Out of sight, out of mind

 It’s funny how quickly I’ve forgotten about the Premier League.

This thought occurred to me one Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago, when I realised that it was the end of the weekend and I only knew a handful of the Premier League scores.

That wouldn’t have happened last season. For the past five years, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say my weekends during the football season were structured around the Premier League, I was certainly aware of what was going on most of the time. As well as attending all of Watford’s home games and half a dozen away fixtures each season, I watched bits and pieces of various PL matches most weekends. Some of them had a direct bearing on our league position, others featured a team we were due to play in the near future. More generally, as a fan of an established PL team, it felt natural to take an interest in the division as a whole – the players, the coaches, the formations, the lot.

Even I’m a bit surprised how little of that interest has survived Watford’s relegation. I suspect much of it is down to the current circumstances – all professional football now has the whiff of a training session about it, however cleverly the broadcasters overlay fake crowd noises. That makes it that much harder to care about what’s going on when you haven’t got any skin in the game, even if that game involves the champions shipping seven goals against a team who only got one more point than Watford last season.

Probably for the same reason, I haven’t replaced my interest in the PL with an in-depth appreciation of the Championship. I’ve watched most of Watford’s games on Sky Sports or Hornets Hive, wishing I could be there, but I’m not much interested in the opposition. There’s been a lot of churn since we were last in this division, and most teams are full of players I’ve never heard of. Maybe that will change as the season progresses; if we build on our steady start and make a concerted push for promotion, I dare say I’ll be tuning into Sky Sports on a Friday night in the hope of watching our rivals drop points.

In the meantime, most of my non-Watford interest in football these days is being channelled into non-league football, where you can actually go and watch proper competitive matches. (Well, not this month, but hopefully normal service will resume in December.) Since the trip to Leatherhead I wrote about last time, I’ve made a couple of visits to the rather less leafy surrounds of King George Field in Tolworth, just off the A3, to watch Corinthian-Casuals in cup action. First up was an FA Cup qualifying tie against Dulwich Hamlet which ended 2-2; that meant a penalty shootout, carried out at the goal right in front of where we standing, which the visitors won. A few weeks later I went to an FA Trophy tie against Hendon, an end-to-end thriller where Casuals triumphed 5-4.

Both games were lots of fun, and apart from a few telltale signs of pandemic compliance (I particularly liked the carefully marked-out 2m intervals on the ground in front of the burger van, snaking around the forecourt like something you’d see in an infant school playground), it felt pretty much like a normal football-watching experience. And oddly enough, I didn’t feel any need to check on how Burnley or Brighton were getting on.

Live from Leatherhead

On Thursday afternoon, for work, I ‘attended’ a virtual industry awards ceremony that opened with the unpromising announcement: “And now, live from our studio in Leatherhead...” Just two days later, having never given this particular town in Surrey a second thought, I was there myself, watching an actual live football match.

The last time I did that was on March 7th, when I was at Selhurst Park to watch Watford demonstrate that the 3-0 win against Liverpool the previous week was a flash in the pan. It was a depressing afternoon, but as the subsequent months showed, it was still better than not being able to go to football matches at all.

So when my Brentford-supporting friend Stuart suggested a trip to Leatherhead to watch them kick off their Isthmian League Premier Division season against Horsham, I immediately agreed. And it was brilliant.

It was about 2pm when we got off the bus just across the River Mole from the ground, so we had plenty of time to stroll to a nearby pub and enjoy a pint of bitter in the garden. Then it was a short walk to the bucolically named Fetcham Grove, where we installed ourselves behind the goal in the home end, shaded from the sun by a corrugated iron roof; a bit like the old Rookery, but much smaller. (Later I noticed that it was called the Bernard Edwards Stand – presumably not after the Chic bassist, though you never know. Maybe the legacy of 70s disco lives on in this part of the Surrey commuter belt.)

