Before yesterday’s game against Leicester, I was trying to remember the last time I’d skipped a Watford home match and watched it at home on TV instead. Not that I have a perfect attendance record at Vicarage Road; there are invariably one or two games a season that clash with a family or work commitment I can’t plausibly get out of.
But on Monday December 7th, 2009, I just wasn’t feeling very well. I’d struggled into work and by five-thirty I felt like death warmed up. The thought of getting myself to Euston, catching the train to Watford Junction, walking across town to the ground, sitting in the freezing cold for a couple of hours and then schlepping back home to South-West London wasn’t very appealing – especially when the game was live on Sky Sports anyway.
So (and those of you with a keen knowledge of Hornets history will know what’s coming) I was lolling on my sofa drinking Lemsip when Lloyd Doyley powered a header past the QPR keeper to score his first goal in 269 Watford appearances. And I missed it. Joy mixed almost instantly with regret. I won’t pretend that I vowed never again to watch a Watford home game on TV, but it did take a global pandemic to force me into repeating the experience.
This time I was sitting in my desk chair watching the game on the BT Sport website on my desktop computer. This time there wasn’t a shock comparable to Lloydinho’s header, though a 93rd-minute overhead kick was a pretty extraordinary way for Craig Dawson to open his own Watford account (albeit after significantly fewer games).
I thought we were good value for the point, overall. Based on the table, this was the second-hardest of our nine remaining games, and with the lack of a crowd supposedly neutralising home advantage, a draw was a decent result. The team looked understandably rusty at the start, but grew into the game and had the chances to win it. Then again, you could say that about all too many matches this season. That’s why we’re in a relegation battle.
It’s impossible to say whether playing the game in front of a crowd would have made the difference. As for the viewing experience, having experimented with both options over the past few days, I definitely prefer watching games with the crowd noise overlaid, rather than having to listen to the shouts of the players and coaches echoing round an empty stadium.
For me, there were two bonuses to the soundtrack of the Leicester game. One was that it was a continuous swell of noise. For all the 1881’s efforts, there are still times in all but the most electrifying Watford games when the crowd falls silent. Not in this strange new world, though.
The second bonus is that the only songs that get played are the positive ones, the ones that celebrate our unswerving love of the Golden Boys. That means I don’t have to listen to any of the puerile playground-style baiting of the away fans that I’ve got increasingly bored with in recent years: “Your support is f*****g s**t”, “Shall we sing a song for you?” and all the rest.
Of course, I’d rather be there singing the songs myself. But it’s some small comfort to know that, for the remainder of the season, I’m only going to hear my favourites.
Showing posts with label Singing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Singing. Show all posts
Sunday, 21 June 2020
Sunday, 16 July 2017
I ain’t gonna stand for it
A few weeks ago, I went to see The Wedding Present play at the Roundhouse in Camden. Musically-inclined readers of a certain age may remember them as a popular indie guitar band in the mid-80s, known for their furiously strummed guitars and pithy lyrics about student love affairs. They’re now playing the nostalgia circuit, performing their classic George Best album in full, and during that part of the show, middle-aged men could repeatedly be seen trying to crowdsurf. It was very entertaining.
I’ve been reading a lot about the campaign to introduce ‘safe standing’ at football grounds recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a similar impulse must be behind it. After all, compulsory all-seater stadiums were introduced for the top two divisions in the early 90s, so anyone who stood regularly as a teenager at a ground in those divisions must now be pushing 40. Like the crowdsurfers at the Roundhouse, I can only assume that the safe standing campaign is being led by people with a hankering to relive their younger days. I can’t see another reason for it.
As it happens, the editorial in this month’s When Saturday Comes (a magazine which invariably has its heart in the right place) gives two main reasons for introducing safe standing: restoring some atmosphere to sterile all-seater stadiums, and reducing ticket prices.
I’ve heard the argument before that standing up encourages singing – some even maintain that it is physically harder to sing while sitting down – and it’s nonsense. It may make a difference if you’re part of a chorale performing a Bach cantata, but not when belting out the ‘Deeney is a legend’ song. I’ve happily sat and sang for 20 years, as have thousands of others.
As for reducing ticket prices, it’s a noble ambition. But Premier League clubs in particular have had ample opportunity to do so in recent years as Sky have showered them with money, and few have done anything to make matchdays cheaper for fan; it all goes on escalating transfer fees and player wages instead. That may change if safe standing is ever introduced, but I’m not holding my breath.
There is a third argument; that fans stand anyway, particularly in away ends, so we need to ensure they can do so safely. I have some sympathy with this line, but I think football supporters have actually become a lot more sensible in the past 30 years. The bundles and crushes that made life on the old terraces so hazardous simply don’t happen when everyone is standing on a narrow strip of concrete with the back of a chair at their feet. It’s not that dangerous any more.
