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.

The greatest hits album

My last two posts have been read by unprecedented numbers of people. (Well, unprecedented for me, at least – I dare say those bloggers who can be bothered to write more than once a fortnight would regard my stats as rather puny.) So, since I presumably have some new readers, and since there’s nothing much to talk about until the fixtures are published on Wednesday, I thought I’d share some of my favourite posts from the past eight years. Good grief, have I really being doing this that long?

A quick introduction for those who are new to the blog; I tend to leave match reports and commentary on the latest goings-on at Vicarage Road to others, with the occasional exception when something has got my dander up, or when I think I’ve spotted something no one else has commented on. Instead, as the subheading suggests, I write about memories from my 45 years of following Watford, crackpot theories about the Hornets and the wider world of football, and anything else I feel like rambling on about.

Two of my personal favourites are memories from my childhood. Confessions of the world’s worst ballboy features my inglorious contribution to a long-forgotten pre-season friendly at the Vic, while Just once, oh lord… is a tale from my equally ignominious career in schoolboy rugby. At the time it was intended to encourage my favourite player, Lloyd Doyley, who had yet to score a goal for the Hornets, that he might one day manage the feat. Less than two years later, he did so. Coincidence?

The demolition of the old Main Stand the season before last sparked reminiscences (pithily entitled Main Stand memories) of my early days peering around its pillars to follow the action. The ironically named Confessions of a groundhopper is about an accidental visit to a reserve team fixture at a northern non-league ground in the depths of winter. I include it here chiefly to prove that I am capable of writing about something other than Watford.

Last but not least, The myth of home advantage is about just that; my conviction (undimmed over time) that the notion that the team playing at home has some sort of head start merely by virtue of that fact is complete baloney, a giant con trick perpetrated by the entire football world, and that said football world would be a better place if we stopped pretending home advantage existed.

So there you are: memories, ramblings and rants. Expect more of the same next season, with the occasional mention of the Premier League if you’re lucky.

Nineties nostalgia, pt. 3 – Ooh ahh

I’ll be honest, I struggled to find a programme worth saving from the 1991/92 season. In the end I plumped for the January 1992 fixture against Newcastle, purely because it was one of the few games from that season that sparked any kind of memory.

A couple of years earlier, I’d done a one-year postgraduate journalism course, and one of my friends there was a bloke called John Mulvey, whose sole ambition was to write for the NME. His admirable single-mindedness had paid off, and by 1992 he was firmly established at the country’s leading weekly music magazine. What’s more, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, he had decided to bring a band he was interviewing to Vicarage Road for the Newcastle game, to add a bit of colour to the piece I suppose. This would be a much better story if I could remember who the band was, but I can’t. Presumably they were Newcastle fans, or maybe they just happened to be in Watford for the weekend.

Either way, I remember meeting John and a couple of guys from the band (and I really wish I could say they turned out to be Blur or the Stone Roses or someone) on the Vicarage Road End terrace before the game and standing with them as the Hornets dashed into a 2-0 lead in the first 10 minutes. As you do, I was rubbing my hands in anticipation of a record scoreline, but the Watford team of the early ’90s wasn’t so obliging, and the game ended 2-2.

The programme is a thin thing of 32 pages, with a rather old-fashioned look and feel. For all the bright colours, it feels very parochial, and two items epitomise this. One is a paragraph on the supporters club page about unclaimed prizes from the Junior Hornets New Year Raffle, which include Scalextric, a bottle of sherry and a half-bottle of whisky. The other, on a page of miscellaneous news, is an apology for the directions to Cambridge United printed in the previous programme; apparently “they were in fact a good route to Cambridge City!” So near, and yet so far.

Dominating the programme, as indeed he did the era in some respects, is Andy Hessenthaler, who is pictured on the cover, on the centre spread (as part of an interview) and on the news pages. He’d only been at the club since the previous September, but had quickly made an impression. It’s no surprise to learn from the interview that he did a lot of cross-country running as a boy, though I wasn’t aware that he was a self-employed ceramic tiler before Watford gave him the opportunity to play football for a living.

What else is there to say of this underwhelming era, when we were expected to get excited about a team including Trevor Putney, Peter Nicholas, Keith Waugh and Jason Drysdale? Well, one thing that’s noticeable is the number of products of the youth system who featured that season. Apart from Drysdale, Nigel Gibbs, David Holdsworth, Gary Porter and Luther Blissett (in his third and final spell at the club) all started that day, while Darren Bazeley came on as a sub and David James was missing his first game of the season. Richard Johnson had just broken into the first-team squad, Jason Solomon and Barry Ashby had played a few games, and Robert Page was a fixture in the youth team. Whatever else happened during the dog days of the 1990s, we never stopped bringing young players through into the first team. I wonder if we’ll ever see that many Academy products in the starting line-up for a league game again?

Main Stand memories

So the old Main Stand (no Watford fan who started going in the 60s or 70s has ever called it the East Stand) is finally going to bite the dust. Not before time, to be honest, but it will still be a sad day for those of us who spent our formative years at Vicarage Road missing large chunks of the action because a pillar was in the way.

When I started going to Watford games with my dad, the Main Stand Extension (that’s the bit nearest the Rookery, for younger readers) was where we sat. Just getting to your seat was an adventure. Once through the turnstiles on Occupation Road, you unexpectedly went down a flight of steps, over a bridge that spanned what seemed to be a dry moat (but was probably just a path running along the outside of the lower level of the stand) and up a few more steps. Straight ahead, there was a room under the stand which was used as a makeshift snack bar, where you could buy Mars Bars and cans of Fanta from a trestle table. Thus equipped, you then made your way up yet more steps into the stand itself, resplendent with its orange seats.

