Diminishing returns

It occurred to me on the way home from the Olympic London Stadium on Saturday that I’ve been to five away games so far this season, and each has been a less enjoyable experience than the one before.

Southampton in September was certainly enjoyable: a 2-0 win, new signings starting to shine, Silva’s team finding its feet. Chelsea in October was, in retrospect, the high water mark of that progression. While we ultimately lost 4-2, I left Stamford Bridge feeling that, if we kept playing football of the quality we’d demonstrated in the first hour, we’d have nothing to worry about this season. Little did I know what lay ahead…

By the time I got to Selhurst Park on a cold, damp December evening, things had started to go wrong. We led for most of the match, missed good chances to make the game safe, and then threw it away in the final minutes, losing 2-1. The journey home seemed particularly long that night.

The return to St Mary’s last month for Javi Gracia’s first game in charge was worse still. A Watford team devoid of confidence looked totally incapable of turning around a 1-0 deficit, while in the away end, what started as black humour (essentially, responding to the Southampton fans’ taunts with a wry acknowledgement that, yes, we know we’re not very good) escalated into out-and-out barracking of our own team. Not a good day to be a travelling Watford fan.

And so to West Ham.

One thing about attending away games on your own is that you have no control over where you’ll be sitting or who you’ll be sitting next to. (The word ‘sitting’ should really be in inverted commas, since no ever sits at away games, for reasons that escape me.) On arrival at the London Stadium, I initially thought I’d done quite well; my seat was three rows from the front, near the corner flag, at the extreme left-hand edge of the Watford block.

As soon as the game started, I realised my error. Immediately on the other side of a tunnel entrance was a block of West Ham fans who have clearly chosen their seats so as to be as close as possible to the away fans, with a view to barracking them throughout the game. I’m sure you know the type. They spent more time looking at us than the pitch, and one bloke got so worked up that he was ejected midway through the first half.

Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if the seats immediately to my right hadn’t been occupied by Watford’s own species of this pond life; two twentysomethings who were more interested in responding in kind to the West Ham fans than in watching the game. Now I’ve got nothing against swearing (I do plenty myself), and I like to think I’m unshockable; nevertheless, being caught in a crossfire of c-words did make it hard to focus on – let alone enjoy – the game. Then there were the spittle-flecked threats – “Come over ’ere and I’ll batter yer”, and so on – that are so easy to make when there are a couple of dozen burly men in high-vis jackets between you and your adversaries.

Once West Ham scored, my neighbours’ focus soon switched to discussing how completely and utterly useless Watford were. “We haven’t had a shot!” complained one of them just before half-time. I reminded him of the two smart saves Adrian had made to keep out Mariappa’s header and Capoue’s shot, but I was wasting my breath. For some people, extremes are all that exist. Watford could only be brilliant or rubbish (I’m paraphrasing, obviously), and today they were rubbish.

This went on throughout the second half, to such an extent that I found myself doubting my own eyes. For it seemed to me that, while short of the standards we reached against Chelsea last week, we were still looking way more positive and confident than we had for most of the last two months of Silva’s time in charge. We were deservedly beaten by a team that was sharper in front of goal and tighter at the back, but it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. By this time, though, I’d realised that trying to express any of this to my neighbours would be pointless.

By the final whistle, caught between the West Ham fans who were now singing highly abusive songs about some blameless female Watford fan and the angry complaints of my neighbours, I was thoroughly miserable. Isn’t going to football meant to be fun?

Look, I know this probably sounds like the whinging of a middle-aged, middle-class supporter who doesn’t ‘get’ football fan culture. I certainly don’t want to see the passion eradicated from the game, and I do accept that brain-dead morons have as much right to buy a ticket as anyone else. But I did find myself wistfully hankering for the hooligan-ridden days of the 80s, when the idiots on both sides of me could have met up for a ruck before the game, kicked seven bells out of each other and spent the afternoon in A&E, leaving the rest of us to watch the match and support our team.

Standing orders

I was going to follow last week’s post about the issues surrounding standing at Premier League grounds with a more specific moan about standing in away ends, and a suggestion.

But I’m delighted to say that Watford have beaten me to it. Hidden away at the bottom of an article on the official site explaining the new priority groups for buying tickets is this:

New for 2017/18, Supporter Liaison & Disability Officer Dave Messenger will be seeking to further assist supporters who’d like to attend away fixtures but cannot stand for the duration of the 90 minutes.

