Questions, questions

Don’t worry, I’m not going to share any profound thoughts on being a Watford fan as 2014 dawns damp and dreary, mainly because I haven’t got any.

Instead, here are five rhetorical questions based around issues that bother me slightly, none of which is worth a whole blog entry in its own right. If you have an actual answer to any of them, please let me know, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

1) Why doesn’t Richard Short just ask the Watford players how to pronounce their surnames? I don’t have a problem with his performance as matchday announcer in general, though I know a lot of fans do. However, given that one of the main requirements of the job is to read out the teams before kickoff, I’d say the least he could do is to make an effort to pronounce them correctly.

The Pozzos have given him a lot of easy ones (Abdi, Anya, Cassetti, Ekstrand), but if there is a way of getting a name wrong, he generally does so – repeatedly. For example, I know enough Spanish to be fairly confident that our Spanish goalkeeper is not called ‘Al-moon-ee-ay’, and I’m pretty sure our Italian-Argentinian striker isn’t ‘Forest-airy’.

It’s not just the foreign players, either. On Sunday he managed to sidestep the tricky question of whether our Chelsea loanee is ‘Mac-keck-ran’ or ‘Mac-eek-ran’ by adding a superfluous ‘r’, making him ‘Mac-reck-ran’.

2) Does Lloyd Doyley ever get tired of having to introduce himself to yet another new manager? Mind you, at least Sannino hasn’t started by dropping him, like most of his predecessors, so maybe the message is finally getting through.

3) What is the point of that enormous car park at the bottom of Occupation Road? On most Saturday afternoons, there are two or three cars parked there and hundreds of empty spaces. Why can’t it be used for matchday parking?

4) What’s happened to poor Ross Jenkins? As far as I can tell, he’s still employed by the club (his contract runs out at the end of the season, according to wfc.net), but he hasn’t got a squad number. Does he still train with the other players, even though he apparently has no hope of getting a game (even in the friendlies they organise for the reserves), or is he left to do laps of the training ground on his own, like a kid who’s annoyed his PE teacher?

I understand that Zola didn’t rate him, but he looked a decent enough player under the previous regimes, so I don’t understand what he’s done to deserve being sent to Coventry.

5) Will Watford ever again have a manager who manages to stay in the job for three full years? Given the way football is going, you could ask the question about pretty much any club, but since Boothroyd (who managed three and half years), we’ve had a succession of one-season managers, and I don’t like that – I prefer stability and certainty.

Of course, in Pozzoworld the stability comes from the regime as a whole, not the head coach, or so we’re told. And from what I’ve read (particularly in the excellent chapter on the subject in Tales From The Vicarage Volume II, of which more soon), they’re prone to changing head coaches at frequent intervals. I’m not expecting Sannino to rival Arsène Wenger for longevity, put it that way. But I’d love to be proved wrong.

North v South

I haven’t got all the answers for Watford’s current malaise (who has? Certainly not the manager), but there is one thing that strikes me as pertinent, and it’s to do with the origin of our loanees.

In general terms, European football can be divided into two styles of play. In northern and central Europe, the emphasis is on strength and speed, while in the south they favour style and skill. A massive over-simplification, of course, but I think it’s basically valid. Look at it this way: I doubt there’s ever been a Swedish team that played like the recent vintage Barcelona, or an Italian one that imitated Dave Bassett’s Wimbledon.

Since the Pozzos took over at Watford, the loanees from our sister clubs who have been most successful have largely been those originally from north or central Europe: Anya (Scotland), Ekstrand (Sweden), Vydra and Pudil (Czech Republic), Abdi (Switzerland).

In contrast, few of those from Mediterranean countries (or Latin American ones, for that matter) have established themselves as first-choice selections. Angella has, but as a central defender, the Latin mentality is perhaps less important to his game (though his error late in the game at Middlesbrough shows what can happen when defenders forget to keep it simple). Ditto Cassetti, though he’s only first-choice at the moment because of injury. Then there’s Forestieri, though he’s still very much a work in progress. I’m not convinced he’s the right foil for Deeney, but he’s done okay this season.

The other southern Europeans (Battochio, Fabbrini, Faraoni, plus Geijo last season) and Latin Americans (Iriney and Acuna) have all struggled to turn their undoubted talent into effectiveness on the pitch. That’s not surprising: the Championship is a northern European league where strength and speed tend to win out over style and skill.

None of this is to say that they won’t eventually come good. We’ve got most of these players on long-term contracts that will (hopefully) give them time to adjust their game to English football. Feel free to remind me of this post in a few years’ time, when Fabbrini is scoring 20 a season and Battochio is running the midfield. But in the meantime, the next time the Pozzos are looking to send us a batch of players, maybe they should focus on the Udinese and Granada players who were originally signed from colder climes.

