Red letter days

It takes a lot to persuade me to put fingers to keyboard these days (to be honest, I still haven’t got over the shame induced by my idiotically complacent prediction of how this season was going to pan out), but I couldn’t let the incredible 3-0 win against Liverpool pass without comment.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, it was a victory against the Reds that started me on a Watford-supporting career that will reach the half-century mark later this year. I wasn’t at the 1-0 win in the FA Cup quarter-final in February 1970, but reading about it in the papers afterwards alerted the seven-year-old me to the fact that there was a professional football team just up the road, and my first visit followed early the following season.

There haven’t been many wins over Liverpool since then, but they’ve almost all been memorable ones. There was the 2-1 victory in the final game of 1982-83 that cemented second place in the First Division; the scrambled Tommy Mooney goal at Anfield in August 1999 to secure one of what turned out to be only six wins in our first visit to the Premier League; and the 3-0 victory in December 2015, with two goals by Odion Ighalo, that went a long way towards convincing the sceptics that this time, our stay in the top flight would last more than one season.

As Troy rightly pointed out after Saturday’s game, beating Liverpool won’t count for much if we get relegated. While the media have now unanimously decided that we will stay up (how could such a brilliant team not gather the necessary number of points in the remaining games?), I doubt I’m the only Hornets fan who isn’t quite so sanguine.

Unusually, we’ve got a decent record against the top teams this season (wins against Liverpool and Man U, draws against Arsenal and against Spurs, twice), but we’ve lost to all our relegation rivals apart from Bournemouth and Norwich. You can look at the fixture list and pinpoint the four games we ‘should’ win to secure our status: Southampton, Norwich and Newcastle at home, plus either Palace or West Ham away, is the most obvious escape route. But on the evidence of this season, we’re just as likely to drop points in some of those and beat Chelsea or Arsenal away.

That unpredictability is, ultimately, what we prize about football. There were plenty of Watford fans who gave Saturday’s game a miss, unwilling to put up with the disruption of a late kick-off time on a chilly day to watch what would inevitably be a dispiriting drubbing by the best team in the world. And besides, it was live on the telly. I’m just glad I wasn’t one of them.

A helluva week

There are some weeks you just want to get to the end of. On Monday my employer announced a programme of redundancies and financial cutbacks designed to steer the company through the choppy waters of the next year or so. My job is safe for the time being, but the atmosphere around the office has been a bit tense all week, as you can imagine. Meanwhile, a family member went into hospital for an operation on Wednesday, and that’s been the cause of plenty more stress, for reasons I won’t go into here.

So I really needed a trip to Vicarage Road yesterday – especially as a combination of postponements, family commitments and holidays meant I hadn’t seen a game for a month. The last game I saw was the FA Cup tie against Palace, but a lot has changed in the interim. The defence looks more solid with Williamson at its heart, Cowie was impressive on the left wing... but you know all that. The really big news is that we have a song! I’m sure ‘Hoist up the Watford flag’ (a nifty adaptation of ‘Sloop John B’) has been nicked from another set of supporters, but who cares – as chorus after chorus rang out from the Rookery, I felt my spirits lift.

In truth, it wasn’t a great game, thanks mainly to Palace’s constant niggling – charmless nerks, the lot of them, as Norman Stanley Fletcher would have said. But to me, it was one of those afternoons that epitomise the joy of supporting a football team. I got to celebrate two goals (one of them possibly offside, the other untidily bundled over the line), bite my fingernails as our defence indulging in some last-ditch clearances, abuse Neil Warnock (always a pleasure), sing a rousing new song... and, for 90 minutes, forget all about life outside the stadium. And that, for me at least, is a big part of what football is for.