Watford FC is aware of the growing trend for fans in away sections to indulge in much longer periods of continual standing than occurs among home fans’ areas of grounds.

In this respect, Dave will work with the Ticket Office team to identify appropriate seats at other Premier League stadia and the Hornets reserve the right to keep back such seats as it sees fit to ensure all Hornets’ fans who are eligible to purchase and wish to travel can enjoy the fixture without the need to stand.

I can only applaud the club for this. I was talking to a fellow Hornet a couple of weeks ago who told me that, at the age of 74, he can’t stand for 90 minutes, so he wouldn’t be going to any away games this season. I’ve certainly witnessed this a number of times over the past few years; older fans (who have as much right to go to away games as anyone else) missing much of the action because they need to sit down, and the people in front of them won’t.

So I’ll stop moaning. If this new plan works, it should satisfy everyone: the 1881 and their ilk (who, I assume, are ideologically wedded to the concept of standing) at one end, the older and more infirm fans at the other, and in the middle, the rest of us who quite like sitting but don’t mind standing for a bit if we have to. Well done, Watford.

Glad it’s all over

Due to a change in personal circumstances, I missed fewer home games this season, and made it to more away games, than for many a year. In total, I attended 26 of Watford’s 41 competitive fixtures, including all three cup ties. Add to that another four or five away games I was able to watch live on TV, and that only leaves 10 afternoons or evenings when I was stuck in front of Soccer Saturday or the midweek equivalent, willing Jeff Stelling to yell “And it’s good news for Watford fans!”

So I was at the cavernous, atmosphere-free London Stadium to watch us come back from 2-0 down to beat West Ham 4-2, and at the Emirates for a second season running to watch us beat an Arsenal team which (as they showed in the FA Cup final) had more than enough talent to blow us away if they could only have roused themselves to do so. I was at the Vic to see us beat Mourinho’s Manchester United before they learnt the art of the bore-draw, and I witnessed fine victories against the reigning champions (enlivened by Pereyra’s magnificent curler) and against Everton (ditto by Okaka’s supremely confident flick). There were fine goals by Holebas at Middlesbrough, Sinclair (remember him?) in the FA Cup against Burton and Niang at home to West Brom, a game where an admirably resolute 10-man rearguard action took us most of the way to Premier League safety.

It’s worth dwelling on the high points of the season, just as a reminder that there were some. Because it’s undeniable that there were an awful lot of lows. It’s not just the high volume of goals conceded – six at Liverpool, five at home to Man City, four in each game against Spurs, four away to Chelsea, another four at home to Southampton. Those, in part, can be explained away by the persistent injuries that rarely gave Walter Mazzarri the chance to field his first-choice back three or four. Central defenders need to develop an understanding, and there was barely a chance for that to happen before they started dropping like flies. The black comedy of the Man City home game, when not one of our six centre-backs was available, was the logical conclusion to a disrupted season.

No, worse than the occasional tonkings was the sheer tedium of the football Watford produced for much of the season, frequently against our mid-table peers in games where we should have been capable of bagging the points – the Burnley and Palace away games spring to mind in particular. (And let’s not even mention the FA Cup tie at Millwall. It’s still too painful.) While this season’s Watford team was undoubtedly full of talented players, as a collective they were all too often sluggish and unimaginative. Many a time a player would receive the ball in the centre of the pitch, look up to see not one of his teammates making a move forwards, and turn and pass back to a defender or to Gomes. With a few exceptions, Walter’s team lacked snap, élan, joie de vivre – call it what you will. They lacked the ability (and sometimes, it seemed, the will) to grab a game by the scruff of the neck. It was tough to watch.

I’m sorry to see Walter go; I always want Watford coaches to succeed, and I do think bad luck with injuries had a lot to do with how the season panned out (Pereyra’s in particular). Anyone looking at the final league table in years to come, seeing Watford in 17th, will conclude that it was a stressful, anxious season, but it wasn’t really. Just a frustrating one. I can’t deny that I’m glad it’s over.

The wait is over

Sadly, the title of this post doesn’t refer to the awful Arthur Wait Stand, surely the worst away accommodation in the Premier League, with its view-obstructing pillars and overhanging gantry, and leg room that only a pygmy would find adequate. I did read somewhere that Palace are finally planning to replace it with something more modern, and it can’t come a day too soon.