Bright ideas: the unsackable manager

I read on WML recently that Gianfranco Zola is now the sixth longest-serving manager in the Championship, having been at Watford just 16 months. That speaks volumes about the ludicrous pressures managers work under these days, and it got me thinking about ways of redressing the balance between managers and players.

So here’s my bright – and completely unworkable, before anyone points it out – idea, based on the oft-stated principle that the manager of a football club should be given three seasons to prove themself: one to ship out the players they inherited but don’t want, one to bring in players they think will improve the team, and one to blend them together into a winning unit.

It’s a simple enough concept. On June 1st 2014, every club in the Premier League and Football League gives its manager (the incumbent or a new arrival – their choice) a three-year contract containing a clause that makes it unbreakable. That is, the club can’t sack the manager, and the manager can’t leave for another club. Three years later, the clubs have the opportunity to make the managers an offer of another three-year term if they want, and the managers have the chance to switch clubs. Then the three-year cycle starts again.

There are several benefits to this scheme. For one thing, it defuses player power. Dressing-room rebellions are futile if the players know they can’t force the manager out, so they just have to get on with the job of playing football. If they don’t like it, they can leave. The manager’s authority is decisive.

For another, it forces clubs to think a bit more carefully about who they appoint. No more hiring an ex-pro everyone on the board has heard of who’s been moderately successful somewhere else (yes, I’m talking about you, Messrs Hughes, Bruce and co.), and who they can jettison after 15 months if they haven’t brought success by then. They need to find someone with a genuine vision and the skill and charisma to make it a reality.

By taking the pressure off managers, it should also improve their performance. No one is at their best when they’re constantly looking over their shoulder. A relaxed manager can focus all his energy on improving his team, without having to field idiotic post-match questions from Garth Crooks about whether they’re expecting a call from the chairman this evening.

Of course, not everyone will be happy. The media will lose a key source of stories, and fans will have to learn that they can wave all the homemade banners they want, go on endless protest marches and sing countless rude songs about the manager – he isn’t going anywhere until the three years are up. But think of it this way: it’s no different to politics. Many of us aren’t happy with the people running our country, but we know there’s no point getting too worked up about it right now. Another lot will be along come the next election, and hopefully they’ll do a better job.

Obviously, some checks and balances would have to be built into the system. There would be the capacity for a club to sack a manager who was convicted of a crime, for instance, and equally, he could be released from his contract in the case of severe illness or other mitigating personal circumstances. But apart from that, a contract would be a contract, and everybody’s blood pressure would be reduced as a result. And that can’t be a bad thing, can it?

Not up for the cup

On Saturday, with Watford not playing, nothing that I urgently needed to do, and the FPO* otherwise occupied, I thought it might be a good opportunity to go and watch a football match as a neutral.

My first choice was Brentford v Shrewsbury. I live in Fulham, so it’s a local ground, and my best friend is a season ticket holder. But it turned out that they had some special promotion on and the home end was sold out, so that wasn’t an option. “Why don’t you go and watch an FA Cup tie?” he said.

I’d already had the same idea. A quick scan of the fixtures revealed that my best bet was Barnet v Concord Rangers. Okay, that sounded promising. I went onto the Barnet website to find out more about their new ground. Then I saw the ticket prices: £24 for a seat, £16 for the terraces.

Are you kidding me? I watched the superb Watford-Norwich League Cup tie for 15 quid a few weeks ago. Why would I pay more than that for an FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round tie between two non-league teams? I thought about it a bit longer: it was going to take me a minimum of an hour to get there, whether I drove or took public transport, and the weather was looking iffy. In the end, I just couldn’t be bothered. If it had been a tenner to get in, I probably would have.

So, after a couple of hours spent working in the garden, I sat down to watch the end of Sky Soccer Saturday. Even though I’d turned down the chance to go, I was still curious to know how the Barnet game had turned out. Sky Sports had featured a few of the FA Cup ties on their vidiprinter (or whatever the digital equivalent is called), but not that one. I waited until the classified scores were in, but no mention of the FA Cup, so I switched over to BBC1, who are usually a few minutes behind. No classified FA Cup scores there either, but the presenter made a point of saying that they could be found on the BBC Sport website.

So I checked the BBC Sport app on my iPhone: the fixtures were there all right, but no scores. This was at 5.10 or so. Okay, I thought, it’s probably just that they don’t update the app as a priority. An hour or so later, I looked on my computer - with the same result. Well after 6 o’clock, it was still impossible to find out a single result from the FA Cup 4th qualifying round from the BBC. (For the record, the Real FA Cup website was no better.)

