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 I’ve been a Watford fan long enough to witness all but two of the club’s Football League promotions. So many memories: Dad not letting me stay to watch the Divison 4 trophy presentation after the Southport game in 1978 because he wanted to “beat the traffic”; the 4-0 win against Hull on a gloriously sunny May evening the following year; running on the pitch after the win against Wrexham that put us in the top flight for the first time; the bedlam on the terraces at Craven Cottage in 1998 when Jason Lee scored to secure the League 2 title; the emotional turmoil of the play-off final win against Bolton, just 48 hours after my father’s sudden death; the oddly straightforward (and hugely satisfying) dismissal of Leeds in 2006, indoors in Cardiff; and my anger at the way we threw away the chance to win the Championship in the final game of 2015, which almost soured the joy of promotion.

And where was I when the Hornets clinched promotion against Millwall a few weeks ago? Here in my back bedroom, of course, sitting in front of my computer, fending off the cat’s demands for yet more food. I think I yelled “Yes!” and punched the air at the final whistle, which at least got rid of the cat for a few minutes, but it’s not a day that will live long in the memory. I watched the post-match coverage on Hive Live, then went out for a walk and spent the evening watching TV. A few congratulatory texts from friends (including a grudging one from my Brentford-supporting mate) were as close as I got to a communal celebration.

And so this strangest of seasons is over, hopefully never to be repeated. The club have done magnificently on every level, from their support of the NHS to the intelligent recruitment policy, from the superb quality of the pitch to the brave decision to appoint Xisco that probably saved us from the play-offs (or worse). But watching it all on a TV or computer screen was a poor substitute for the real thing, even if I actually got to see more games than in any of my previous 50 seasons as a Hornets fan – I usually only get to half a dozen away games, whereas this year I was able to enjoy pretty much all of them (though enjoyment was in short supply for the first half of the season).

Watching the FA Cup final yesterday (the first for a few years that I’ve watched all the way through) just reinforced the difference that fans make to the football experience. Emotionally, I was there with those Leicester supporters as they celebrated Tielemans’ incredible goal, and then as they chewed their fingernails to the quick while the clock ticked down. And the noise they made – you’d never have guessed the stadium was only a fifth full.

So it was a pleasure to receive the email from the club inviting me to renew my season ticket for next season. By then I will have had my second jab (as will most of the country, with a bit of luck) and it ought to be possible for Vicarage Road to host a proper crowd again. Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.

Glory days

With no new Watford games for us to watch for a while, it was nice of the BBC to show highlights of an old one last weekend: our 1987 FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal at Highbury. It’s still available on iPlayer if you haven’t seen it yet, and I heartily recommend it – not least for the lengthy opening montage tracing the Hornets’ rise under GT, cleverly soundtracked by Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ (“I just know that something good is going to happen,” indeed).

For those of us who were there, jammed into the open terracing at the Clock End, it was a memorable day. Watching it again 33 years later, there were a few things that immediately struck me:

• The shorts – good lord, how did they manage to run around in such short, tight shorts? The contrast with today, when some players’ shorts come down almost to their knees (and with tights under that on cold days), is stark.
• The pitch – I don’t know if it had been a particularly wet winter, but the Highbury pitch is in a dreadful state, with both goalmouths and the centre circle mainly consisting of sand. There are a couple of occasions when Gary Porter gallops forward on the break, and you can see him struggling to control the ball as it bobbles around on the uneven surface. The sides of the pitch, on the other hand, are fully grassed…
• The wingers – … which is fortunate, because Watford’s game plan is clearly built around getting down the wing and pinging crosses into the penalty area. John Barnes is on the left, while – with Nigel Callaghan having been sold to Derby the previous month – David Bardsley is on the right. I’d forgotten just how good he was, fast and skilful, and it was his crosses that led to both Watford’s first two goals. As for Barnesy, there’s one glorious moment when he tricks his way past Viv Anderson, leaving him flat on his backside, that has commentator John Motson purring: “That was a perfect piece of wing play.”
• The Arsenal goal – we (rightly) remember the great players for their best qualities, but the Arsenal goal is proof that even the best can get it disastrously wrong. John McClelland tries to shepherd the ball back to Tony Coton, but when he doesn’t come for it quickly enough, Macca belatedly tries to clear it, succeeding only in knocking it to Ian Allinson, who pokes it in the net. It’s one of those goals that would have been the subject of endless recriminations if the result had been different.
• Mark Falco – there are some players who are completely unmemorable, and for me, Falco is one of them. He only spent this one season at Watford, but he played 33 times and scored 14 goals, and I must have seen a fair few of them (having graduated the previous summer, I had become a regular again after four years of patchy attendance), yet I can’t remember a single thing about him. And in this game, he barely figures in the highlights.

