The oracle

Like all Watford fans of a certain age, I was sad to hear that Oliver Phillips had died. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has had more influence on my Watford-supporting life than anyone not actually employed by the club.

Every Friday when I was growing up, I would eagerly devour every word he had written about the Hornets that week – and he wrote a lot. Not just match reports and previews, but all the news you wanted and needed about the club, much of it straight from the horse’s mouth – that is, the manager’s, for Oli forged good relationships with most (though not all) of those in charge during his time at the Watford Observer, once they realised he wasn’t going to stitch them up.

When I was living in West Germany (as it was then) in 1982, and then again in 1984-85, as part of my university course, my mother used to send me the sports section of the Observer every week, and I looked forward keenly to its arrival. Reading the many online tributes to Oli these past few days, it’s clear that I was far from the only one for whom his writing provided a link to the club, and to home, for those living overseas.

I was lucky enough to meet him once. I did a postgraduate journalism course, with a special module on sport, where one of the first assignments was to profile a sports writer. Naturally I saw this as a perfect opportunity to meet one of my heroes, and a couple of weeks later I found myself in a meeting room at the Watford Observer offices in the Rickmansworth Road, face to face with the man himself.

I say face to face, but Oli was so tall that he towered over me, even sitting down. Allied to his height was a rather stern, forbidding manner. It soon became clear that he took his job, and the craft of journalism, very seriously indeed. He was appalled to find that I wasn’t taking the NCTJ exam (the standard qualification for news journalists) as part of my course, and I didn’t really want to explain that it wasn’t necessary to fulfil my ambition of reviewing rock albums for the NME.

Still, he softened once we got to talking about his career, and about Watford. I’ve still got the article I wrote, printed on the flimsy, yellowing paper they gave us in the computer room at City University. (This was 1989, and no one my age had their own PC.) I note that my tutor gave me a mark of 16 out of 25 – a solid pass, but no more. I wasn’t destined to spend my working life in press boxes at football grounds.

My opening line was: “To anyone who supports Watford FC, Oliver Phillips is the oracle,” and I still stand by that. I went on to outline his career; a false start working in insurance in the City, then a job as a junior reporter at the West Herts Post, and then on to the Observer in 1968. 

There are some nice anecdotes that I’d forgotten, like the story of his first day reporting on the Watford first team, in 1963. “I started the same day as Ken Furphy took over as Watford manager, so I dashed down to the ground to interview him. I was really nervous, and I explained that it was my first day in the new job. He said, ‘Well, it’s mine too, so we’ll just have to bodge through together, won’t we?’”

I also like the fact that he had only missed eight Watford games since 1967, and the last one at that point had been in 1978 – over a decade earlier. He even made it to Vicarage Road on the day of his wedding, though he was at pains to point out that “my wife went too, and I didn’t actually report on the match”.

The piece finishes with Oli saying that he still loved his job, which he’d be happy to do until he retired. His only complaint was that the football season started too early, just when he’d got used to spending Saturday afternoons with his wife and kids. “One day I’ll be thinking, ‘Now, what shall we do next weekend?’, and then I remember that I’ve got to go off to Devon or Sweden or somewhere for the pre-season tour. But by the third week of the season, I’m as keen as ever.”

Rest in peace, Oli. We won’t see your like again.

The relegation game

One of the benefits of having been a Watford fan for nearly half a century is that you can see patterns across the years and decades. It also lessens the pain of relegation, to a certain extent; I’ve seen it happen before, and doubtless I will again.

In fact, all but one of Watford’s relegations have happened since I started supporting them in 1970. I can’t tell you much about the club’s descent from Division 1 of the Southern League to Division 2 in 1902-03, and Oliver Phillips’ centenary history of the club doesn’t explain what went wrong. He does make it clear, though, that relegation had been coming, with the club finishing 14th out of 15, and then 13th out of 16, in the previous two seasons.

In that respect, it sounds similar to the first relegation I witnessed, from Division 2 in 1971-72. Having finally achieved the longed-for promotion to the second tier three seasons earlier, the Hornets had found the step up a struggle from the start, and didn’t have the money to invest in the quality of players they needed to be competitive. Successive finishes of 19th and 18th out of 22 were followed by last place in a dismal season.

Watford’s first two ventures into the Premier League both ended in similar fashion, albeit after a single season. In both 1999-2000 and 2006-07, we’d been promoted before we were really ready for it, couldn’t afford transformative signings, and injuries to key players sabotaged any hopes of survival.

Our other relegation from the top division, in 1987-88, is also easily explained. In just a few months, Dave Bassett managed to undo pretty much all the good work Graham Taylor had done over the previous decade, weakening the backroom staff and the playing squad and deploying an unappealing brand of football based on the long ball and the offside trap. Despite Bassett’s departure in January, replacement Steve Harrison couldn’t stop the ship sinking.

