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.

One out of three ain’t bad

For all the many uncertainties of professional football, some things never change, and the first three fixtures of this season threw up three of the most reliable of eternal verities where the Hornets are concerned:

1) In the 1st Round of the League Cup, Watford are always drawn at home against a lower-division side who we struggle to beat in a horribly dull game

2) When we play at Selhurst Park, it is always cold and wet and we get tonked

3) We never lose to Ipswich

All right, so some things do change after all (though at least we can rely on the League Cup). I can just about accept winning at Selhurst: Watford have occasionally won there – just not when I’ve been in attendance, and I couldn’t make it on Saturday, so I can practically take credit for the late winner.

But losing to Ipswich is against the natural order of things. I really thought we were going to get away with it last night, having been outplayed for most of the match – as if our status as Ipwich’s bogey team would somehow keep the ball out of our net. Still, if the Pozzos and Zola are going to revolutionise our club, they might as well start by destroying everything we know for sure. Yay.

Oh well

So much for my powers of prediction. Sod’s law, I think they call it. Though I was right on the first point, at least.

What I won’t be doing tomorrow night

After winning his fourth Olympic rowing gold medal, Steve Redgrave famously said in an interview that if anyone ever saw him near a boat again, they had his permission to shoot him. I feel much the same about the first round of the Carling Cup. And this year, I really mean it.

It’s the sheer mind-numbing predictability I can’t stand. Every year we get drawn at home in the first round of what I still like to think of as the League Cup, and every year I go because, well, it’s the first or second home game of the season and I’ve been starved of live football all summer. And besides, we’re playing some inferior outfit from a division or two lower down the league, so it’s bound to be a goal-fest, isn’t it? Ah, the joys of watching football on a balmy August evening...

Except that it doesn’t turn out like that, does it? At the risk of spoiling your enjoyment of the fixture, here’s what will happen tomorrow evening:

- Aidy will select a side containing no more than four of the team who started against Wolves on Saturday. Several of the squad he picks will not feature again in the first team this season, other than in second round of the League Cup. Oh, and Richard Lee will be in goal. Richard Lee is always in goal in the League Cup. When he finally retires, Richard will be dismayed to discover how high a proportion of his first-team appearances were made in the League Cup

- Watford will start brightly and create a few chances, but without scoring. Then Watford’s blend of youthful enthusiasm and inexperience and Gillingham’s blend of relative experience and lower-division ineptitude will cancel each other out, leading to a bland stalemate that will last for most of the match

- If you’re lucky, Watford will nick a goal in the last 10 minutes and that will be that. More likely is a scoreline of 0-0 or 1-1 at full-time, leading to a mind-numbing half-hour of extra-time and, as likely as not, penalties. By this time you will be so far past caring that you may well decide to leave before the shoot-out - I saw plenty of people doing just that in the tie against Accrington last year. If you stay, you’ll probably witness a victory, but somehow it won’t seem like a great cause for rejoicing

By the way, I know that Steve Redgrave reneged on his vow and returned to the water to win a fifth Olympic gold medal. What a lightweight, eh? He should have been at the Accrington game; then he’d know what real pain is...