A question of philosophy

With no Watford games to look forward to for a couple more weeks, there’s an opportunity to think more philosophically about the season so far. And if there’s one thing a philosopher loves, it’s a thought experiment, so try this one:

The day before a Premier League season starts, a genie appears and grants you the power to determine how Watford will fare. The catch is that there are only two options:

A: Watford will stay up, but they won’t win a single home game

B: Watford will be unbeaten at home, but they will be relegated

Now if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly a Watford supporter, so obviously you’d choose A, right? Supporting a club means wanting the best for them at all times, and staying in the Premier League is the best thing for Watford; it means more money to spend on buying better players and to invest in the stadium, the training ground, youth development and community schemes. And it means we get to see some of the best players in the world at Vicarage Road for another season. It’s a no-brainer.

But the thing is, most of us don’t think like that. Human beings are inherently selfish, and what we want from our football-watching experience is the elation of seeing our team scoring goals, the shared experience of cheering on a winning side and the satisfaction of leaving the ground with three points in the bag. I strongly suspect the only people who would realistically choose option A are that dedicated band of fans who go to every away game, and who would reap those benefits anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this, obviously, because of the contrast in Watford’s recent home and away form:

Last five home games: W 0 D 0 L 5, GF 3, GA 13

Last five away games: W 2 D 1 L 2, GF 3, GA 6

Moreover, the two away games before that were draws at Burnley and Newcastle, while the two previous home games were comprehensive defeats by West Ham and Manchester City.

Roy and Ray have clearly managed to tighten up our leaky defence (apart from the suicidal performance at Wolves, which accounts for four of the six away goals conceded), but it doesn’t seem to work at home. And I’m beginning to wonder, a bit like David Mitchell’s Nazi in the famous sketch: are we the problem? Do the team crumble under the weight of the fans’ expectations at Vicarage Road? Does the perceived greater need to win home games (even though the points are the same wherever you win them) force Roy to compromise his defensive principles, with disastrous results?

I’ve written before about my conviction that the concept of home advantage is a myth – or at least, it only exists in so far as managers and players believe it does. (I’m sure the philosophers have a term for that, too.) Last season was an interesting experiment in that regard: the Hornets’ home record – 19 wins, 2 draws, 2 defeats – was outstanding, it’s true, but it was achieved in the almost total absence of home fans. Indeed, the three games where fans were allowed to attend saw one of the two home defeats and one of the draws. The players may have made regular statements about how it wasn’t the same without the fans there, but when they were, they performed worse.

Clearly, promotion and the return of proper crowds means we can’t properly compare this season with last. The fact remains that Watford have performed miserably at home for the most part; take out the first 70 minutes against Villa, the Man United game and the dogged – but ultimately unsuccessful – resistance against Spurs and you’re left with precious little from which to construct a highlights reel.

So bearing all this in mind, while we’ve got a string of potentially winnable home games against teams from the bottom half of the table, it’s probably best not to get our hopes up. The tension in the stands at those games will be almost unbearable (unless the unthinkable happens and we dominate our opponents and win with ease), and it will be transmitted to the players. It would probably be better if we were playing Leeds, Burnley, Brentford and Everton away and Liverpool and City at home.

As for me, I’m trying to view the whole situation philosophically.

Home comforts

Returning to old routines is reassuring, like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. It starts, as usual, with lunch at my mum’s, where she still insists on making me fish and chips (the proper way, using a deep fat fryer), as she has done on Saturdays ever since I was a boy, even though she’s now 94 and I’m 58.

Then the short drive from Bushey Heath to Watford, parking as usual in the industrial estate on Whippendell Road (£2 more expensive than it used to be, mind). The walk over the railway bridge, left down Cardiff Road, right up Occupation Road, past the allot... Oh, hang on. Where the allotments used to be is now a building site, with the enormous steel frame of what looks like a warehouse looming up on the hospital side.

From there on in, it’s a mixture of the familiar and the new. Familiar: buy a programme from my usual seller for the usual price. New: queue to use my iPhone to get into the ground. (This early – around 2.15 – the queues aren’t too bad and move quickly, and the technology works perfectly for me and for everyone else, as far as I can see.) New: put on a face mask for the 30-second walk through the concourse. Familiar: discover I’m the first one in my row, and exchange a few words with the old bloke in the row in front who’s always there before me.

From there until kick-off, the level of hysteria gradually rises. The emergence of the three goalkeepers for their warm-up is greeted with disproportionately huge cheers, which are then surpassed when the rest of the team join them a few minutes later.

Once they’ve returned to the dressing room, it all gets rather chaotic. The first showing of the moving montage of Watford fans who didn’t make it through the pandemic is swiftly followed by the announcement of the Graham Taylor Matchday. Is this where we’re all supposed to raise our scarves? Apparently not, but the 1881 take it as a cue to start bellowing the old anthems at a volume which renders the PA inaudible, so I may have missed some instructions. Then the Villa team come out first, followed by the Hornets, though I can’t hear Z-Cars. Do we raise our scarves now? Some do, so I follow suit, but it’s all a bit patchy. Finally, once the hubbub has died down a bit and the players have done that lining up thing, Z-Cars is audible, and all is right with the world.