My abiding memory of the game is of course that decisive third goal. Horror as the Arsenal players’ arms all go up, claiming a penalty, and the linesman flags; confusion as Watford play on, Porter hoiking the ball out to Luther Blissett; excitement as Luther steams towards us, past Arsenal defenders still expecting play to be stopped; despair as John Lukic gets a hand to his shot; ecstasy as Luther stabs in the rebound; tension as the Arsenal players surround the referee, demanding it be disallowed; and then overwhelming joy as the ref finally raises his arm to signal the goal.

It was a minute’s play that summed up the crazy exhilaration of being a football fan, and ultimately made the game a classic. It’s sometimes referred to as an upset, but it wasn’t really; yes, Arsenal were top of the table at the time (though they faded badly to end the season fourth, 16 points behind champions Everton), but Watford were a solid mid-table team and finished ninth – still the second-highest league placing in the club’s history.

What we couldn’t know at the time was that this would be the last great day of the Graham Taylor era (until he came back a decade later, but that’s another story). There’s a hint of it in Motty’s comment over the warm-up that Barnes’s contract is nearly up and Liverpool have made a bid (though Arsenal were apparently also interested – I wonder how that would have worked out?). The semi-final saw the Hornets thrashed 4-1 by Spurs with Gary Plumley in goal, and even though it was only the third time we’d reached that stage of the Cup, we didn’t sell all our allocation of tickets. GT noticed, and historians suggest it was a significant factor in his decision that he’d taken the club as far as he could. He left for Aston Villa a few days after the season ended, Barnes went to Anfield, and Dave Bassett duly arrived to ruin everything.

But thanks to the BBC, we can relive the last of the good times. I can’t stop watching. “Blissett’s away for Watford – controversy here looming. He’s onside, is Blissett – and Lukic has saved. Blissett again – a goal!”

Glory days.

Quarter masters

The quarter-finals of the FA Cup have provided some of the most memorable moments of my Watford-supporting life. Indeed, it was the TV and press coverage of the unprecedented 1-0 victory over Liverpool in the 1970 quarter-final (the first in the club’s history) that first made me, aged eight, aware that there was a local football club I could actually go and watch in person. The rest, as they say, is history.

There have been six further quarter-finals since then, and I’ve been present at all but one (Plymouth in 2007 – family commitments). I was in the away end at St Andrews when John Barnes curled the first goal past a helpless Tony Coton in 1984. I watched with growing glee as Luther Blissett sprinted towards the Hornets fans jammed into the Clock End at Highbury in 1987 while the Arsenal defence stranded up the other end of the pitch belatedly realised that the referee wasn’t going to blow his whistle, and went crazy when Luther slotted the ball into the net (albeit at the second attempt) to make it 3-1. I was at Arsenal’s shiny new ground in 2016 when Adlène Guedioura scored his piledriver. And let’s not forget Stephen Glass’s gorgeous free kick against Burnley in 2003, as covered extensively in yesterday’s programme.

