2015/16: highs and lows

So that’s that, then: 2015/16 is done and dusted, with a match that was the polar opposite of the first home game back in August, when Watford and West Brom looked as if they could play till Christmas without troubling the scorers. The baffling thing about today’s game is that it didn’t finish 5-5.

‘Baffling’ is a word that’s been used a lot in a Hornets context recently, whether to describe Quique’s selections and substitutions, or the decision to let him go. I’m not going to get into that now, though. In an attempt to make some sort of sense of an up-and-down season, this is my take on some of the highs and lows, both the big issues and (mainly, to be honest) the small stuff.

HIGH
We scored some great goals. The video rundown of the contenders for goal of the season before the Villa home game reminded me of just how good some of Iggy’s haul before Christmas were, and of course Guedioura’s thunderbolt in the FA Cup quarter-final has already gone down as one of the all-time great Watford goals...

LOW
... but a lot of players didn’t pull their weight when it came to goalscoring. Over the years, we’ve usually had at least one midfielder who could be relied on to chip in with 5-10 goals a season. Almen Abdi has fulfilled that role in recent seasons, and he did at least score two this year, making him our joint fourth highest goalscorer. That’s two more than Capoue, or Jurado, or Behrami, or Suarez – and frankly, that’s not good enough. Okay, the formation Quique settled on militated against midfielders finding themselves in the opposing penalty area too often, but even so, the standard of finishing we’ve seen from our midfield this season has been shockingly poor. Today’s game was a fine example, with around a dozen shots flying wide or over the bar. With a bit more precise execution of what should be a basic skill for a Premier League footballer, we could have won that game at a canter.

HIGH
We’ve got Troy Deeney, and that’s been absolutely central to our success this season. If you’re reading this blog, you don’t need me to explain any further. Suffice to say, he is the one player I dread being sold this summer...

LOW
... but, sadly, we no longer have Lloyd Doyley. Okay, I promise this is the last time I’ll go on about him, and realistically, he was on borrowed time once he picked up the neck injury that caused him to miss the end of last season and the start of this one. But seriously, given some of the Keystone Cops defending we’ve seen from Nyom, Parades and Cathcart at right back in the last couple of months, I can’t believe Lloyd would have performed any worse.

HIGH
We’ll still be a Premier League club next season, and that was the goal. So, job done…

LOW
... but we’ve taken on some of the unpleasant pretensions of the Premier League. I’m not talking about the silly pre-match rigmarole; the referee picking the ball up off a plinth, the hasty line-up under the sponsor’s banner and so on is all mandated by the PL, and we don’t have a say in the matter. But as far as I’m aware, no one stipulates that we have to deny the existence of other divisions by only reading out the half-time scores in the PL. This is something that often irks me at away grounds, and until comparatively recently, you could rely on hearing the scores from all four divisions of the English league, plus the Scottish Premier League, and occasionally even local non-league scores. Not this season, though. It smacks of arrogance to me – not to mention depriving us of the pleasure of cheering when Luton are behind.

HIGH
The Watford fans, led by the 1881, have been brilliant most of the season, and the flags and foil displays have been magnificent. (Well, so I’m told. I’m usually underneath them, so I only get to see blurry pictures on Twitter later on.) I’m genuinely proud of the send-off we gave Quique today...

LOW
... but there are always exceptions, not least the thousands who failed dismally to get behind the team at Wembley. But I was particularly baffled (that word again) by a twentysomething couple who were sat/stood in front of me at the league game at the Emirates. After about half an hour (at which stage we were only 1-0 down and not out of it by any means), I noticed them leaving their seats. A few minutes later I had to nip to the loo, and on my way I spotted the couple perched at a table in the concourse, pints of beer in front of them, watching Soccer Saturday on the TV. And this was in the middle of the match. Words fail me.

Everyone’s a winner

Despite the disappointing run-in, there’s no doubt that 2010/11 was a good season for the Hornets. We were never in serious danger of relegation (a first in recent times), achieved a comfortable mid-table finish in a competitive division, and played some lively, entertaining and goal-strewn football. Oh, and we did all this with the youngest team in the Championship.

So, without further ado, here are my personal end-of-season awards – although, as the title of this post says, everyone’s a winner:

Player of the season

I can’t find fault with the official club award here. Plaudits to Martin Taylor and John Eustace in particular, but Danny Graham was the stand-out player, a striker who contributed off the ball as well as mastering the all-important skill of whacking it into the net at regular intervals.

Young player of the season

At the start of every season, there are a clutch of youngsters who seem to be on the verge of breaking into the first team, but most end up spending more time on the bench than the pitch. Of this year’s hopefuls, Matt Whichelow showed a lot of promise, giving new impetus to the attack when coming on as a sub, and Piero Mingoia showed signs of being the new Gary Porter. But the award has to go to Marvin Sordell: 15 goals in his first full season is not at all shabby, even if he couldn’t quite maintain his best form week in, week out. That will come.

