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.

Yes, but...

I mentioned in my last post that I’d been interviewed outside the ground before the FA Cup quarter-final for the Dream Team website, and the results were published during the week. You can read the article here and watch the video on their Twitter feed @dreamteamfc.

As a journalist, it’s always interesting to be on the other end of the microphone. The journalist, Sam, asked me a series of questions about Watford’s Premier League adventure to date, covering each of the head coaches but focusing particularly on Javi Gracia and his similarities to a certain famous former Watford manager whose statue I happened to be standing next to at the time. Sure enough, the only quotes of mine they used were about how great Javi is and how he has the human touch, just like GT did.

Now I can’t speak for the other two people interviewed for the piece (Andy Lewers of The Hornets’ Nest and Mike Parkin of From The Rookery End), but I couldn’t help feeling that this rather misrepresented what I tried to get across during the interview. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not that bothered – I know how these things work, and at the end of the day I was just blethering on about a football team. But it is annoying that, even when the mainstream media (Dream Team is an offshoot of The Sun, so I think they count) are being complimentary about Watford, then still don’t get us.

As the interview proceeded, it became clear from the way Sam pressed me on certain questions that there were two things they wanted me to say: (1) that Javi’s success meant that the ‘managerial merry-go-round’ at Vicarage Road has hopefully stopped, to be replaced by a period of long-overdue stability; and (2) that he is a modern version of GT. To both of which assertions my answer amounted to “Yes, but...”

On the first point, I certainly agreed that Javi is a highly talented coach, the best we’ve had since we arrived in the Premier League. But I pointed out that a lot of his success can be attributed to the structures Scott Duxbury and co. have put in place around him, which enable him to do his job to the best of his ability. I mentioned, for example, that Mazzarri and Silva were both hampered by the long injury lists during their time in charge, and that the club had addressed this by hiring a new Head of Injury Prevention & Rehabilitation, who has done his job so well that Javi had a completely fit squad to pick from for the Palace game.

I also pointed out that these structures (and the meticulous planning that underlies them) meant that if Javi leaves the club tomorrow, the club will almost certainly have a new head coach in place within days who will have a framework around him that will allow him to take over with minimum fuss. To talk of a managerial merry-go-round is to fundamentally misunderstand the Pozzo way of running a club, where the head coach isn’t the be-all and end-all and stability comes instead from that carefully constructed framework.

That’s also where the comparisons with GT are misguided. Yes, Javi does appear to be a likeable, warm, humane and thoughtful person, as GT was, and he’s certainly easier for the fans to relate to than either Mazzarri or Silva. But GT was a force of nature who (backed by Elton’s money) transformed our football club from top to bottom, leading Watford up the divisions not once, but twice. The days when the manager of a club was the beating heart of it are long gone, though. Even if Javi stays at Watford for 10 years (which is highly unlikely), he’ll still be just a cog in the Pozzos’ machine, albeit a very important one.

But like I say, most of the football media still don’t understand this. Maybe they don’t want to understand, since the way they talk about football is still based on the idea that everything good or bad that happens to a club is down to the manager. And maybe it is, in some places – but not at Watford.

It only occurred to me after the interview (as the best ideas often do) that there’s a very simple way to explain all this with reference to the Premier League club we’re most often compared with. When Eddie Howe leaves Bournemouth, it’s highly likely that they’ll be screwed: when Javi Gracia leaves Watford, it’s highly likely that we’ll simply carry on as before.

A game of frustration

Older readers may remember playing Frustration as a child. It was a fairly basic board game where you rolled a die and moved your pieces around a circuit; the first player to get all their pieces home was the winner. The twist was that, if another player landed on a spot that one of your pieces was occupying, yours got sent all the way back to the start, even if you were only one place from home. Hence the name of the game.

It’s as apt a metaphor as I can think of for Watford’s season, a season in which, again and again, a promising beginning has been undone and we’ve ended up back at square one. The games where we’ve played well, taken the lead and then ended up drawing or losing. The players who’ve lit up the pitch for a handful of matches and then picked up an injury that kept them out for months on end. And, of course, the head coach who looked like he might be the one to take Watford to the next level, only to have his head turned by a rival club and lose focus.