Brilliant goals and dramatic finishes have been the defining feature of Watford’s games at this stage of the competition, then. The game against Palace didn’t really have either of those, to be honest. True, the second goal was a very good one, and it was great to see Roberto Pereyra providing the decisive pass, after being a rather peripheral figure over the past couple of months. But one thing I’ve become increasingly aware of this season is that the majority of Premier League teams are so evenly matched, and so aware of what each other are going to do, that games tend towards the stalemate, decided either by a moment of extra quality or a defensive error. We witnessed both yesterday, and I’m just thankful that the extra quality came from players in yellow and black.

I was interviewed before the game by a couple of guys from the Dream Team website, who asked me about Watford’s Premier League years and where the club goes from here. I said I wanted us to win trophies, which realistically means domestic cups, and to qualify for Europe.

I think I concluded with something like this: “Some fans may turn up their noses at the Europa League, but I love the idea that I might be spending the autumn looking up the times of flights to obscure Eastern European cities.” Those of us who were too young and impoverished to travel to Kaiserslautern, Sofia and Prague in 1983 (I was a student, barely able to afford the coach fare home from college, never mind flights to the continent) have been waiting a long time for a second bite of the cherry. Now we’re just two wins away.

Celebrate good times, come on

After the bore-draw at Brighton a few weeks ago, I wrote that February’s games could define Watford’s season. Well, we’ve won all three games since, so I think it’s safe to say that, whatever happens from here on in, 2018-19 will go down as a good season.

Among other things, Friday’s rout at Cardiff means I can officially celebrate PLSD, and unprecedentedly early; in the past three seasons it’s taken Watford until at least mid-April to reach the magical 40-point mark, and last season it was early May. But this year, I doubt whether the idea of relegation has crossed anyone’s mind, with the possible exception of those journalists who doggedly refuse to pay attention to the way Watford have grown stronger each year, and who couldn’t see how we could possibly survive after selling Richarlison.

While I’m talking about previous posts, I should acknowledge that my stated opinion that Gerard Deulofeu really isn’t a striker and would be far better off playing on the wing looks a bit silly after Cardiff. My fault for doubting the wisdom of Javi.

Anyway, moving swiftly on… One thing I did notice, looking at the league table in the paper yesterday, is that those 40 points are evenly split between home and away. In fact, we’ve lost more games at home than we have away. That’s skewed slightly by the fact that we played five of the top six teams at home in the first half of the season, and the next few weeks may well put a dent in our away record. But I do think it’s indicative of the fact that we’re at our best when we have space to play, and at our worst when teams come to Vicarage Road intent on stopping us playing – the home games against Newcastle and Burnley spring to mind.

The next few matches should be interesting rather than season-defining. Liverpool away on Wednesday is a free hit, Leicester next Sunday will be interesting (not least because I’ve just seen this moment that Puel has gone), and then we’ve got two difficult trips to Manchester either side of the FA Cup quarter-final. Frankly, even if we only pick up a few points from the league games, I don’t care as long as we beat Palace. Like I say, this is already a good season – but when it comes to the cup, we’re now just three wins away from making this the greatest season in the club’s history.

A crucial draw

You could argue (and I’m about to try) that tomorrow is the most important day of Watford’s season. If everything goes well at about 7.45pm, the team could be on the way to fulfilling its undoubted potential. If not (and lord knows we’ve had some disappointments in recent years), then 2018-19 will probably go down as the latest in a series of seasons that promised much but ultimately failed to deliver.

I’m talking, of course, about the FA Cup 3rd Round draw which takes place tomorrow evening. Thanks to our now traditional autumn slump, the chances of the Hornets ‘doing a Burnley’ and finishing as the best of the teams outside the so-called Big Six are looking distinctly remote. For all the talent in the squad, we seem to have lost the knack of putting the ball in the back of the net on a consistent basis (or, indeed, at all), and that is unfortunately a primary requirement for teams that aspire to finish high up the table.

No, I fear we’re destined for yet another season where we end up somewhere between 10th and 16th in the Premier League table. That wouldn’t necessarily represent failure, far from it – just a bit of an anticlimax after our excellent start.