For what it’s worth, I’m not against standing at football matches. I just don’t see the point of spending money on installing rail seating (which the safe standing brigade are pinning their hopes on) when there are other ways of arranging things. Watford’s Operations Director made this point perfectly at an At Your Place event I attended last season. As he pointed out, the club have an arrangement with the 1881 that they can have a block where everyone can stand throughout the match if they want; those who want to stand can join that group, and everyone else sits down. It doesn’t cost anything, and everyone’s happy. We can’t be the only club where this common-sense approach is taken.
As further proof, he also mentioned standing in the away end, but I’ll come back to that another time...
I’ve been reading a lot about the campaign to introduce ‘safe standing’ at football grounds recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a similar impulse must be behind it. After all, compulsory all-seater stadiums were introduced for the top two divisions in the early 90s, so anyone who stood regularly as a teenager at a ground in those divisions must now be pushing 40. Like the crowdsurfers at the Roundhouse, I can only assume that the safe standing campaign is being led by people with a hankering to relive their younger days. I can’t see another reason for it.
As it happens, the editorial in this month’s When Saturday Comes (a magazine which invariably has its heart in the right place) gives two main reasons for introducing safe standing: restoring some atmosphere to sterile all-seater stadiums, and reducing ticket prices.
I’ve heard the argument before that standing up encourages singing – some even maintain that it is physically harder to sing while sitting down – and it’s nonsense. It may make a difference if you’re part of a chorale performing a Bach cantata, but not when belting out the ‘Deeney is a legend’ song. I’ve happily sat and sang for 20 years, as have thousands of others.
As for reducing ticket prices, it’s a noble ambition. But Premier League clubs in particular have had ample opportunity to do so in recent years as Sky have showered them with money, and few have done anything to make matchdays cheaper for fan; it all goes on escalating transfer fees and player wages instead. That may change if safe standing is ever introduced, but I’m not holding my breath.
There is a third argument; that fans stand anyway, particularly in away ends, so we need to ensure they can do so safely. I have some sympathy with this line, but I think football supporters have actually become a lot more sensible in the past 30 years. The bundles and crushes that made life on the old terraces so hazardous simply don’t happen when everyone is standing on a narrow strip of concrete with the back of a chair at their feet. It’s not that dangerous any more.
For what it’s worth, I’m not against standing at football matches. I just don’t see the point of spending money on installing rail seating (which the safe standing brigade are pinning their hopes on) when there are other ways of arranging things. Watford’s Operations Director made this point perfectly at an At Your Place event I attended last season. As he pointed out, the club have an arrangement with the 1881 that they can have a block where everyone can stand throughout the match if they want; those who want to stand can join that group, and everyone else sits down. It doesn’t cost anything, and everyone’s happy. We can’t be the only club where this common-sense approach is taken.
As further proof, he also mentioned standing in the away end, but I’ll come back to that another time...
Sunday, 1 May 2016
Some thoughts about singing at football matches
1) Singing at football matches is fun
That feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself, part of an ecstatic, bellowing mass of humanity all hell-bent on encouraging your team to greater heights – you can’t beat that, can you?
I haven’t read much football history, but I suspect this may have been one of the key factors in football’s first upswing in popularity in the late 19th century: the chance for factory workers, miners, steelworkers and whoever else to get away from the monotony of their jobs for one afternoon a week and sing “Come on you [insert team name here]!”, knowing that this was a passion they’d chosen for themselves, and one that they shared with thousands of their fellow supporters.
2) Singing at football matches is hard to get going
It’s like starting a fire, essentially. The first spark catches, the fire spreads through the tinder around it, and then onto the kindling around that. But if the kindling is damp, the fire will stop spreading and soon burn itself out.
That’s what happened in the Watford end at Wembley last week. From where I was sitting, diagonally up from the right corner flag on the lower tier, I could clearly see the 1881 jumping up and down, singing and waving. But I couldn’t actually hear them, because between them and me there were hundreds of people standing silently, the damp kindling that stopped the fire from spreading. We did our best in our section, but there’s only so much noise you can make if the people around you won’t join in.
3) Singing at football matches should be spontaneous
I can’t have been the only person at Wembley who found the Palace fans’ scarily well-coordinated celebrations after their first goal (which encompassed the entire lower tier from one corner flag to the other, around 6,000 people, all singing and waving flags in time) reminiscent of a Nuremburg rally. How did they do that? Did they have mass practice sessions in Crystal Palace Park the week before? Or was some kind of coercion involved? (“You vill sing ‘Glad all over’ or you vill not see your children again.”)