The reasons for the other two relegations are harder to pin down. In 1974-75, the Hornets followed a season when they’d finished 7th in Division 3 with relegation, and from Oliver Phillips’ account (I was only 12 at the time, and the nuances passed me by), it seems that they sleepwalked into it. Despite the presence of several players who would come back up under GT a few years later (including Jenkins, Garner, Downes and Joslyn), and despite only needing seven points from the last 11 games to be safe, they went down by a single point. (By the way, one of the teams that went down with us was Bournemouth. Like I say, patterns keep recurring.)

Likewise, in 1995-96, we went down from what was then called Division 1 (ie the second tier) after a 7th-place finish the year before. Injuries were certainly a factor here, as was a lack of investment from notoriously cautious Chairman Jack Petchey. Roeder was replaced with a returning GT with 17 games to go, giving us all hope. But Ian Grant catches the mood well in his piece in Tales From The Vicarage Volume II: “Had we conjured up any kind of form, any kind of running start for our dramatic late surge, we almost certainly would’ve escaped; instead, we seemed caught in a hopeless conundrum, as if imprisoned in a windowless room with only a trapdoor for escape.” It went down to a final home game against Leicester where we needed to win and hope other results went our way. We didn’t, and they didn’t anyway.

So how does 2019-20 stack up against these previous examples? We certainly can’t blame underinvestment, given the current value of the squad (though a bit more money spent on defenders last summer might have helped). Likewise, injuries haven’t been a major factor; we’ve had a few, but not nearly as many in previous Premier League seasons, recent and otherwise. We do have to mention the pandemic, though. Who knows how things would have turned out without a lengthy break just after our famous victory over Liverpool?

Overall, though, this year’s relegation most closely resembles 1975 and 1996. At the start of the season, as we did then, we seemed to be on an upward trajectory, with an 11th-place finish and an FA Cup final appearance. But whether through complacency, or lack of focus, that forward momentum not only stopped, but slammed into reverse at a speed that proved impossible to halt. The lesson seems to be that the time of greatest danger for a football club is when it appears to be on the rise. Let’s hope we learn that lesson if and when we get back to the Premier League.

That’s Mr Phillips to you

On Friday, Oliver Phillips’ final Watford Observer column was published, bringing down the curtain on 58 years of writing about Watford FC. It’s hard to think of another individual not actually employed by the club who has been so prominent in the lives of Hornets fans.

For the past week, many of those fans have taken to WML and Twitter to share their stories of how reading Oli’s in-depth coverage of the club in the Observer kept them in touch when they were unable to go to games. I was one of those fans; while I was studying in Germany during the 1984-85 season, my mother faithfully sent me the local paper every week, and I looked forward eagerly to the arrival of the baton-shaped package in my pigeonhole so that I could devour every word Oli had written about the latest matches I’d missed, together with all the other goings-on at the club that he covered in lovingly forensic detail.

We were so lucky to have him for so long, and I wish him a long and happy retirement. To mark the occasion, here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about the day when I interviewed the great man. Enjoy!

The big man

It’s entirely consistent with the theme of my contribution to Tales from the Vicarage that I don’t know any of my fellow contributors personally. But I have met one of them, many years ago.

In autumn 1989, I’d just started a journalism course. We each had to choose a specialism, and I picked sport – not because I had any ambition to be the next Brian Glanville (if I’d become a football reporter, I wouldn’t have been able to watch Watford every week), but just because it sounded like fun.

For our first assignment we were told to interview a sports writer we admired. I didn’t have to think about it for very long. For as long as I could remember, I’d spent every Friday poring over the three or four pages of the Watford Observer devoted to the Hornets, most of it written by Oliver Phillips. So I wrote to him at the paper, explaining my request, and was granted an audience.

On the big day, I turned up at the Observer offices on the Rickmansworth Road and was shown into a meeting room, where my nerves had time to simmer nicely (this was one of the first interviews I’d ever done) while I waited for the great man to arrive.

If there’s one thing everyone knows about Oliver Phillips, from the days when he would come out onto the pitch before the last game of the season to present the awards, it’s that he’s exceedingly tall. When you’re in a small room with him, that effect is magnified, and I can’t pretend I wasn’t intimidated.

It didn’t help that he wasn’t the friendliest of interviewees. He wasn’t unfriendly either, just… ‘stern’ is the closest I can get to describing his manner. The interview got off to a shaky start when he noticed that I wasn’t taking notes in shorthand. Why not? I explained apologetically that I’d only been learning shorthand for a couple of weeks. Then I told him a bit about the course, and sensed further disapproval when I explained that, because I was studying magazine journalism, I wouldn’t be taking the NCTJ exam that you needed to pass in those days if you wanted to work in newspapers. As a newspaper man of the old school, he didn’t seem to have much sympathy with magazines and the frivolous people who worked for them.