The FA Cup, therefore, represents our only chance of glory. It’s a realistic one, too. We may not be playing consistently at the moment, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t win six one-off games between January and May. Do that and Troy will be lifting the cup at Wembley while we try to work out whether Brexit means we need visas for away ties in the Europa League. And after all, as a top-half Premier League team, we really should be aiming at the 5th Round (ie the last 16) as a minimum requirement; all but nine of the teams left in the competition are, statistically, worse than Watford.

But for all this to happen, we need the footballing gods to be kind. Ideally,we will draw the lowest-ranked team in each round, at home. Meanwhile the Big Six knock will each other out, or get punished for their hubris when they field third-string teams because they’re saving their star players for the all-important battle for fourth place.

And I reckon those gods owe us one. Since the turn of the century, we’ve drawn a Premier League team in the 3rd Round roughly every other year – and usually strong ones, too: Arsenal in 2002, Chelsea in 2004, 2010 and 2015, Manchester City in 2013. Where we have been given a kinder draw and gone through, we’ve invariably come up against one of the big boys sooner rather than later, and promptly lost.

Indeed, looking at our FA Cup record on Trevor Jones’s excellent site, it strikes me that the win over Arsenal in the 2016 quarter-final is the only time we’ve beaten one of the top teams in the competition this century. Our other two runs to the semis were achieved by beating a mixture of lower-division teams and middling-to-poor Premier League ones. In 2003 (when we were in the Championship) it was Macclesfield, West Brom, Sunderland and Burnley; in 2007 (a Premier League relegation season) we beat Stockport, Ipswich, West Ham and Plymouth.

I’d certainly take either of those runs again this season, given the chance. But really, we just want to be drawn against someone we can be confident of beating, even if Javi decides to rest the entire first team, as he will almost certainly do. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed, and I suggest you do the same. Our season could depend on it.

We’re going to Wem-ber-ley – again

I’m sure there are plenty of football fans – particularly those who follow unfashionable clubs in the provinces – for whom a trip to Wembley Stadium is a rare treat, maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime event. But for those of us who grew up less than 10 miles away, it’s really not that special.

My dad took me to Wembley for the first time, to watch England play East Germany in 1970. England won 3-1, but I mainly remember the night for the hour or more it took to get out of the car park afterwards. I honestly can’t recall if Dad took me to any more internationals, but I’m pretty sure that if he did, we didn’t drive .

After that, there were a couple of England schoolboy internationals in the early 70s. Presumably the FA offered bulk deals to schools; at any rate, Ashfield organised cheap class trips. Rediscovering the programmes years later, I found that I’d unwittingly had my first sight of a certain John Wilfred Rostron, as he was then listed.

I went to a few more full internationals over the next decade, culminating in Luther’s glorious full international debut against Luxembourg in 1982, when he scored a hat trick and could have had at least as many again. Then, two years later, I finally got to see Watford play at Wembley in the FA Cup Final – and it was one of the most anticlimactic days of my football-watching life.

For the rest of the 80s, I was more often at Wembley for rock concerts than football; U2, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones. (I missed Live Aid, though; I was on a year abroad, studying in Hamburg, where I watched the proceedings on TV.) I did go to the Football League v the Rest of the World match in 1987, where Hornets centre-back John McClelland had to contend with Maradona, Platini and Lineker and still kept a clean sheet, the League winning 3-0.

In the 90s there were more concerts, and also a rugby union international, for a change. While the Millennium Stadium was being rebuilt, Wales played their home Five Nations (as it then was) matches at Wembley. My friend Andy came up from Cardiff and we watched the Welsh get roundly thrashed by a skilful France team.

Towards the end of the decade, I was working for a running magazine, which involved reviewing local events. You did this by running in them, so one Sunday morning I found myself lining up on the running track inside Wembley Stadium for the inaugural Wembley 10K. After puffing round the streets for an hour, the finish on the same track at least allowed me to indulge in some Olympian fantasies, even if I was struggling to finish in the top 500.

And then there was the Play-Off Final against Bolton in 1999, one of my most emotional footballing memories – for the result and performance, of course, but also because my father had died two days earlier. That year, and again in 2000, I also went to the FA Trophy Final to watch Kingstonian, who my friend Stuart supported. In the first one, they beat a little team no one had heard of called Forest Green Rovers.