For me, the best moments in a football crowd are the spontaneous ones. At Upton Park, a few days before the semi-final, someone behind me started up the Valon Behrami chant to the tune of ‘La Bamba’. Okay, it may have been practised in the pub before the game, but the singers still took a while to master the tricky rhythm, and it needed a hoarse-voiced MC to yell “three-four-five-six-seven-eight” between verses to keep it going in time. But keep it going he did, for quite long sections of the game, and it was fantastic. I can honestly say I enjoyed singing that more than I enjoyed Sebastian Prödl’s bizarre consolation goal.
4) Singing at football matches doesn’t make any difference to the result
I wrote about this recently, so I won’t rehearse the argument again. Suffice it to say that if having passionate fans made any real difference, Sunderland and Newcastle wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of relegation right now.
Of course, the fact that it doesn’t make a difference is no reason not to sing. (See point 1, above.)
5) Singing at football matches is not compulsory
I love singing, lots of us do, but it’s not a condition of entry to the ground. Quite frankly, I don’t want to see 10-year-olds joining in with a rendition of “You’re f***ing sh*t”, and I wouldn’t expect to see OAPs doing so either.
Moreover, Watford’s support is (and probably always will be) more middle-class and reserved than that of many of our rivals, what with South-West Hertfordshire being one of the wealthier and more comfortable parts of the country, and there are always going to be plenty of fans, even in the Rookery Stand, who are not natural singers. That doesn’t make them bad people, or bad supporters for that matter. It just means the rest of us have to sing a bit louder.
That feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself, part of an ecstatic, bellowing mass of humanity all hell-bent on encouraging your team to greater heights – you can’t beat that, can you?
I haven’t read much football history, but I suspect this may have been one of the key factors in football’s first upswing in popularity in the late 19th century: the chance for factory workers, miners, steelworkers and whoever else to get away from the monotony of their jobs for one afternoon a week and sing “Come on you [insert team name here]!”, knowing that this was a passion they’d chosen for themselves, and one that they shared with thousands of their fellow supporters.
2) Singing at football matches is hard to get going
It’s like starting a fire, essentially. The first spark catches, the fire spreads through the tinder around it, and then onto the kindling around that. But if the kindling is damp, the fire will stop spreading and soon burn itself out.
That’s what happened in the Watford end at Wembley last week. From where I was sitting, diagonally up from the right corner flag on the lower tier, I could clearly see the 1881 jumping up and down, singing and waving. But I couldn’t actually hear them, because between them and me there were hundreds of people standing silently, the damp kindling that stopped the fire from spreading. We did our best in our section, but there’s only so much noise you can make if the people around you won’t join in.
3) Singing at football matches should be spontaneous
I can’t have been the only person at Wembley who found the Palace fans’ scarily well-coordinated celebrations after their first goal (which encompassed the entire lower tier from one corner flag to the other, around 6,000 people, all singing and waving flags in time) reminiscent of a Nuremburg rally. How did they do that? Did they have mass practice sessions in Crystal Palace Park the week before? Or was some kind of coercion involved? (“You vill sing ‘Glad all over’ or you vill not see your children again.”)
For me, the best moments in a football crowd are the spontaneous ones. At Upton Park, a few days before the semi-final, someone behind me started up the Valon Behrami chant to the tune of ‘La Bamba’. Okay, it may have been practised in the pub before the game, but the singers still took a while to master the tricky rhythm, and it needed a hoarse-voiced MC to yell “three-four-five-six-seven-eight” between verses to keep it going in time. But keep it going he did, for quite long sections of the game, and it was fantastic. I can honestly say I enjoyed singing that more than I enjoyed Sebastian Prödl’s bizarre consolation goal.
4) Singing at football matches doesn’t make any difference to the result
I wrote about this recently, so I won’t rehearse the argument again. Suffice it to say that if having passionate fans made any real difference, Sunderland and Newcastle wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of relegation right now.
Of course, the fact that it doesn’t make a difference is no reason not to sing. (See point 1, above.)
5) Singing at football matches is not compulsory
I love singing, lots of us do, but it’s not a condition of entry to the ground. Quite frankly, I don’t want to see 10-year-olds joining in with a rendition of “You’re f***ing sh*t”, and I wouldn’t expect to see OAPs doing so either.
Moreover, Watford’s support is (and probably always will be) more middle-class and reserved than that of many of our rivals, what with South-West Hertfordshire being one of the wealthier and more comfortable parts of the country, and there are always going to be plenty of fans, even in the Rookery Stand, who are not natural singers. That doesn’t make them bad people, or bad supporters for that matter. It just means the rest of us have to sing a bit louder.
