of spoiling your enjoyment of the fixture, here’s what will happen tomorrow evening:

- Aidy will select a side containing no more than four of the team who started against Wolves on Saturday. Several of the squad he picks will not feature again in the first team this season, other than in second round of the League Cup. Oh, and Richard Lee will be in goal. Richard Lee is always in goal in the League Cup. When he finally retires, Richard will be dismayed to discover how high a proportion of his first-team appearances were made in the League Cup

- Watford will start brightly and create a few chances, but without scoring. Then Watford’s blend of youthful enthusiasm and inexperience and Gillingham’s blend of relative experience and lower-division ineptitude will cancel each other out, leading to a bland stalemate that will last for most of the match

- If you’re lucky, Watford will nick a goal in the last 10 minutes and that will be that. More likely is a scoreline of 0-0 or 1-1 at full-time, leading to a mind-numbing half-hour of extra-time and, as likely as not, penalties. By this time you will be so far past caring that you may well decide to leave before the shoot-out - I saw plenty of people doing just that in the tie against Accrington last year. If you stay, you’ll probably witness a victory, but somehow it won’t seem like a great cause for rejoicing

By the way, I know that Steve Redgrave reneged on his vow and returned to the water to win a fifth Olympic gold medal. What a lightweight, eh? He should have been at the Accrington game; then he’d know what real pain is...