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.

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.

‘Tales From The Vicarage: Volume 4’ by Lionel Birnie

Founded in 1960, the group of French-speaking writers who called themselves Oulipo devoted themselves to writing fiction under certain constraints. Most famously, George Perec set himself the challenge of writing an entire novel without using the letter ‘e’.

Perec died a long time ago, but if he was still alive, I reckon I could set him a tougher challenge than that: try writing about pre-Pozzo-era Watford without mentioning Graham Taylor. Judging by TFTV4, I don’t think even Oulipo’s finest could have managed it.

Entertaining and illuminating snapshots of GT crop up throughout the latest volume in the excellent TFTV series. Here he is in 1983, “donning a three-piece suit, bowler hat and stick-on moustache” for a nostalgic friendly against Corinthian Casuals (a game I often think I dreamt, so I’m grateful to have independent verification that it actually took place). Here he is the following year, sitting in a room in an airport hotel in Glasgow, waiting nervously for John McClelland – who has just agreed to join the Hornets – to return from a room down the corridor, where he knows that Aberdeen manager Alex Ferguson is trying to gazump him. Here is again in 1996, on his first day back at the club, giving all the players a piece of paper and a pen and telling them to pick a team for the next game (Tommy Mooney not only picks himself, but names himself as captain). And yet again in 1998, persuading Allan Smart to sign on the dotted line in a series of conversations and messages that make him feel “like the best player in the world”.

The credits for the TFTV series have shrunk over time, from the varied cast of writers employed for the first two volumes (myself included on Volume 1) to the two-handed, interview-themed Volume 3.  Volume 4 is a Lionel Birnie solo album, but it’s none the worse for that. That’s largely because of the variety of material covered in the 10 chapters, where extended interviews are interspersed with both topical material (the first three chapters are broadly themed around Watford’s journey to the Premier League) and more nostalgic digressions.

To be honest, the latter were my favourite parts of the book. For instance, the chapter on the friendly games of the early 80s (many of which I attended) makes you realise just how much less seriously professional football as a whole – and Watford in particular – took itself in those days. Can you imagine a team today going abroad to play a friendly just three days before the final game of the season, and one that would determine whether or not they won promotion? That’s what Watford did in May 1979, and that’s not even the strangest part of the story (which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t read the book yet).

I could go on, but you get the point. TFTV4, like its predecessors, is full of wonderful stories and intriguing insights into the club we all love. And pretty much every chapter underscores how lucky those of us of my generation are to have been Watford fans in a period that has encompassed both GT in his pomp (twice!) and the Pozzos.