Coming into the present century, I can say that I was present at the first concert held in the rebuilt Wembley. Okay, it starred George Michael, who wouldn’t have been my choice, but I was married by then. There have been more Springsteen concerts, too, though it’s really not the best place to see him. And more recently, of course, I’ve doubled my tally of Watford games at the home of football with those two dismal defeats against Crystal Palace, first in the Play-Off Final and then in the FA Cup semi-final.

So when I rock up for the Spurs game tomorrow evening, you’ll excuse me if I don’t look too impressed. I’ll be a lot more impressed if we come away with three points, mind you.

I’m not disappointed, just angry

Regular readers will know that I don’t often react to individual matches, but sometimes you’ve got to make an exception. I’m just so angry about Watford’s performance against Millwall today that I need to get it off my chest.

First off, I’m angry that the club showed such disrespect to the world’s oldest and most famous cup competition by fielding an understrength team. (It’s easy to spot when Watford are fielding an understrength team, by the way: Guedioura is in it.) The FA Cup has provided many of the finest moments in the club’s history – arguably more than league football ever has – and to leave out so many of our best players for a tie that offered a great chance of reaching the 5th Round is unforgivable.

The argument will doubtless be that the first-choice players were being rested so that they’re fresh to face Arsenal on Tuesday night. But you’ll struggle to find a single Watford fan who thinks we’ve got the slightest chance of winning at the Emirates – not based on today’s performance, but based on a long string of poor performances stretching back to October, particularly those against the teams challenging for the league title.

No, the most likely scenario is that we’ll come away with a four- or five-nil defeat to add to today’s capitulation, so that the players go into next Saturday’s home game against Burnley (one we really need to win) even more demoralised than they are right now. That’s another reason a win today would have been so valuable – just to remind the players what it feels like.

I haven’t even got on to the tactics yet. It was bad enough when we played the same way against Burton (a game where Pantilimon touched the ball more than any outfield player), but to think that we could just amble around, passing the ball around the back four again and again, against a muscular Millwall team that had already seen off Bournemouth’s second string, was either naive or just plain stupid. We were weak, we were slow, we were completely lacking in imagination. Worst of all, we were completely unable to cope with Millwall’s tactical masterstroke, ie repeatedly lumping the ball up to a nippy striker. It was only a surprise it took them so long to score.

It seems a bit unfair to criticise a team where only three of the starting eleven (Britos, Kaboul and Guedioura) have played more than half a dozen games this season. Watson, Dja DjéDjé and Mariappa in particular have every excuse to be a bit rusty. But nothing excuses the technical inepititude on display today; from Guedioura wasting a free kick just outside the box by kicking it straight into touch, to Watson repeatedly mishitting passes, to Okaka’s many and varied failed attempts to cushion the ball and lay it off to a teammate, there was a constant stream of unforced errors. Indeed, it was an error (a lazily-hit backpass) that led directly to Pantilimon’s game-ending injury.

Last, but not least, I’m angry with Walter Mazzarri. At the start of the season we were told that playing with wing-backs was a sign of attacking intent, yet for much of today’s match Watford seemed so uninterested in attacking at all, I was beginning to wonder if the Pozzos had told them we needed the money from a replay. In the first half in particular, Dja DjéDjé and Mason repeatedly reached the halfway line when a teammate had the ball, only to stop abruptly, wasting the opportunity for them to receive the ball on the wing deep into Millwall’s half. You can only assume that was down to instructions they’d received.

It’s not just today, either. For weeks now, Watford have repeatedly approached games against supposedly weaker opposition (Middlesbrough, Palace, Burton, Millwall) with an almost complete lack of aggression and attacking intent. Whatever the opposite of an ‘up and at ’em’ approach is, we’ve perfected it. It’s painful to watch – and worse still, it’s not winning us matches (Burton excepted, and that’s now irrelevant).