While Stuart went to the bar to get us another pint, I read the programme, keeping a wary eye out for errant footballs, as the Horsham players were practicing their shooting just a few yards in front of me. It turns out that Horsham were officially formed in 1881 and are nicknamed the Hornets as the result of a competition among the fans. Sound familiar? Mind you, Horsham’s traditional colours are yellow and green – not a combination I’ve ever seen on a winged insect of any kind.

Nevertheless, when visiting a ground as a neutral, I regard it as good manners to support the home team. That decision looked sensible when Leatherhead scored in the first minute through a superb volley that curled into the top corner of the goal right in front of us, close enough that I heard the sound of the net rippling. After that they had a few more good chances to score, with the right winger pinging over some excellent crosses. Meanwhile Horsham won a succession of corners at the other end, most of which ended with a header soaring over the bar and out of the ground.

At half-time, we joined the Leatherhead ultras (half a dozen mouthy teenagers and a prematurely wizened middle-aged bloke in a replica shirt – every non-league club seems to have one of these) and relocated to the far end, this time leaning against the pitch-side fence to the right of the goal. Inevitably, we spent a certain amount of time checking our phones for news from Hillsborough and the Brentford Community Stadium, where Stuart should have been sitting in his new seat for the very first time. But we also watched as Horsham played their way back into the game, and inevitably made Leatherhead pay for their profligacy by equalising in the 81st minute. The last 10 minutes were predictably hectic, but 1-1 was the final score.

That wasn’t really the point, though, at least for me. It was just so nice to be standing in the autumn sunshine in a tree-lined stadium watching a proper, competitive football match, listening to the banter and watching the players pretending they couldn’t hear the abuse being hurled at them from close range. (Particular vitriol was reserved for one Horsham player who’d previously turned out for Dorking, Leatherhead’s much-hated local rivals.) During one lull in play, I watched as an oak leaf floated gently to the ground, landing close to the corner flag, and thought: “This is the life.”

I haven’t given up on Watford, of course; next Saturday, I’ll be sat here in my back bedroom following the action from Vicarage Road on Hive Live, even though the mere thought of playing Luton makes me nervous. But, as Stuart pointed out, there are plenty of non-league grounds to explore in south-west London and its hinterlands, and for as long as we can’t watch our actual teams in the flesh, this is the best  available alternative. If you’re missing live football, I suggest you check your local fixtures and do the same. You won’t regret it.

A sunny day at the Beveree

We Watford fans are spoiled these days. When we’re not making repeat visits to Wembley, we watch home games at a spruced-up Vicarage Road that would be all but unrecognisable to anyone who last saw a match there in the 20th century, and away games at a variety of equally smart stadiums (and Selhurst Park).

Listening to Hornet Heaven or reading The Watford Treasury gives a flavour of the no-frills experience that watching football used to be, but sometimes you just need to go back to basics. So yesterday afternoon, finding myself at a loose end on a sunny day and with a full programme of football outside the Premier League, I decided to pay a visit to my local non-league team, Hampton & Richmond Borough, who were hosting Truro City in the National League South. Call it a palate-cleanser ahead of tonight’s game at the Vic.

I say ‘local’; their ground, the oddly-named Beveree, is about eight miles away as the crow flies, but thanks to the random transport generator that is South West Trains it took me an hour and a quarter to get there (and even longer to get home). Arriving just after kickoff, I chose a vantage point in the shade, on the covered terracing that stretches halfway down one side of the ground, and surveyed the scene. The Beveree is a typically ramshackle non-league ground, with the pitch surrounded by a random assortment of structures; a couple of small stands with seats, some covered terracing, a two-storey clubhouse that holds the changing rooms, a bar and various other bits and pieces. I particularly liked the ‘Keith Hussey Stand’ that adorns the away end, consisting of little more than two rows of scaffolding poles with some corrugated iron laid over the top.

Among the fans I spotted a couple of Fulham shirts and a few Hampton ones, in their distinctive colours of red and dark blue stripes. Many were sipping pints, the Beveree being a rare stadium where alcohol is permitted on the terraces. What with the beer and the bank holiday sunshine, the vibe was laid-back, with no one getting too worked up about what was happening on the pitch. This may have been because Hampton had made themselves mathematically safe with a victory on Saturday.