Yesterday’s opponents provided a timely reminder of how things could have been, like the ‘here’s what you could have won’ reveal on a TV gameshow. In a parallel universe, we could have been where Burnley are, sitting in 7th place, dreaming of winning a place in Europe.

Imagine for a moment that, throughout the season, we’d been able to field Chalobah, Cleverley and Doucouré in the centre of midfield, in front of a defence anchored by the strength and experience of Kaboul and Cathcart. Imagine we’d had access to the speed of Femenía and the skill of Hughes and Pereyra in every game. Imagine (and admittedly, this is a bit more of a stretch) that we’d managed to find a way to make a pairing of Deeney and Gray work up front. I know ‘what if’ is one of the most pointless phrases in the lexicon, but you can’t help wondering, can you?

The fact that, despite all these frustrations – all the leads chucked away and the absurdly lengthy absences through injury – we’re still sitting fairly comfortably in mid-table,almost makes it worse. So near, and yet so far.

Hopefully we’ll pick up a few more points before the season ends (although you can look at our remaining games and make a plausible case for us losing every one, given the form and/or desperation of the opposition), and then regroup in the summer, ready for the season we should have had this time round. But of course, somehow it never works out that way.

That was the year that was

On the face of it, 2017 was a reasonably successful year for Watford. Last season we retained our Premier League status, which was after all the object of the exercise, and the start of 2018 sees us sitting in 10th place. Another good year for the Pozzo project, then.

Well, up to a point. Your view of the club’s progress is inevitably coloured by the matches you attend, and this was a year in which I barely missed a home game, as well as making it to eight away fixtures. In all, I attended 30 Watford matches in 2017 (not counting the pre-season friendly against Real Sociedad), and saw just 10 victories; six in the latter half of last season, four so far in this campaign. And you know what? One win every three games doesn’t really feel like success to me. More like getting by.

There weren’t a lot of memorable moments, either. The two wins against Arsenal stand out, naturally, but I’m struggling to recall anything about the other wins I saw between January and April, apart from Jerome Sinclair’s solo goal against Burton in the FA Cup. Of the victories so far this season, away at Southampton was particularly enjoyable.

It’s not all about winning, of course, and there has been plenty of excitement and drama in games we drew or lost: the two games at Stamford Bridge where we threatened to pull off a shock, but ended up losing 4-3 and 4-2, and the three-all draw against Liverpool, spring to mind.

But there’s also been an awful lot of dross. You don’t need me to remind you how dreadful the football in the latter half of Mazzarri’s season was. More recently, our display against Swansea on Saturday was one of the dullest I’ve witnessed in a long time.

There’s always an excuse, though, and if there’s one word that seems to sum up Watford’s 2017, it’s injuries. There was that period at the start of the year when we lost Pereyra and then Zarate in rapid succession, and our ability to unlock opposing defences went with them. As for this season, our defence seems cursed, while any player who comes into the team and impresses is guaranteed to suffer an injury after a few games: Chalobah, Hughes, Femenia… At any one time, at least half a dozen important players have been unavailable for selection. In the circumstances, perhaps I should be grateful to have seen as many wins as I have.

Conspiracy theorists have linked the ongoing injury crisis to the departure of Head of Medical Richard Collinge at the start of last season, and maybe there’s something in that. What baffles and irritates me is the lack of clear communication about injuries. I appreciate that it’s not always possible to put a precise date on a player’s return to full fitness, but we get told so little, it’s not surprising the fans start to wonder what’s going on. When Nathaniel Chalobah was first injured, it was suggested he’d be out for about six weeks; more than twice that time has elapsed and there’s still no sign of him. Another example: a couple of weeks ago, Marco Silva suggested in a press conference that Will Hughes might be in contention to return against Brighton, yet he wasn’t named in the squad for that or the two subsequent games, with no explanation as to what’s going on.

At some point, it would be nice if someone from the club could give us their take on the ongoing injury crisis. Is it something to do with the way the players train (it was interesting to read in the programme the other day that Darryl Janmaat had barely had an injury in his career before he arrived at Vicarage Road), have we signed a lot of injury-prone players, or it really just down to bad luck?

In the meantime, Watford fans will continue to suffer more poor performances and results and keep reciting the mantra: things will pick up when our injured players are fit again. Except that day seems as far off as ever.