Undeterred, I asked him my prepared questions about how he’d got into journalism and his experiences following, and writing about, Watford, and in the process of answering them he mellowed a little. (I’ve occasionally thought about digging out the interview and posting it on this blog – but it was strictly off the record, and even after all these years, I have a residual fear that me might come after me with a writ if I did.) The story that always stuck with me was the one about the day in the early 60s when he got married in the morning and went to Vicarage Road to report on a match in the afternoon. Respect, as they say.

And respect for the man was what I ultimately came away from the interview with. I’d naively expected to meet a fellow enthusiast who I could chat to about the great players and matches he’d seen. He was an enthusiast, no doubt about it, but he was also deadly serious about his work, a professional journalist to his fingertips, and his duty to his readers came first. That's what made him – despite what various managers, directors and chairmen over the years may have thought – one of the finest and most loyal servants the club ever had. We were lucky to have him working on our behalf for so long.

Books do furnish a room

A conversation with Lionel Birnie on Twitter today reminded me that I meant to finish off my inventory of the Watford-related items in my home with a list of the relevant section of my bookshelf. So here it is, in no particular order:

Drawn Game – Terry Challis
A selection from 25 years of weekly cartoons in the Watford Observer. The sports pages still don’t seem the same without them.

The Official Centenary History of Watford FC – Oliver Phillips
A magisterial (and often moving) account of the club’s history. I’m shocked to realise that it’s now 20 years since this came out. High time for an update.

Four Seasons – Lionel Birnie & Alan Cozzi
Subtitled ‘The remarkable story of Watford Football Club from 1997 to 2001’. In hindsight, maybe that should have read ‘Where did all the money go?’

You Are My Watford – various
A compilation of memories in aid of WST. Includes an account of the incident that gave this blog its name.

The Golden Boys – Oliver Phillips
Another lovingly crafted and beautifully produced official work from Oli. It’s a shame the club doesn’t commission books like this any more.

Watford: A Tale Of The Unexpected – Geoff Sweet & Graham Burton
The story of the 1982-83 season – much of which I missed by virtue of it being my first year at university.

Watford FC On This Day – Matt Rowson
On this day in 1889, Watford Rovers beat Buckinghamshire side Schorne College 2-1 in an FA Cup 2nd Qualifying Round tie. I love the fact that I can find that out from a book.

Enjoy The Game – Lionel Birnie
A great tale, superbly told. I refer you to my review.

Watford Season By Season – Trefor Jones
One of the standard works of reference for any Watford fan. Only goes up to the end of the 1997/98 season, though, so another that could do with an update…

The Watford FC Illustrated Who’s Who – Trefor Jones
… As could this, the other standard reference book, published in 1996. In an ideal world, the club would fund the publication of updated editions at regular intervals – say, every 10 years.

Team Shirts To Ticket Stubs – Nick Davidson
A real gem to finish with; a great idea, lovingly realised.

Although they’re not strictly books about Watford FC itself, honourable mentions also go to Nick Corble’s novel Golden Daze, and to Dave Hill’s thought-provoking biography of John Barnes, Out Of His Skin. As far as I know, it’s still the only biography of a player who is mainly associated with the Hornets. (All right, I know Liverpool have a claim too, but we had him first.)

As to what’s missing, the obvious gap in the market is for a biography of Graham Taylor, which would make for fascinating reading. Or maybe an autobiography, which would be even better – but maybe we’d better let GT concentrate on running the club for the time being.

Terry Challis RIP

I’ve been on holiday for the past 10 days, and it hasn’t been a good time to be a Watford fan. First we lose 4-0 at home to Cardiff (a good one to miss, from the sound of it), complete with a howler from Scott Loach; then Scott repeats the trick in the England under-21 international, helping to inspire a Macedonian fightback; and now, just to put the tin lid on it, Terry Challis has died.

For anyone who doesn’t know (though what you’re doing reading this if you don’t, I can’t imagine), Terry ’s topical cartoons about Watford adorned the sports pages of the Watford Observer for many years – he was already there when I started reading it as a child, and still going until a couple of years ago, I believe.

As a result, he’s one of those people who have always seemed to me to be part of the very fabric of Watford FC, along with the likes of Elton John, Graham Taylor and Oliver Phillips (whose heartfelt tribute to Terry is well worth reading). His affection for the club was obvious in every cartoon he drew, and his mischievous take on the previous week’s game was always the first thing I read in the paper.

A couple of years ago, the paper mentioned the possibility of reprinting Terry’s classic poster, first published in the early dawn of the Elton and GT era, depicting the road ahead for the Hornets in an allegorical manner. I put my name down for one, but nothing ever happened. I hope they reconsider now – I suspect it would sell out. And I hope the club finds a suitable way to commemorate him. He deserves it.