As for Truro, still potentially in danger of relegation, they had decided to play a ridiculously high defensive line (just short of the centre circle), and after a few failed attempts at breaching the offside trap, Hampton finally succeeded and duly scored. A one-nil half-time lead soon became two with a penalty, and that seemed to be that. However, after a combination of the post, the Truro goalie and poor finishing had kept it at two-nil for most of the second half, some classic fannying about in the Hampton defence led to a goal back for Truro, who then piled everyone forward and scored a dramatic injury-time equaliser with a diving header from a deep cross. Cue some chuntering from the home fans, but nothing more. At least the coachload of Truro fans would have had something to celebrate on their 300-mile trip home (though as it turned out, the draw dropped them into the relegation zone).

Perusing the programme at half-time, I spotted a Watford link; among the Hampton squad is a certain Matty Whichelow, who you may remember as one of a number of homegrown youngsters who had a spell in the Hornets first team in the cash-strapped pre-Pozzo era. He hasn’t played much this season (nine starts and 14 appearances from the bench), and he wasn’t in the matchday squad yesterday, so maybe he’s injured.

I liked Matty, a lively winger with an eye for goal. I was convinced that this fertile crop of youth team graduates (Jordan Parkes, Dale Bennett, Piero Mingoia, Sean Murray and others), all of whom looked decent for a while in the Championship, would go on to form the heart of the team for years to come, in the way that an earlier generation (Terry, Gibbs, Jackett, Porter and co.) had done under GT. But clearly, none of them had the X factor that’s needed to become successful in professional football, and I think they’re all playing outside the Football League now.

Whichelow is still only 27, according to Wikipedia. I wonder if he watches Watford games on TV and thinks, that could’ve been me? Equally, you could turn it around and think, that could have been us – still reliant on raw, homegrown youngsters in the absence of the money to buy in experienced players from elsewhere. Like I say, we Watford fans are spoiled these days.

Alternative views

Apologies for the lack of posts in the last three months. While it might be understandable if Watford’s recent run of poor performances had put me off football altogether (and believe me, some very dark thoughts crossed my mind on the walk back to Norwood Junction in the rain after the Palace game), the banal truth is that I moved house in October, and when I haven’t been working or watching football, I’ve been too busy to write about it. But I did have two contrasting football experiences in that period that I wanted to write about.

First, for the West Ham game in November, I treated my brother and four of my closest friends to the full-on Watford hospitality experience; partly to celebrate my birthday, and partly as a thank you for their support during what’s been a difficult couple of years for me. We dined in The View – that’s the restaurant on the middle floor of the block in the corner between the Rookery and the Graham Taylor Stand – and a very good time was had by all.

I’m not going to review the experience, other than to say that the service was excellent, the food good but not exceptional, and the atmosphere buzzing. We also got a couple of exclusive interviews staged for our benefit (the whole room, I mean, not just our party); one with Richard Johnson, a version of the pre-match preview he does out on the pitch, and one after the game with Odion Ighalo, who was one of Sky’s match summarisers.

What you miss out, though, is all the stuff that happens outside the 90 minutes of football. You’re only ushered out of the hermetically sealed room a few minutes before kick-off, and with allocated seats on the halfway line that take an age to get to, you don’t see much of the pre-match build-up. At half-time, we’d barely managed to return to the restaurant and have a swig of our drinks before it was time to head back out. Afterwards, enjoyable as the experience had been, I found I missed watching the players warm up, the first reading of the teams, the half-time penalty shoot-out and all the other familiar parts of the matchday routine.

Bottom line: it’s an expensive day out for what you get (especially as drinks weren’t included in my package), but if you get a chance to try it, you should, if only to see how the other half live.

By way of complete contrast, a couple of weeks later I was in Dorchester, down in Dorset, and with nothing better to do with my Saturday afternoon, I went to watch Dorchester Town play Hitchin Town in the Evostik Premier League.