So, either Walter is telling them to play that way, or he’s not getting his message across properly. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on him. I’m not one to demand the manager’s head on a platter, and I don’t think it would help right now – not at this stage of the season. But he needs to show that he understands how to field a winning team pretty quickly, or the tentative chants of “Walter out!” in the away end today are going to get a hell of a lot louder.

What a life

I finally got round to trying out the My Premier League Life tool on the BBC Sport website the other day, and very illuminating it is too. I never knew that I share my birthday with Michael Essien and Christian Benteke.

More pertinently, I learnt that, of the nine ‘trophies or promotions’ Watford have achieved in their history, eight have occurred in my lifetime (the one I missed being a 4th-place finish to win promotion from Division 4 in 1959-60). Looking into the details, I was reminded that we’ve only ever actually won three trophies: the Division 3 title in 1969-69 and 1997-98, and the Division 4 title in 1977-78. In other words, we’re not bad at getting promoted, but we’ve rarely done it in style.

Here’s the thing, though: if we stay up this season, there’s a pretty high probability that we won’t win another trophy in my lifetime.

If we don’t stay up, then there’s always the Championship title to play for; with the Pozzos’ backing, we’d have a decent chance of going one better than last season. But if we do stay up, and we establish ourselves as a Premier League club, then it’s probably not worth investing in a trophy cabinet.

Look at the records of some of the mid-ranking Premier League clubs that we can realistically aspire to sit alongside in the years to come:

• Newcastle United – last trophy: Fairs Cup, 1969 (apart from the Championship title or equivalent, which they won in 1993 and 2010)
• West Bromwich Albion – last trophy: FA Cup, 1968 (apart from the Championship title, which they won in 2008)
• Stoke City – last trophy: League Cup, 1972 (apart from the 2nd Division title, which they won in 1993)
• West Ham United – last trophy: FA Cup, 1980 (and they won the 2nd Division title the following year)
• Southampton – last trophy: FA Cup, 1976 (surprisingly, they’ve never actually won the Championship or equivalent)

You see the pattern: the only way for clubs like these – like us, potentially – to win silverware in the last 30-odd years has been to drop down a division and come back up as champions.

There are occasional exceptions, of course. Since the turn of the century, Swansea, Wigan, Birmingham and Portsmouth have all won one of the two cup competitions, though only one of those is still a Premier League club.

That’s our best bet, though. Unless something cataclysmic happens to English football, the Premier League title will remain out of Watford’s reach, as it is to all but a handful of clubs. The European competitions? I can see us qualifying for the Europa League in a few years’ time, if all goes according to plan, but winning it? Since it switched to the current format, the only English club to win the trophy are Chelsea.

Maybe we’ll win the FA Cup or League Cup one day, then. But that does rather depend on whether we actually take those competitions seriously, as Southampton, West Ham and the others listed above did in the 1970s and 80s. A cup run was something special in those days, the three-week gap between rounds filled with eager anticipation. Nowadays, the only thing we have to look forward to when the cups come around is the chance to see players in action who spend the rest of the season warming the bench if they’re lucky.

(I don’t blame Quique for selecting the team he did against Preston in the League Cup, by the way; in the circumstances, it was the only chance he had to see those players in competitive action. I do blame the players for being rubbish, though.)

So there you have it. If I’m lucky, I’ve maybe got another 30 or 40 years of supporting Watford ahead of me before I pop my clogs. But I doubt I’ll ever see them lift another trophy, unless we get relegated. Which is why I’ll never forgive them for chucking away the Championship title against Sheffield Wednesday in May.

Nineties nostalgia, pt. 4 – It takes a small man to beat a small team

I really can’t cope with the tension of the Championship promotion battle any more, and the idea of having to wait nearly a fortnight for the next instalment of the story is agonising. So let’s go back in time to an altogether simpler age. An age when Watford sometimes got easy FA Cup draws – that’s how long ago it was.

