The relegation game

One of the benefits of having been a Watford fan for nearly half a century is that you can see patterns across the years and decades. It also lessens the pain of relegation, to a certain extent; I’ve seen it happen before, and doubtless I will again.

In fact, all but one of Watford’s relegations have happened since I started supporting them in 1970. I can’t tell you much about the club’s descent from Division 1 of the Southern League to Division 2 in 1902-03, and Oliver Phillips’ centenary history of the club doesn’t explain what went wrong. He does make it clear, though, that relegation had been coming, with the club finishing 14th out of 15, and then 13th out of 16, in the previous two seasons.

In that respect, it sounds similar to the first relegation I witnessed, from Division 2 in 1971-72. Having finally achieved the longed-for promotion to the second tier three seasons earlier, the Hornets had found the step up a struggle from the start, and didn’t have the money to invest in the quality of players they needed to be competitive. Successive finishes of 19th and 18th out of 22 were followed by last place in a dismal season.

Watford’s first two ventures into the Premier League both ended in similar fashion, albeit after a single season. In both 1999-2000 and 2006-07, we’d been promoted before we were really ready for it, couldn’t afford transformative signings, and injuries to key players sabotaged any hopes of survival.

Our other relegation from the top division, in 1987-88, is also easily explained. In just a few months, Dave Bassett managed to undo pretty much all the good work Graham Taylor had done over the previous decade, weakening the backroom staff and the playing squad and deploying an unappealing brand of football based on the long ball and the offside trap. Despite Bassett’s departure in January, replacement Steve Harrison couldn’t stop the ship sinking.

The reasons for the other two relegations are harder to pin down. In 1974-75, the Hornets followed a season when they’d finished 7th in Division 3 with relegation, and from Oliver Phillips’ account (I was only 12 at the time, and the nuances passed me by), it seems that they sleepwalked into it. Despite the presence of several players who would come back up under GT a few years later (including Jenkins, Garner, Downes and Joslyn), and despite only needing seven points from the last 11 games to be safe, they went down by a single point. (By the way, one of the teams that went down with us was Bournemouth. Like I say, patterns keep recurring.)

Likewise, in 1995-96, we went down from what was then called Division 1 (ie the second tier) after a 7th-place finish the year before. Injuries were certainly a factor here, as was a lack of investment from notoriously cautious Chairman Jack Petchey. Roeder was replaced with a returning GT with 17 games to go, giving us all hope. But Ian Grant catches the mood well in his piece in Tales From The Vicarage Volume II: “Had we conjured up any kind of form, any kind of running start for our dramatic late surge, we almost certainly would’ve escaped; instead, we seemed caught in a hopeless conundrum, as if imprisoned in a windowless room with only a trapdoor for escape.” It went down to a final home game against Leicester where we needed to win and hope other results went our way. We didn’t, and they didn’t anyway.

So how does 2019-20 stack up against these previous examples? We certainly can’t blame underinvestment, given the current value of the squad (though a bit more money spent on defenders last summer might have helped). Likewise, injuries haven’t been a major factor; we’ve had a few, but not nearly as many in previous Premier League seasons, recent and otherwise. We do have to mention the pandemic, though. Who knows how things would have turned out without a lengthy break just after our famous victory over Liverpool?

Overall, though, this year’s relegation most closely resembles 1975 and 1996. At the start of the season, as we did then, we seemed to be on an upward trajectory, with an 11th-place finish and an FA Cup final appearance. But whether through complacency, or lack of focus, that forward momentum not only stopped, but slammed into reverse at a speed that proved impossible to halt. The lesson seems to be that the time of greatest danger for a football club is when it appears to be on the rise. Let’s hope we learn that lesson if and when we get back to the Premier League.

About that last post...

There’s nothing like actual events to expose the blithe theorising of so-called experts. Nine games into the Premier League season and the complacency I expressed in my last post looks downright naive. In my defence, I’m not the only one; it’s obvious that the club hierarchy didn’t see the Hornets’ disastrous start to the season coming either, or they would have made different choices in the transfer market over the summer.

In retrospect, the Pozzo regime’s habit of changing Head Coach every summer starts to make more sense. If nothing else, it gave everyone at the club a chance to reset the clock – forget about the disappointing end to the previous season and start again with a clean slate. Whereas it seems that Javi’s team just carried the woeful end to last season on into the Brighton game and beyond.

Wiser heads than me have debated at great length what’s gone wrong. I’d just like to highlight one aspect of Watford’s current stint in the Premier League that continues to bother me, and that may be part of the problem; the inability to integrate young players into the team.

When Quique took the Hornets into that first PL season in 2015, he’d quite deliberately been provided with a squad packed with experienced, battle-hardened players; new signings included Capoue, Britos, Holebas, Nyom, Behrami and Prödl. It worked, too; we didn’t ship too many goals, Iggy and Troy banged in the goals and we stayed up fairly comfortably.

Since then, it’s been much the same story. Four years on, Capoue, Holebas and Prödl are still here, four years older and starting to slow down (visibly, in Jose’s case). More importantly, very few younger players have been integrated into the first team. This only really hit home to me when I was reading the programme before the FA Cup Final and looking at the ages of the Watford team; only Will Hughes (24) and Gerard Deulofeu (25) were under the age of 28.

We have tried to use younger players from time to time, but it hasn’t really worked. Take 23-year-old Isaac Success; three years after his debut, he still looks like a work in progress. But he’s a rare exception, in that he has at least been selected for Premier League games. More often, talented young players are restricted to cup games and/or sent out on loan, rather than being trusted to play a role in the first team. I’m sure I’m not the only Watford fan who was sorry to see Ben Wilmot sent to Swansea, and as for Domingos Quina, there can’t be many Premier League clubs where such an obviously talented player would struggle even to get on the bench. And don’t get me started on Pontus Dahlberg, a goalkeeper who is highly rated by everyone who comes into contact with him, yet doesn’t even get to take part in the pre-match warm-ups. I’d love to know the plan for his development.

The impression the club gives right now is of one that is simply too scared to give youth its chance. The rapid turnover of Head Coaches doesn’t help; why should they take a risk on untested players when they know they won’t be here long enough to enjoy the fruits of the experiment?

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should flood the first team with callow youngsters; merely that there’s no point signing talented young players if there’s no intention of giving them a chance to show what they can do – and that  an injection of youthful energy and ambition can be just what’s needed to buck up a struggling team. If any club’s history is proof of that, lord know it’s ours.