Dorchester’s ground, The Avenue, is about a mile from the town centre. It’s a modern stadium, clearly built as part of a deal with Tesco, whose giant superstore is part of the same complex. It’s a neat and tidy little stadium. With no obvious hard core of home fans to join, I picked a crush barrier beside the goal at one end and watched as the struggling home team shipped three goals before half-time. The standard of football was okay, though not helped by a muddy pitch, and I enjoyed being so close to the action. There’s something about hearing a tackle or a shot, rather than just seeing it, that brings a game to life.

In the second half, the noisy Hitchin fans (all 20 of them – I counted) having occupied the end where I’d been standing, I moved round to the side opposite the main stand. Once the sun went down it got properly cold, and without a team to root for, I seriously considered leaving long before the final whistle. As a Hertfordshire lad, I was secretly pleased with the result – 4-1 to Hitchin – and only annoyed that they didn’t score more. About 10 minutes from time, one of their strikers had a free run on goal, only to divert towards the corner flag and do the old ‘shielding the ball’ routine. I wondered if that was on the manager’s instructions, or whether it was just something they’d seen the pros do on TV and thought they should copy.

So, two very different football experiences, both enjoyable in their own way. If I had to choose one to repeat week in, week out, I’d like to think I’d pick the non-league option. But knowing myself as I do, I’m not sure I wouldn’t plump for the luxury of hospitality. Especially if someone else was paying.

Not up for the cup

On Saturday, with Watford not playing, nothing that I urgently needed to do, and the FPO* otherwise occupied, I thought it might be a good opportunity to go and watch a football match as a neutral.

My first choice was Brentford v Shrewsbury. I live in Fulham, so it’s a local ground, and my best friend is a season ticket holder. But it turned out that they had some special promotion on and the home end was sold out, so that wasn’t an option. “Why don’t you go and watch an FA Cup tie?” he said.

I’d already had the same idea. A quick scan of the fixtures revealed that my best bet was Barnet v Concord Rangers. Okay, that sounded promising. I went onto the Barnet website to find out more about their new ground. Then I saw the ticket prices: £24 for a seat, £16 for the terraces.

Are you kidding me? I watched the superb Watford-Norwich League Cup tie for 15 quid a few weeks ago. Why would I pay more than that for an FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round tie between two non-league teams? I thought about it a bit longer: it was going to take me a minimum of an hour to get there, whether I drove or took public transport, and the weather was looking iffy. In the end, I just couldn’t be bothered. If it had been a tenner to get in, I probably would have.

So, after a couple of hours spent working in the garden, I sat down to watch the end of Sky Soccer Saturday. Even though I’d turned down the chance to go, I was still curious to know how the Barnet game had turned out. Sky Sports had featured a few of the FA Cup ties on their vidiprinter (or whatever the digital equivalent is called), but not that one. I waited until the classified scores were in, but no mention of the FA Cup, so I switched over to BBC1, who are usually a few minutes behind. No classified FA Cup scores there either, but the presenter made a point of saying that they could be found on the BBC Sport website.

So I checked the BBC Sport app on my iPhone: the fixtures were there all right, but no scores. This was at 5.10 or so. Okay, I thought, it’s probably just that they don’t update the app as a priority. An hour or so later, I looked on my computer - with the same result. Well after 6 o’clock, it was still impossible to find out a single result from the FA Cup 4th qualifying round from the BBC. (For the record, the Real FA Cup website was no better.)

So here’s the thing: I’m a Watford fan through and through, and 95% of all the football matches I’ve ever watched have featured the Golden Boys. But every now and then I fancy a change of scene, and I’m open to watching non-league football. (I’ve seen plenty of non-league games, mostly at Kingstonian with a friend who used to support them.) But if it’s going to cost the same as a league game, I’m not going to bother. And if the media can’t be arsed to update the scores from the biggest competition non-league teams feature in, it’s hardly going to encourage other neutrals to take an interest, either. I’m not impressed, frankly.