No, I’m referring to my long wait to witness a Watford victory at Selhurst Park. True, I haven’t made every away game over the years, but if I tell you that the last time I saw us win there, the home team was Charlton Athletic, you’ll get an idea of the timescale. (For younger readers, Charlton ground-shared with Palace from 1985-1992, as The Valley didn’t meet the league’s safety standards.) Since then, I’ve seen us defeated, often heavily, by both Wimbledon (another of Palace’s tenants) and Palace themselves, on a number of occasions. Probably the worst was a 5-0 defeat in December 1999 to a Wimbledon team that was already one of our rivals in the bid to scramble out of the relegation zone.

A common factor in all these defeats was miserably cold, wet weather (one reason why I’ve missed a few chances to visit – there’s only so much suffering a man can take), so when I saw the conditions yesterday, my hopes of breaking my losing streak were dented.

Then there’s the Zaha factor. I don’t know if something bad happened to Wilf in Watford at some stage – maybe he got cut up while driving round the ring road, or a girl he fancied dumped him in whatever the nightclub at the top of the High Street is called these days – but he seems to reserve his best performances for games against the Hornets. Let’s face it, if he played like that every week, he’d be starting for England (and probably playing for a bigger club).

Sure enough, he did well enough yesterday to turn Allan Nyom into a gibbering wreck who looked like he didn’t know which was up any more, and there was a period in the second half, as Palace tore into us with pace and verve, when yet another Selhurst Park defeat looked inevitable.

Yet it didn’t come, and for that you have to give credit to the grittiness of this Watford team. By any objective standard, we didn’t play particularly well yesterday. The midfield rarely looked in control of the ball, the forwards saw very little of it, and the defence were hanging on by the skin of their teeth at times. And yet we won, thanks to a superb, instinctive finish by Troy Deeney and a tenacious rearguard action for the last 10 minutes.

If any player exemplified that grittiness it was Valon Behrami, my man of the match for the way he stayed in the Palace players’ faces throughout, challenging for the ball aggressively while skilfully staying just on the right side of the rules.

So, win against Bournemouth in a fortnight’s time and we can start to relax. Quique has promised to play a bit more expansively once safety is ensured, which will be fun to see. In the meantime, my personal Selhurst Park hoodoo is broken. Maybe next season, the sun will even shine in South Norwood. I wouldn’t put any money on it, though.

First impressions

It’s been a feature of recent years that I don’t get to see much of Watford’s start to the season. Having a wife whose birthday (which is invariably celebrated lavishly with family and friends) is on August 4th doesn’t help, and the Bank Holiday weekend is another regular occasion for family gatherings a long way from Hertfordshire. The fixture computer is rarely helpful, and I can’t remember the last time I actually got to see the Hornets’ first home game.

This year it’s been spectacularly unhelpful, to the extent that my first home game will be against Charlton on September 14th. So I made a point of marking yesterday’s game at Reading on the calendar early and ringing it in red pen. I wanted to see this latest Watford team for myself.

My first impressions weren’t great. Just as in the early months of last season, the Hornets looked a bit lost. There was clearly an ambition to play a silky passing game based on a combination of patient possession and rapier-like penetration, but it simply wasn’t working. Giving away a goal in the first five minutes didn’t help, of course.

But after the break (and especially after Fabbrini’s introduction) it was a different story. I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account; you can read plenty of those elsewhere. I just wanted to say that as we built up attacking momentum, it was absolutely thrilling to watch. You could sense the Reading players thinking “Holy sh*t, where did that come from?” The draw was absolutely deserved, and given another 10 minutes, I’m sure we’d have won.

As Gianfranco Zola has been at pains to point out, this team is still very much a work in progress, with a number of players who are new to English football, let alone Watford. If that’s what they can do (against, let’s not forget, what’s likely to be one of the stronger teams in this year’s Championship) when they’re still getting to know each other, god help the rest of the division once they really get into gear. I haven’t felt so excited about a Watford team since John Barnes was thin.

A damp day out in the Fens

My first away game this season was the 6-1 demolition of Leeds in November. The second was today’s defeat at Peterborough, making it 12 goals I’ve seen in just two away matches. But apart from the high scorelines, the two games had little in common.

