Approaching the bell

Most track and field events are fairly easy for the casual viewer to appreciate. All the track races up to and including 1500m are over in less than four minutes, while each individual jump or throw is self-contained; even if you don’t see the whole competition, success and failure are usually easy to tell apart.

The 10,000m, though, is more of an acquired taste: 25 laps of the track in which nothing much seems to happen until the very end. Indeed, unless you attend an athletics meeting in the flesh, you’re unlikely to get the chance to watch an entire race from start to finish; TV producers tend to show the start and finish, filling in the dull middle laps by covering the field events. You can often see the 10,000m runners in the background, on their way to completing yet another circuit of the track.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. I reckon a 10,000m race has a lot in common with this season in the Championship. After a blanket start, a few runners soon drop off the back of the pack, clearly destined to be lapped (relegated). The rest trail round and round the track in a long line in which the exact order changes regularly. More are gradually dropped as the relentless pace takes its toll. Meanwhile, at the front, the big guns take it in turns to lead, focusing on being in the right position at the business end of the race.

And when the end is finally in sight, with 600m or so to go, the strongest runners slip into a higher gear and sprint the final lap, trusting that they’ve got enough in the tank to hold off the opposition. Mo Farah is the modern master of the sprint finish, of course, taking off as if turbocharged. In the big races in recent years, no one has been able to stay with him.

I won’t spell out all the parallels with the Championship season. The point is that the runners in this particular race are approaching the bell that signals the final lap. The pack is down to eight – though a couple of those are barely clinging on to their hopes of automatic promotion – and this weekend’s fixtures are the equivalent of one of those periodic surges when the leaders try to shape off the weaker runners. The question is, are we Mo Farah (or at least one of the Ethiopians and Kenyans who invariably win silver and bronze behind him)?

No one knows how this race is going to end. But if we’re still in the leading pack on Monday night, we’ll have given ourselves the best possible chance of going up automatically. C’mon you ’Orns!

The benefits of amputation

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.