North v South

I haven’t got all the answers for Watford’s current malaise (who has? Certainly not the manager), but there is one thing that strikes me as pertinent, and it’s to do with the origin of our loanees.

In general terms, European football can be divided into two styles of play. In northern and central Europe, the emphasis is on strength and speed, while in the south they favour style and skill. A massive over-simplification, of course, but I think it’s basically valid. Look at it this way: I doubt there’s ever been a Swedish team that played like the recent vintage Barcelona, or an Italian one that imitated Dave Bassett’s Wimbledon.

Since the Pozzos took over at Watford, the loanees from our sister clubs who have been most successful have largely been those originally from north or central Europe: Anya (Scotland), Ekstrand (Sweden), Vydra and Pudil (Czech Republic), Abdi (Switzerland).

In contrast, few of those from Mediterranean countries (or Latin American ones, for that matter) have established themselves as first-choice selections. Angella has, but as a central defender, the Latin mentality is perhaps less important to his game (though his error late in the game at Middlesbrough shows what can happen when defenders forget to keep it simple). Ditto Cassetti, though he’s only first-choice at the moment because of injury. Then there’s Forestieri, though he’s still very much a work in progress. I’m not convinced he’s the right foil for Deeney, but he’s done okay this season.

The other southern Europeans (Battochio, Fabbrini, Faraoni, plus Geijo last season) and Latin Americans (Iriney and Acuna) have all struggled to turn their undoubted talent into effectiveness on the pitch. That’s not surprising: the Championship is a northern European league where strength and speed tend to win out over style and skill.

None of this is to say that they won’t eventually come good. We’ve got most of these players on long-term contracts that will (hopefully) give them time to adjust their game to English football. Feel free to remind me of this post in a few years’ time, when Fabbrini is scoring 20 a season and Battochio is running the midfield. But in the meantime, the next time the Pozzos are looking to send us a batch of players, maybe they should focus on the Udinese and Granada players who were originally signed from colder climes.

A motley crew

Is that it now? Do we have enough players to get us through the season? Or maybe we should get a few more in on loan, just to be on the safe side.

All right, enough sarcasm. But I can’t be the only Watford fan to find the steady stream of players arriving at Vicarage Road over the past few weeks (so many that the ‘Team’ section of the club website makes no mention of half of them) more dispiriting than exciting. Yes, Vydra, Abdi and Pudil look promising, and have added quality to positions where we needed it. But such a huge influx of new personnel can only be destabilising, surely?

Here are the questions that are uppermost in my mind at the moment:

1) Does Zola have any say in this?

A manager’s priority at the start of a season is to build a coherent, stable team as quickly as possible: it’s hard to do that when your squad is changing on a daily basis. Also, we’re often told that the challenge for managers with large squads is keeping those who aren’t playing regularly happy. I’d have thought that’s a challenge Zola, new to the club as he is, would rather not have to deal with right now.

2) Do we have to play them all?

If I’ve understood the Pozzos’ business model correctly, the point of us taking all these players on loan from Udinese and Granada is to put them in the shop window. That’s not going to happen if the only action they see is the occasional friendly against Wycombe or Stevenage reserves, though, so we should expect to see all the newcomers in first-team action at some stage. How Zola manages that without disrupting the team is anyone’s guess.

3) How do our homegrown players feel about this?

I’ve written before about the dispiriting effect of Sean Dyche’s transfer and selection policy on players like Lee Hodson, Dale Bennett and Ross Jenkins. Now, I would imagine, they must be thoroughly depressed, all chance of a run in the first team extinguished. If I were them, I’d move in the next transfer window, to a club where they’ve got a realistic chance of developing their career. A club like Watford used to be.

4) Why should I care about any of them?

The fact that a player is on loan doesn’t mean that, as a fan, you don’t regard them as one of yours. I still feel quite proprietorial towards the likes of Ben Foster and Tom Cleverley, for example. But when half the squad consists of players who are unlikely to have a second season at the club, you can’t help but wonder why you should get to know them. By the time you’ve worked out who they all are and who plays where, they’ll be gone again.

5) Are there enough lockers at the training ground?

Seriously, it must be chaos at London Colney, like at school when all the foreign exchange kids arrive and none of them knows where they’re supposed to go and what they’re supposed to do. Still, if you’re a translator based in South-West Herts with a good knowledge of a few key languages (Italian, Spanish, French), you must be quids in right now.

The loan rangers

I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about loan signings; given the choice, I’d rather give one of our young players a chance to show what they can do rather than bus in someone from outside. But occasionally, as with Adam Johnson on Saturday, a loanee makes such an immediate impact that even I can’t find fault with the manager’s decision.

Watford have made full use of the loan system in the past 10 years or so, with mixed results. It would be easy to list the failures – well, I say that, but actually, so many have come and gone without leaving an impression that I’m struggling to remember all their names. Darren Caskey, Trevor Benjamin, Steve Morrow, Danny Hill – there must be dozens more. Then there are those who make a brief, startling impression before returning whence they came: Michael Chopra’s bizarre four-goal burst at Burnley in 2003 springs to mind.

But I’m just going to concentrate on the successes. So here, in reverse order, are my top 5 Watford loan signings:

5) Jermaine Pennant (from Arsenal, 2002-03: 23 games, 3 goals)
Okay, so he didn’t score as often as he should have, and he spent a fair amount of time running down blind alleys. But his twinkle-toed wing play brought a touch of class to a team that was lacking it, and he did lay on a few goals when he remembered to deliver a cross.

4) Tommy Mooney (from Southend, 1994: 10 games, 2 goals)
Obviously, if we were judging Tommy on his Watford career as a whole he’d be higher up the list. But even on loan he made an impact, helping to bring about an unlikely escape from what looked like certain relegation. The battling qualities we were to come to know and love were obvious enough for Glenn Roeder to bring him back full-time at the start of the following season.

3) Marlon King (from Nottingham Forest, 2005: 21 games, 12 goals)
Possibly the shrewdest loan deal we’ve ever done: half a season, with first option to buy, and at a preset price to boot. If Forest had been able to predict how prolific Marlon would turn out to be, they surely wouldn’t have agreed to that last part.

2) Ben Foster (from Manchester United, 2005-07: 81 games, 0 goals)
While Marlon was banging them in at one end, Ben was keeping them out at the other throughout the promotion season we weren’t expecting. Even Ben couldn’t keep us in the Premiership – but think how much worse it could have been without England’s best young keeper between the posts...

1) Dennis Bailey (from Queen’s Park Rangers, 1994: 8 games, 4 goals)
Dennis makes no. 1 because no other loan player I can remember has been so directly responsible for a turnaround in the club’s fortunes. When he and Tommy arrived in March 1994, Watford looked dead and buried, but the pair of them somehow managed to score the goals we needed to win 6 of the last 10 games and finish 3 points clear of the drop zone. Dennis’s contributions usually came off the bench, and his goals seemed all the more heroic for it at the time. But it was Tommy (the younger of the pair by 6 years) who went on to be a Watford legend, while Dennis continued to be a roaming striker for hire; Soccerbase lists stints at 18 different clubs in a 20-year career that only seems to have ended last year. I wonder if he had such a dramatic impact at any of the others?