My abiding sensory memory of those early years is of Dad’s pipe smoke. Over a decade before the Bradford fire, smoking was freely allowed at football grounds, and Dad (who didn’t really like watching football, and was just humouring me) would alleviate the boredom by lighting his pipe. Invariably, the breeze would blow the acrid smoke into my eyes. Sometimes I’d complain, and we’d swap seats – at which point the wind would change direction and I’d get another eyeful of smoke.

Luckily, I wasn’t missing much excitement on the pitch. This was the early 70s, when the Hornets struggled to stay in the old Second Division – in my first season, I didn’t see us win a league game until the end of February. When we finally went down, the misery continued, and before you knew it we were in the Fourth Division, where we won a few more games, but still not enough.

Of course, that was the point at which Graham Taylor arrived and everything changed. Suddenly there were goals galore, from Alan Mayes and Keith Mercer (my hero) and the previously rubbish Ross Jenkins, and the novelty of Watford actually topping the league.

The last game of that season was a 3-2 home win against Southport, after which the Fourth Division trophy was going to be presented. Unfortunately, despite my protests (and possibly, I’m ashamed to say, tears), Dad insisted on leaving before the final whistle, “to beat the traffic”, and it was many more years before I finally got to see a Watford team lift a trophy.

That was when I decided it was time to go to games on my own, and from the following season until it was demolished I called the Vicarage Road End terrace my home. I can’t say I ever missed sitting in the Main Stand, and it has become a bit of an eyesore in recent years. But we football fans are nothing if not misty-eyed nostalgics, and its demolition will represent the demise of an important part of my childhood – the place where I discovered one of my life’s abiding passions.

Half a world away

Late last year, I turned 50, and my friend Stuart gave me a special present: the programme from the closest Watford home game to the day I was born. It was a Division 3 (or ‘Division III’, as the programme has it) fixture against Bristol Rovers on Saturday December 8th, 1962, which we apparently lost 1-0 on the way to finishing 17th in the table.

Not a particularly remarkable game, or season, then. But to modern eyes, the programme itself is a strange artefact. For starters, there are hardly any articles. The 16 pages include an editorial (matily entitled ‘Welcome Back, Lads’), a spread with pen portraits of the opposition and Odd Spots (‘A Soccer Believe It Or Not’), and a page of Supporters’ Club Notes. As for photographs, the only one is the aerial shot of the ground on the cover. The rest is statistics, fixtures, team line-ups and, above all, advertisements. I count 41 ads in total, ranging from national brands (Double Diamond beer, Senior Service cigarettes) to resolutely local ones, some for businesses that I remember fondly from my youth; Peter Spivey’s sports shop, Kirby’s coaches, Thirteens bike shop.

I could spend hours listing the delights contained in this slim volume, but I’ll limit myself to five things I find particularly interesting:

1) The supporters’ club notes are worth an essay in themselves, but what comes across above all is the key role the club played in fundraising for the football club in those days – it’s financial support we’re talking about here. The page lists key contacts for services ranging from away travel to membership to the purchase of “a Club diary or golliwog favour”, complete with their full addresses, and warns against bothering the club’s sole administrative employee, the legendary Ron Rollitt: “Please do not write to the Football Club for any of the following items. It only causes delay, and Mr Rollitt has enough to contend to with his own work.”

2) The list of ball donors (when did that stop?) for the season to date includes, among various gentlemen, The Brian Fredericks Dance Orchestra, and, for the Football Combination game against Portsmouth, an anonymous ‘Pools winner’.

3) In the days before football was a megabucks profession, players often bought local businesses when they retired. Among the ads, I spotted the names of Watford legends Ken Nicholas, who had a sports equipment and shoe shop in Harwoods Road, and Arthur Grimsdell, proprietor of a newsagent’s in Vicarage Road.

4) The ‘Odd spots’ include the fact that Newcastle’s team against Portsmouth in October 1951 included internationals of five countries (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Chile). Nowadays, in the Premiership at least, it would be more noteworthy if a club fielded internationals of fewer than that number of countries.

5) I know it’s childish to laugh at people’s names, but who could resist Bristol Rovers’ Esmond Million, “a goalkeeper of considerable merit and courage, who adopts complete command of his area”. As the programme lists the players’ vital statistics, I can also tell you that Mr Million weighed exactly 11st 8 1/2lb.

Everything I know is wrong

I’ve started reading Lionel Birnie’s excellent, evocative book Enjoy The Game, and I’ll post a proper review when I finish it. On the train home this evening, I started the chapter which tells the story of the legendary 7-1 League Cup win against Southampton, and when I got to the bit when Nigel Callaghan talks about looking up at Vicarage Road after he scored his goal and seeing a bus stopped there with everyone on the top deck celebrating, I suddenly found I had something in my eye…

But here’s the thing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve told everyone who cared to listen that when Watford achieved that epic win, we were in the Third Division. That’s how I’ve always remembered it, and I’m rather taken aback to find out now that we were actually in our second season in the Second Division at the time. I wonder what else I’ve been wrong about all these years?

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time...

I can’t bring myself to write anything about yesterday’s farrago. I’m just going to keep reminding myself that Brendan Rodgers has been waiting to manage a football club for 15 years, so maybe it’s understandable if he’s behaving like a kid with the key to a sweetshop right now. With a bit of luck he’ll calm down soon.

Instead I’m just going to post the link to a wonderful YouTube video that takes me right back to my teenage years. Enjoy!