Most disappointing player

This is all relative, of course, especially given the age of the players involved. Having said that, Scott Loach’s increasing flakiness as the season went on was worrying for a player who’d already appeared in a couple of senior England squads – although if it’s put off potential buyers for a while, that’s no bad thing. As for Will Buckley, his pace and trickery are so thrilling to watch (when he’s on song, at least, though there are also games when he vanishes) that it’s frustrating that he delivers so little end product.

But my biggest disappointment was Danny Drinkwater, the latest in a long line of loanees from Old Trafford, but the first to completely fail to ‘get’ it. He looked promisingly skilful for the first half an hour of his debut, but it soon became apparent that he just didn’t fit into this Watford team. The fact that Malky only gave him three starts and nine substitute appearances in half a season suggests that he agreed.

Invisible man

An honorable mention to Josh Walker, who arrived from Middlesbrough with an impressive pedigree, but made only five substitute appearances and spent most of the season on loan. Then there’s Liam Henderson, who didn’t appear in a Watford shirt at all, but kept up his record of failing to score for the first team (any first team) at Colchester, Aldershot and Rotherham. I doubt he’ll be back in August.

But the real invisible man was Tom Aldred, signed (or so it seemed) to provide much-needed cover for Taylor and Mariappa in the centre of defence. All he has to show for his first season as a Hornet is seven appearances for Stockport (the last of them in January) and a random 90 minutes on the bench against Coventry in April. And when we were desperate for a defender in the last game of the season, it was 17-year-old Tommy Hoban who Malky turned to, not the older Aldred, described on the official site as a “commanding centre-half” who we had to fight to sign, so coveted was he by other clubs. Very strange.

To-do list

A bit late I know, but I just wanted to say well done - to Brendan, to the players, to the board, hell, even to the fans. To have got through the past 12 months and come away with a 13th-place finish in the Championship is quite an achievement, all things considered. And to finish with a smile on our faces is, if anything, even more of an achievement.

Last season (2007/08) was, as I kept saying at the time, a very strange season - and so was this season, albeit for different reasons. Above all, because, no matter what was happening in the boardroom or the dugout, the goals kept flowing (at both ends). Who’d have guessed, after the tedium of last season, that Vicarage Road would see more goals than any other Championship stadium? And that the last game of the season would see us so far ahead at half-time that the Rookery could spend the second half yelling ‘Shooooot!’ at Lloyd Doyley every time he got the ball in the opposition’s half? (Mind you, I was so confident that Lloydinho was finally going to break his duck that I put a tenner on him to score. Maybe next season...)

Others have reviewed the season gone by a lot more thoroughly than I can. So for what it’s worth, here are a few things I think Watford need to do to build on the progress made in 2008/09:

1) Sort the pitch out
A few years ago, the club boasted about some new technology they’d used whereby the grass was interwoven with plastic or something, making it stronger and more resilient. I can only assume the plastic melted, because for the last couple of seasons, the Vicarage Road pitch has been a disgrace. I’m sure the Saracens are partly to blame, but I can’t believe it’s entirely down to them that the pitch is bumpy and skiddy, often both at the same time. Bottom line: if we want to play proper passing football, we need to lay a new pitch and look after it properly.

2) Buy Gregor Rasiak
A tricky one, this: reports repeatedly stress that he wants a hefty sum in wages, the sort of sum we really can’t afford these days. Only this morning I read that Sheffield Wednesday have given up hope of signing him for precisely that reason. So I can only hope that he’s developed enough affection for Watford in his time here to take a pay cut, because he makes a real difference to our front line: strong in the air, skilful on the ground, able to hold the ball up and gobble up the slightest of half-chances, Old Greg is the kind of all-round striker we’ve seen all too rarely in recent years. Especially if Priskin buggers off elsewhere (as I suspect he will), we need Rasiak.

3) Give youth a chance
Our youth, I mean. Brendan keeps talking about his passion for developing young players, but so far he’s preferred to give match experience to other clubs’ young players. It’s hard to object to Jack Cork, who is clearly a star in the making and already out of our league. But Bridcutt, Hoyte, Rose - why did these players get game time ahead of the likes of Jordan Parkes and Lewis Young? And how many loans does Theo Robinson have to go on before the Watford hierarchy makes up its mind as to whether he’s worthy of a place in OUR team? I don’t pretend to know whether these youngsters are going to make it, but I do know that we’ll only find out by playing them in the Watford first team in serious competitive games.

4) Keep talking
An obvious point really, but after the secrecy and mistrust of the Simpson-Ashton regime, it’s essential for the new board to keep talking openly and honestly to the fans. We know that there are difficult decisions to made, and that we’re not out of the financial woods just yet. All we ask is that you tell it like it is.