Sunday, 6 March 2016
You’re not singing any sense
After Watford played Brentford at home last season, I asked my friend Stuart how on Earth he and his fellow Bees fans could justify singing things like “Is this a library?” when the Rookery End, inspired by the 1881, had been making a racket for pretty much the entire 90 minutes.
He replied that in the Vicarage Road End, they couldn’t hear anything of the sort – and maybe it’s the acoustic peculiarities of the ground that are to blame for my current irritation. Because I’m getting a bit fed up of away fans reeling out the same old tired chants about the Watford fans not singing when we clearly are. The Leicester fans were at it again yesterday.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like my football songs to make sense. I admit that when Watford fans, buoyed by a particularly fine performance, sing “We’re by far the greatest team/The world has ever seen”, it’s not a claim that would pass unchallenged in any court in the land, but we can be forgiven the occasional excess of exuberance. On the other hand, singing “Sh*t ground, no fans” at the newly spruced-up Vicarage Road when there’s scarcely an empty seat to be seen is just stupid.
The more fundamental problem I have with this is simply this: who cares? If you go to a football ground and the home fans don’t sing or chant, what does it matter?
Don’t get me wrong – I love singing, and I think the 1881 have done an incredible job in coaxing the historically reticent Watford fans into creating something that can occasionally, genuinely, be called a cauldron of noise.
On the other hand, no one ever won a trophy because their fans sang louder than the other team’s. Let’s look at the English clubs with the most famously passionate fans: clubs like Wolves, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Manchester City, Sunderland. How many trophies have any of that lot won in the past 20 years or so? Okay, City have won a couple, but it was Abu Dhabi oil dollars that made the difference, not mouthy Mancs.
No, it’s the infamously silent prawn sandwich munchers of Old Trafford and the team that used to play at a ground known as the ‘Highbury library’ that have carried off most of the silverware in modern times. (Chelsea fans aren’t particularly vocal either, unless the caterers have run out of smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels.) In other words, there’s no correlation between the noisiness of a team’s fans and their propensity to win football matches.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sing our hearts out, of course. It makes us feel good, for one thing. Moreover, the players always say they appreciate it, and I have no reason to doubt them when they say it matters to them.
But at the same time, I secretly long for the day when an entire home crowd stays pointedly silent for 90 minutes while their team wipes the floor with the opposition, just to prove that all the playground yah-boo-sucks ‘we make more noise than you’ nonsense actually makes no difference whatsoever.
He replied that in the Vicarage Road End, they couldn’t hear anything of the sort – and maybe it’s the acoustic peculiarities of the ground that are to blame for my current irritation. Because I’m getting a bit fed up of away fans reeling out the same old tired chants about the Watford fans not singing when we clearly are. The Leicester fans were at it again yesterday.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like my football songs to make sense. I admit that when Watford fans, buoyed by a particularly fine performance, sing “We’re by far the greatest team/The world has ever seen”, it’s not a claim that would pass unchallenged in any court in the land, but we can be forgiven the occasional excess of exuberance. On the other hand, singing “Sh*t ground, no fans” at the newly spruced-up Vicarage Road when there’s scarcely an empty seat to be seen is just stupid.
The more fundamental problem I have with this is simply this: who cares? If you go to a football ground and the home fans don’t sing or chant, what does it matter?
Don’t get me wrong – I love singing, and I think the 1881 have done an incredible job in coaxing the historically reticent Watford fans into creating something that can occasionally, genuinely, be called a cauldron of noise.
On the other hand, no one ever won a trophy because their fans sang louder than the other team’s. Let’s look at the English clubs with the most famously passionate fans: clubs like Wolves, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Manchester City, Sunderland. How many trophies have any of that lot won in the past 20 years or so? Okay, City have won a couple, but it was Abu Dhabi oil dollars that made the difference, not mouthy Mancs.
No, it’s the infamously silent prawn sandwich munchers of Old Trafford and the team that used to play at a ground known as the ‘Highbury library’ that have carried off most of the silverware in modern times. (Chelsea fans aren’t particularly vocal either, unless the caterers have run out of smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels.) In other words, there’s no correlation between the noisiness of a team’s fans and their propensity to win football matches.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sing our hearts out, of course. It makes us feel good, for one thing. Moreover, the players always say they appreciate it, and I have no reason to doubt them when they say it matters to them.
But at the same time, I secretly long for the day when an entire home crowd stays pointedly silent for 90 minutes while their team wipes the floor with the opposition, just to prove that all the playground yah-boo-sucks ‘we make more noise than you’ nonsense actually makes no difference whatsoever.
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