It’s December 1996, and Watford’s reward for struggling past Northampton Town in the 1st Round of the FA Cup is a home tie against Ashford Town of the Dr Marten’s Premier League. Who of the what? You may well ask. Ashford went bust in 2010, though the town now has a new club (Ashford United) which plays in what is basically the Kent county league. As for the shoemakers, they were sponsoring the Southern League at the time. All in all, a fairly straightforward tie for Kenny Jackett’s team, then sitting 8th in Division Two (that’s League One in old money).

A cursory glance at the back page of the programme reinforces the impression. That day the Hornets had Miller in goal; Gibbs and Robinson at full-back; a classic central defence pairing of Millen and Page; Bazeley and Slater on the wings; and Mooney, Noel-Williams and Penrice forming what was presumably an attacking trio, with only Palmer left to hold down the centre of midfield. That’s pretty much a classic mid- to late 90s line-up, and not that different from the one GT would take all the way to the Premier League a couple of seasons later.

Appearances can be deceptive, though. It turns out this was only Robbo’s 6th first-team game and Gifton’s 11th, while Slater had only made his Watford debut the previous week. Still, there should have been enough skill and experience to see off Ashford. Yet at half-time it was 0-0 and the atmosphere was starting to get a bit twitchy.

Enter a new hero (or so it seemed at the time). Say what you like about David Connolly (and plenty have), he’s scored goals wherever he’s played: brought on for Mooney, he scored a second-half hat-trick. Two goals for Bazeley against the tiring non-leaguers made for a slightly flattering 5-0 scoreline.

The programme is in the same garish, PC-inspired style as the one from 1997 I looked at a while ago. On the cover is Gary Porter, currently sidelined with a broken leg, while Steve Palmer gets the centre spread interview, in which he talks positively about having to play in defence, despite being a midfielder by trade. How little he knew of what lay ahead.

Also in the future lay the extensive career of Ade Akinbiyi, highlighted for scoring the winner for Norwich against Watford’s reserves in a recent game. Altogether less extensive would be the career of Richard Flash, a player so elusive that many Watford fans still refuse to believe he actually existed. Yet he’s listed here in the reserve team line-ups, so at least a few must actually have got to see him play.

As for Watford’s FA Cup run, it was ended in the 4th Round by Manchester City. Some things never change.

How the other half live

When it was confirmed that Watford would be playing Manchester City in the FA Cup 4th Round, I didn’t even consider going to the game. It’s a long way to go to get tonked, as I told friends who asked if I was going to make the trip.

Then a client at work, whose firm is one of City’s sponsors, invited me to attend and partake of the full corporate hospitality experience. (She didn’t actually know I was a Watford fan – she just invited the team she works with.) Suddenly travelling to Manchester didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

I know, I know. But it’s amazing what the offer of free booze and a comfy seat does to your scruples.

So at about one o’clock yesterday afternoon, I found myself walking into the executive entrance of the Etihad, past ranks of plebs (as I temporarily thought of them) who were standing in the rain, cordoned off by crash barriers, watching a bloke perform ball tricks.

Lunch in the Mancunian Suite was very pleasant; good company, fantastic food courtesy of one of Jamie Oliver’s franchises, a few glasses of Rioja. As kick-off approached and I settled into my padded seat, I was convinced that the pineapple parfait would prove to be the highlight of the day.

That’s the thing about football: you never know when it’s going to catch you unawares. As the drama of the first half unfolded, my main concern was to keep my mouth shut. I just about managed to keep my goal celebrations down to a private fist pump, but I would have loved to be with the rest of the Hornets fans way off to my right, singing and chanting in glee. But in case I needed an incentive to keep quiet, City fanatic and former world champion boxer Ricky Hatton was sitting three seats away, and I sensed it wouldn’t be a good idea to irritate him.

Half-time brought more booze and food (a small portion of chicken curry and rice served in a mug – very odd), and the chance to observe the perplexity of a room full of wealthy City fans who clearly weren’t used to their side being 2-0 down – to anyone, let alone a no-mark Championship team. Then it was back outside for the inevitable denouement, for I was sure our lead couldn’t last another 45 minutes. (Mind you, to show that the fatalism of the football fan is all-pervasive, someone asked Hatton if City were going to get back into the game: “There’s more chance of me making a comeback,” he said.)