Whereas the game at Elland Road was one of those where almost everything seemed to go right for Watford (to the point where, every time a player tried a speculative shot from outside the area, it fizzed into the net), today’s was the opposite. I lost count of the number of times that a Watford player blocked  a pass or shot, only for it to rebound straight into the path of an opponent. We suffered from the bobbly pitch, too, and don’t get me started on the referee.

But beyond all that, the team today was almost unrecognisable from the one that was so effective against Leeds, and throughout the winter. Lord knows they’re trying their damnedest, but they’re collectively around 20% less effective than they were in their pomp, and that’s the difference between winning and losing games.

Put simply, some of them just look knackered. It’s not that surprising; Udinese weren’t going to loan us players who’d been first-team regulars, so we got the guys who’d spent most of last season warming the bench and playing the occasional reserve match. Vydra is a shadow of his former self, and looks like he could do with a rest until August, and it’s a while since Abdi produced one of those laser-guided through passes to unlock an opposition defence. His dead ball striking was poor today, too.

Age plays a part, too. It’s easy to forget that Vydra, Forestieri, Battochio and others are still young and relatively lacking experience of first-team football. Chalobah in particular is starting to look his age, a cocky boy who can’t understand why he can’t dribble round anyone he likes, in any part of the pitch, the way he could in the under-18 team. He’s another who could do with a rest.

Meanwhile, the defence is down to the bare bones; if I’d had to guess at the start of the season who’d end the match in the centre of defence at London Road, Doyley and Thompson would have been a long way down the list. Frankly, they’re looking creaky, and it’s not going to get much better, even if Fitz Hall does get fit again.

Finally, there’s a tentativeness in attack that wasn’t there when we were scoring for fun. Some of the sequences of passing around the edge of the Peterborough area today, with player after player shunning the chance to shoot in favour of a safe pass, reminded me of the days of Lewington and beyond, when no one would ever take a chance. More and more in recent games, promising attacks break down as the man on the ball hesitates, checks back and plays the easy pass. The elan and confidence of the winter have long gone.

I never bet against my own team, but if I did, I’d be prepared to wager that Watford will be playing in the Championship again next season. Automatic promotion is looking like a very long shot after today’s results, and unless Zola works a miracle, I can’t see us going into the playoffs as anything but a tired, disillusioned shadow of the team we were in the winter. As in Aidy Boothroyd’s last season, I suspect that, if we come up against a team that ends the regular season in form (Bolton, say), we’ll get taken apart in the way Aidy’s side were by Hull.

None of this is intended as a criticism. Zola’s team have exceeded expectations this season (I thought somewhere around 8th would be a good finishing position), and provided plenty of entertainment in the process. Next season, given some judicious strengthening in the summer, we should have a good chance of doing what Cardiff have done this year and leading from the front. And, if and when we do go up, maybe we’ll have a better chance of staying in the Premiership. After all, can you honestly say that you’d relish the prospect of seeing the defence that shipped three goals against Peterborough today taking on Arsenal or Manchester United?

Best. Awayday. Ever.

One of the benefits of being married to a Yorkshire lass is that I get to lord it over Leeds fans. My other half comes from Ossett, a few miles south of Leeds, and many of her male relatives and her friends’ husbands support United – and fortuitously, for much of the 10 years that we’ve been together, Watford have outperformed Leeds for what is probably the only prolonged such period in football history. The Championship Play-off Final in Cardiff was a particular highlight, obviously, but opportunities for smugness keep on coming.

For the last three seasons I’ve made the trip to Elland Road in the company of Richard, the husband of one of my wife’s oldest friends and a long-suffering Leeds fan. Having watched his first game in 1967, he’s witnessed plenty of glory in his time, but has nothing but contempt for the current regime, and refuses to put money in Ken Bates’s pocket by going to games – other than my annual visit, bless him. Two years ago we saw a 2-2 draw (with the Hornets only minutes away from an unlikely win), and last season we won 2-0.

But nothing could have prepared me (or Richard) for yesterday’s match, one of the most extraordinarily action-packed games I’ve ever seen. You’ll have seen the match reports, so I won’t run through the litany of incidents here. The point I want to make it is that the identity of the opposition made it exquisitely enjoyable – it just wouldn’t have been so much fun if that had happened to Derby, say, or Ipswich. Now I’m looking forward to dropping the result into the conversation at forthcoming family parties. Winning 6-1 is all very well – but it’s the opportunity to gloat that makes it special.

The best trip I’ve ever been on?

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.