Next steps

Given that, going into the last month of the 2018/19 season, Watford had two possible routes to European football, it’s tempting to view the denouement as a disappointment. In the cold light of day, though, reaching a cup final for only the second time in the club’s history, and finishing in the highest league position since 1987, has to be viewed as success. It’s also progress, and it was encouraging that the statement from Gino Pozzo and Scott Duxbury after the Cup final emphasised that this is just the beginning. Of course, there’s plenty that can go wrong, but I’m confident that I won’t have to wait another 35 years (by which time I’ll be 91, if I’m still here) to see the Hornets appear in another cup final.

So, what do Watford need to do to keep up the momentum and ensure that next season is even better? I have a few thoughts…

On the pitch
The most obvious thing that needs fixing is our defence. After three consecutive shutouts (against Brighton and Everton in the league and QPR in the cup), we didn’t register a single clean sheet after February 15th – that’s 15 games. Some of the defending was positively inept, and towards the end of the season we were routinely conceding the first goal, even when we were apparently on top.

It feels like we need an injection of youthful energy. At 28, Christian Kabasele and Kiko Femenía are the youngest members of the regular defence, and Kabasele has had a wobbly season, having previously looked like a nailed-on starter for years to come. We know Miguel Britos is leaving this summer, and it wouldn’t be a surprise in Sebastian Prödl joins him. That would create a couple of vacancies for fresh blood.

Maybe one of those vacancies will be filled by the promising Ben Wilmot, though it seems that the club views him more as a defensive midfielder. Either way, that leads on to my second point: it would be good to see the club’s talented youngsters being integrated into the Premier League squad next season. The team is starting to feel a bit old (only three of the 11 who started the Cup final were under 28: Hughes, Delofeu and Doucouré) and needs rejuvenating. Wilmot and Domingos Quina have made the strongest case, and then there’s Nathaniel Chalobah (if he still counts as young) and the enigma that is Adalberto Peñaranda. What with them and the many young players we have out on loan, the future looks bright – as long as they’re given a chance.

The other area where we’ve fallen down this season is in finishing. Obviously, no team converts all their chances (though Man City get close), but, as noted above, there were a significant number of games this season where we failed to turn dominance into goals and paid the price for sloppiness in front of goal. Given the competition in the transfer market for proven goalscorers, our best hope is probably that one of our overseas contingent will prove to be the answer in the medium to long term; for example, Cucho Hernandez has had rave reviews playing for Huesca in La Liga, and the Brazilian 17-year-old wunderkind João Pedro can apparently join us in January.

Off the pitch
The first one is easy: reinstate the Z-Cars theme as the music the team walk out to at Vicarage Road. Whatever the reasoning behind replacing it with ‘I’m still standing’, the resentment and outright anger caused by the move should be reason enough to reverse it. It’s part of our tradition and, let’s be honest, we don’t have a lot to boast about in that regard.

The second one is more of a challenge. We have the second smallest stadium in the Premier League, yet we struggle to fill it for all but the biggest games. Look around during a typical match and you’ll see swathes of empty seats in the Family and Sir Elton John stands in particular.  Given that the announced attendance figure is usually close to the ground capacity, this can only mean that season ticket holders are staying away. The suspicion is that they’re actually fans of another team and only attend when that team is playing.

I can vouch for this, having had two empty seats next to me in the Rookery (in prime position behind the goal, not too far back) all season after the previous occupants moved over to the Graham Taylor Stand. They were only occupied twice, and one of those was a cup game. Given that there is apparently a waiting list for season tickets, I can only assume that someone bought them and didn’t use them.

I know the club is trying to address this – and it needs to, because it’s not a good look. More generally, there is a job to be done in marketing the attractions of Premier League football at Vicarage Road across a wider catchment area – much as the club did in the 1980s, with some success. After all, if you ignore Greater London and look north, east and west, the nearest PL clubs are Leicester and Norwich. A club as successful as Watford ought be able to draw in neutrals from across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, and from further afield too. Hopefully, reaching the FA Cup final will have helped spread the message that this is a club that’s going places.

There’s always a but

A week after the end of the 2017-18 season and the sense of frustration I wrote about a few weeks ago still lingers. There were so many good things that were ultimately undermined by personalities and performances and circumstances and sheer bad luck. Here are five of my biggest buts (no sniggering at the back).

It’s great that we had 17 different scorers this season – it’s not a bad thing when there are multiple players who are capable of hitting the back of the net. But the fact that not one player managed double figures, and that our top scorer, with an underwhelming seven, was a midfielder (Doucouré) whose last goal came on January 13th, points to one of the key problems: neither Silva nor Gracia came up with a system or a formation that consistently created chances for our forwards. That’s the key issue that needs sorting out next season.

It’s great that Troy Deeney is still at our club and looks set to start his ninth season in August – a rare feat in modern football. His talismanic status is universally acknowledged, and I think he can still make an important contribution if Gracia can find a way to play to his strengths. But, let’s be honest, this wasn’t his greatest season, lack of goals aside. Missing seven games on bans for violent conduct didn’t help us, or him, given that he is, by his own admission, a player who needs a run of games to operate at his most effective.

It’s great that we signed a couple of hugely promising young English players, Nathaniel Chalobah and Will Hughes, who look set to have a big impact over the next couple of seasons if we can keep them fit. But the continuing lack of players coming through from our own Academy is disappointing. At least Mazzarri gave a few of them a runout, albeit mostly through necessity. This season, a handful of benchwarming stints by Michael Folivi, Carl Stewart and Joy Mokena – actually, they managed four between them, so not even a handful – is all we have to show for the club’s investment in youth. It’s rather depressing to think that Adrian Mariappa may turn out to be the last player we ever get to sing ‘He’s one of our own’ for.

It’s great that the 1881 have continued to improve the atmosphere at games this season with their banners and flags and confetti cannons (though a bit of warning might have been nice, lads – an old bloke near me nearly had a heart attack when they went off the first time). Sticking a drummer and a ‘conductor’ on the TV gantry outside the hospitality suite for a couple of games near the end of the season worked particularly well. But it’s disheartening to see so many empty seats at most games, suggesting that there a few thousand season ticket holders who aren’t actually that bothered about Watford, but can afford to spend hundreds of pounds a year to watch a handful of games that interest them. I know the club is looking into this, and it’s an emotive subject – you can’t force people to attend games. But all the talk of extending the ground seems a bit extraneous as long as we can’t fill it from week to week at the current capacity.

And finally, a personal bugbear. It’s great that the players still run out to ‘Z Cars’ – it’s part of the club’s heritage, something that is special and (almost) unique to us. But it’s bloody annoying that they cut it off once the teams have lined up and switch to some anonymous rubbish that is presumably the PL’s official anthem, or some such nonsense (I’m moderating my language here in case any minors are reading), thus depriving us of the chance to hear the tune in all its glory, complete with the bonkers clarinet (?) solo in the middle. I assume this is a PL rule – I noticed at the Bristol City FA Cup tie that ‘Z Cars’ got played in full – but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

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.