As the game entered its final 10 minutes, I was beginning to dare to dream. It’s the hope that kills you... Well, we all know what happened. I managed to applaud politely as those around me roared in relief as City’s third and fourth goals went in (it was around this time that someone, presumably a fellow Hornet, was hauled out of the executive seating near us and firmly ejected, gesticulating wildly as he went), and then it was back inside for a final drink and a dainty little cake, before we finally left our luxury accommodation to queue in the rain for a taxi back to the station.

Befuddled with booze and brooding on shattered dreams, I didn’t enjoy the journey back to Euston. At least I wasn’t in the same carriage as my colleagues, who had to spend two hours in the company of some boisterous Brighton fans determined to celebrate their win at Port Vale as noisily as possible.

I’m glad I went, and I hope it will prove to be the case that I witnessed the turning point of Watford’s season. The corporate hospitality experience is fun, but only as an occasional treat. (I’ve done it a few times before, at grounds as diverse as White Hart Lane and Griffin Park.) If you can’t shout and sing in support of your team, watching football isn’t half as much fun.

Not up for the cup

On Saturday, with Watford not playing, nothing that I urgently needed to do, and the FPO* otherwise occupied, I thought it might be a good opportunity to go and watch a football match as a neutral.

My first choice was Brentford v Shrewsbury. I live in Fulham, so it’s a local ground, and my best friend is a season ticket holder. But it turned out that they had some special promotion on and the home end was sold out, so that wasn’t an option. “Why don’t you go and watch an FA Cup tie?” he said.

I’d already had the same idea. A quick scan of the fixtures revealed that my best bet was Barnet v Concord Rangers. Okay, that sounded promising. I went onto the Barnet website to find out more about their new ground. Then I saw the ticket prices: £24 for a seat, £16 for the terraces.

Are you kidding me? I watched the superb Watford-Norwich League Cup tie for 15 quid a few weeks ago. Why would I pay more than that for an FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round tie between two non-league teams? I thought about it a bit longer: it was going to take me a minimum of an hour to get there, whether I drove or took public transport, and the weather was looking iffy. In the end, I just couldn’t be bothered. If it had been a tenner to get in, I probably would have.

So, after a couple of hours spent working in the garden, I sat down to watch the end of Sky Soccer Saturday. Even though I’d turned down the chance to go, I was still curious to know how the Barnet game had turned out. Sky Sports had featured a few of the FA Cup ties on their vidiprinter (or whatever the digital equivalent is called), but not that one. I waited until the classified scores were in, but no mention of the FA Cup, so I switched over to BBC1, who are usually a few minutes behind. No classified FA Cup scores there either, but the presenter made a point of saying that they could be found on the BBC Sport website.

So I checked the BBC Sport app on my iPhone: the fixtures were there all right, but no scores. This was at 5.10 or so. Okay, I thought, it’s probably just that they don’t update the app as a priority. An hour or so later, I looked on my computer - with the same result. Well after 6 o’clock, it was still impossible to find out a single result from the FA Cup 4th qualifying round from the BBC. (For the record, the Real FA Cup website was no better.)

So here’s the thing: I’m a Watford fan through and through, and 95% of all the football matches I’ve ever watched have featured the Golden Boys. But every now and then I fancy a change of scene, and I’m open to watching non-league football. (I’ve seen plenty of non-league games, mostly at Kingstonian with a friend who used to support them.) But if it’s going to cost the same as a league game, I’m not going to bother. And if the media can’t be arsed to update the scores from the biggest competition non-league teams feature in, it’s hardly going to encourage other neutrals to take an interest, either. I’m not impressed, frankly.

*Fun Prevention Officer, aka wife

A pleasant change

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.

It’s not a *@%&ing panto!

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.

Get with the programme, pt. 2

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.

Why do it the hard way?

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!