I won’t bore you with a match report – you can read those elsewhere. But it is worth noting how satisfying it was that all Watford’s debutants distinguished themselves, despite the doom-laden predictions of the many idiots on Twitter who’ve been moaning about the club’s recruitment, as if we’d just picked random names out of a hat. Just because you haven’t heard of a player, it doesn’t mean they’re no good. My instant new favourite of the bunch is Juraj Kucka, who’s built like a bouncer and plays like Valon Behrami on steroids. He’s got ‘cult hero’ written all over him.

Half-time brings another showing of the memorial montage and an impressive parade of NHS staff round the ground - so many that there are still people emerging from the Sir Elton John Stand when the leaders complete their lap. My hands are sore from clapping by the time the last nurse finally disappears, but it’s no hardship. It’s great to see the Villa fans joining in, too – although unless I missed it, they never did raise their scarves for GT.

By the end of the game I’m hoarse from singing and shouting, and my nerves are shot thanks to the late Villa penalty and their subsequent all-out assault on our tottering defence. (We need to get better at closing out games, but that’s an argument for another day.) We held out, though, the final whistle went and delirium was unconfined. In no rush to leave, I waited to applaud the players and then to sing Xisco’s name (we really need a proper song for him).

And then, finally, reluctantly, I left the stadium. My, but it was good to be there again.

Questions, questions

Don’t worry, I’m not going to share any profound thoughts on being a Watford fan as 2014 dawns damp and dreary, mainly because I haven’t got any.

Instead, here are five rhetorical questions based around issues that bother me slightly, none of which is worth a whole blog entry in its own right. If you have an actual answer to any of them, please let me know, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

1) Why doesn’t Richard Short just ask the Watford players how to pronounce their surnames? I don’t have a problem with his performance as matchday announcer in general, though I know a lot of fans do. However, given that one of the main requirements of the job is to read out the teams before kickoff, I’d say the least he could do is to make an effort to pronounce them correctly.

The Pozzos have given him a lot of easy ones (Abdi, Anya, Cassetti, Ekstrand), but if there is a way of getting a name wrong, he generally does so – repeatedly. For example, I know enough Spanish to be fairly confident that our Spanish goalkeeper is not called ‘Al-moon-ee-ay’, and I’m pretty sure our Italian-Argentinian striker isn’t ‘Forest-airy’.

It’s not just the foreign players, either. On Sunday he managed to sidestep the tricky question of whether our Chelsea loanee is ‘Mac-keck-ran’ or ‘Mac-eek-ran’ by adding a superfluous ‘r’, making him ‘Mac-reck-ran’.

2) Does Lloyd Doyley ever get tired of having to introduce himself to yet another new manager? Mind you, at least Sannino hasn’t started by dropping him, like most of his predecessors, so maybe the message is finally getting through.

3) What is the point of that enormous car park at the bottom of Occupation Road? On most Saturday afternoons, there are two or three cars parked there and hundreds of empty spaces. Why can’t it be used for matchday parking?

4) What’s happened to poor Ross Jenkins? As far as I can tell, he’s still employed by the club (his contract runs out at the end of the season, according to wfc.net), but he hasn’t got a squad number. Does he still train with the other players, even though he apparently has no hope of getting a game (even in the friendlies they organise for the reserves), or is he left to do laps of the training ground on his own, like a kid who’s annoyed his PE teacher?

I understand that Zola didn’t rate him, but he looked a decent enough player under the previous regimes, so I don’t understand what he’s done to deserve being sent to Coventry.

5) Will Watford ever again have a manager who manages to stay in the job for three full years? Given the way football is going, you could ask the question about pretty much any club, but since Boothroyd (who managed three and half years), we’ve had a succession of one-season managers, and I don’t like that – I prefer stability and certainty.

Of course, in Pozzoworld the stability comes from the regime as a whole, not the head coach, or so we’re told. And from what I’ve read (particularly in the excellent chapter on the subject in Tales From The Vicarage Volume II, of which more soon), they’re prone to changing head coaches at frequent intervals. I’m not expecting Sannino to rival Arsène Wenger for longevity, put it that way. But I’d love to be proved wrong.

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.

Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more

I was fully intending to go to tonight’s game against Ipswich, until the FPO phoned up in distress at about four o’clock and persuaded me that I was urgently needed elsewhere. So it was no surprise to me that Watford won: clearly, it was because I wasn’t there.

Indeed, it is now mid-October and I still haven’t seen a Watford victory this season. I’ve been to every home game bar three – and two of those have been our only home wins. I didn’t even get to see us beat Norwich on live TV, as I was on holiday abroad at the time.

The bad news is that, unless another extreme emergency occurs, I will be at the Scunthorpe game on Saturday. Sorry everyone.

This is getting ridiculous

Having finally seen (and thoroughly enjoyed) my first Watford game since mid-December last night, I was disappointed to hear that the Palace match on Saturday 13th has had to be postponed because of their continued involvement in the FA Cup.

It can’t be helped, I suppose, but it does mean that Watford’s first home game on a Saturday afternoon in 2010 will be on February 27th - which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. I enjoy midweek games, but they are a bit of a chore to get to and from, especially in the depths of winter. Then there’s the inevitably smaller attendance for midweek games (I’m sure Sheffield United would have brought more fans down on a weekend), which hits the club’s bank balance at a time when every penny counts.

I’ve just worked out that of our 17 remaining league games, a maximum of five will take place on a Saturday afternoon at Vicarage Road - and that’s assuming that none get moved for TV. Like I said, ridiculous.