*Fun Prevention Officer, aka wife

Confessions of a groundhopper

I’ve seen a few non-league games over the years, mainly featuring Kingstonian, who my friend Stuart supported for a while. I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of getting closer to the grass roots of football – the knowledge that everyone in the ground is there because they love the game, and their club, rather than being motivated by money or fame.

Yesterday my better half and I drove up to the town of Ossett in West Yorkshire, where she grew up, and where we’d been invited to a family party in the evening. I had the afternoon to myself, and I was pleased to discover that Ossett Town had a home game against Colwyn Bay in the Northern Premier League. Sorted.

So at 2.45 I strolled up to the gloriously named Stade France (formerly Ingfield, but now sponsored by local scrap merchant Eddie France), right in the centre of town – only to find the ground mysteriously empty. The game had obviously been postponed, for some reason.

Dispirited, I was walking back through the town square when I bumped into one of my wife’s friends and recounted my tale of woe. “Are Ossett Albion at home today?” she asked “You could watch them instead.” I said I didn’t know, but I was willing to go along on the off-chance if it wasn’t far. It wasn’t, and five minutes later I found myself outside the WareHouse Systems Stadium, where there was clearly a match going on. I paid my £3 at the turnstile (there was only the one) and asked the bloke behind the counter who Albion were playing. “Town,” he replied, as if I should have known that. Somehow I appeared to have stumbled upon a local derby.

I took up a position level with one of the penalty areas, on the top step (of three) of what I suppose you could call a terrace and surveyed the scene. There were roughly the same number of people on the pitch as there were around it (the small stand on the opposite site, with half a dozen rows of seats, had one solitary occupant), but all the noise was coming from the pitch. That’s one thing about football at this level; you can hear every word the players, manager and referee say. To be fair, the air didn’t turn particularly blue, though the Town coach did spend most of the match moaning at the referee, like a cut-price Alex Ferguson.

The standard of the football was… okay, I suppose. There were plenty of moments of skill from both sides, but rarely enough in a row to create the kind of football that’s pleasing to the eye. All too often the ball pinged back and forth as one team, then the other, conceded possession cheaply.

At half-time (0-0) I took a stroll round the ground, just because I could. I’d been too shy to ask anyone about the match, for fear of exposing my extreme southernness in this bastion of northern masculinity, but when I drew level with the occupant of the stand, I asked him how come this local derby was taking place. That’s when I learned that what I was actually watching was a reserve match.

It was tempting to leave at that point (I don’t even make the effort to watch Watford’s reserve matches, never mind anyone else’s), but I didn’t. For one thing, like any true football fan, I wanted to see who won. Besides, there was something evocative about the setting that I was keen to nail down. As the light dimmed and the Yorkshire accents clashed on the pitch (“Fooking ’ave ’im!”), with the moors looming behind the ground and the constant hum of the generator that powered the floodlights, I was oddly reminded of the legendary football match in Kes. (Yes, I know that involves schoolboys and takes place in broad daylight, but still, that’s what it felt like to me.)

The game opened up in the second half, as Albion pressed forward and Town’s defenders lost the plot. Albion scored two in a matter of minutes and could have had a hatful. Time and again they sliced through the defence to create a one-on-one or two-on-one situation, only to waste the chance with a poor shot or final ball. Town scored a very late penalty to make it 2-1, but there was barely time for the restart before the ref blew for full-time.

By this time the temperature had dropped several degrees, and the home fans’ joy at the result had been tempered by reports coming in of a 6-0 defeat for the first team at Chester, so no one was going to hang around to cheer the players off the pitch. I certainly didn’t, at any rate.

At the party that night, I told a few people that I’d been to watch Ossett Albion Reserves play Ossett Town Reserves, but I don’t think any of them got it. They doubtless thought that living in London had made me a bit soft in the head. Still, I reckon I’ll go back another time –preferably when the first team are playing. For one thing, Albion play in gold shirts and black shorts…