Everyone’s a winner

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.

Wow!

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.

An idiot writes

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…”