So here’s the thing: I’m a Watford fan through and through, and 95% of all the football matches I’ve ever watched have featured the Golden Boys. But every now and then I fancy a change of scene, and I’m open to watching non-league football. (I’ve seen plenty of non-league games, mostly at Kingstonian with a friend who used to support them.) But if it’s going to cost the same as a league game, I’m not going to bother. And if the media can’t be arsed to update the scores from the biggest competition non-league teams feature in, it’s hardly going to encourage other neutrals to take an interest, either. I’m not impressed, frankly.

*Fun Prevention Officer, aka wife

Marathon men

Sporting metaphors and phrases are so common nowadays that they often get used without much thought as to whether they the situation being described – especially when it comes to talking about other sports. ‘Step up to the plate’, ‘off his own bat’, ‘move the goalposts’, ‘on the ropes’ – there are dozens of them.

The one I’ve seen applied to Watford a lot recently is the idea that a football league season is ‘a marathon, not a sprint’. And in fact, this is the exception to the rule set out about above, because it is an entirely apt metaphor. I should know: I used to be a marathon runner.

Actually, that’s a lie. But I did used to work for a running magazine, and in that capacity I was occasionally assigned to report on a marathon, so I’ve seen them at close quarters.

These things usually work in one of two ways. At the big, prestigious marathons, like London, the journalists are hosted in a cosy press room near the finish line, with banks of TV screens showing the race from every angle and all the statistics you could possibly want. There are plentiful supplies of hot drinks and snacks, and it’s a wrench when you have to tear yourself away and go out in the cold to watch the winner cross the finish line.

But at the less well-funded events, reporters don’t get such a cosy time of it. In Prague and Belgrade I found myself in the back of an open truck with half a dozen fellow writers, driving round the course a few yards ahead of the lead runner – sometimes so close that I wondered if they might be tempted to jump in with us. A functionary with a walkie talkie updated us on the leaders’ split times and other useful snippets of information, but otherwise we only knew what was happening in front of (or rather, behind) us.

It strikes me that this is the perspective adopted by most casual football fans, and indeed those journalists who can’t be bothered to study the situation in depth, when it comes to assessing the football season as it goes along. They take the foreshortened view from the head of the field and assume that whoever is leading at a given time is a shoo-in for victory.

This nonsense wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t infectious. Some Hornets fans are already worrying that we’re being left behind by Burnley and QPR, and that’s just dumb. As in a marathon, what matters is to be part of the leading group. The fascination in watching these races lies in seeing how the best runners pace themselves, injecting little bursts of extra speed from time to time that shake off the weaker ones. It’s all about timing your effort to maximum effect – like a football team going on an unbeaten run in the early spring, just when their competitors are suffering from injuries and fatigue.

The other thing I’ve learned from watching marathons is that, while a runner who hasn’t been part of the leading group may come back up the field strongly, overtaking others who’ve run out of steam, they never win. It just doesn’t happen; third or fourth place is the best you can hope for if you haven’t been part of the leading pack throughout.

That applies to football too, of course – just remember the Mooney-inspired run that took Watford from mid-table to the playoffs in 1999. So if you look at the Championship table now, the chances are that the two automatically promoted teams will come from the pack of seven currently setting the pace. A Bolton or a Brighton might surge through the field from the bottom half of the table and into the playoffs, but that’s probably the best they can hope for.

So, it’s nearly a quarter of the way through the season and Watford are jogging along nicely in the middle of the leading group. I believe that we have the skill, and the strength, both on and off the pitch, to make the decisive burst when it counts. Have faith. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

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.

Is that it?

So I finally got to go to my first home game of the season yesterday. Just like every season since 1970, my excitement mounted as I traced the familiar route over the railway bridge, along Cardiff Road and up Occupation Road, past the allotments.

Inside the ground, nothing much seems to have changed. There’s a big banner at the back of the Vicarage Road stand, and the half-finished block in the south-west corner has been blocked up in such a way as to suggest it might actually get finished at some point. That’s about it.

There was certainly a bigger crowd than you’d expect for a regular league game against Charlton (I’ve rarely seen the Rous so full), and I was expecting more atmosphere, what with the much-heralded founding of The 1881. I thought there were going to be giant flags, constant noise, new songs? True, a persistent drumbeat and attempts to keep the singing going wafted over from the south-west corner of the Rookery, but it hardly turned the Vic into a cauldron of noise. Early days, I suppose.

To be fair, the action on the pitch was hardly conducive to a great atmosphere. It’s early days for the team as well; it still has the look of a group of players who are getting to know each other, with occasional flashes of genius punctuating long passages of ponderous passing. It was the same at this stage last season, of course, and we know how that turned out, so I’m not overly concerned yet. At least we didn’t lose.

Just to put the tin lid on a rather disappointing day, my Official Favourite Player (for the 23rd season running, or something of the sort), Lloyd Doyley, wasn’t even playing – presumably rested after his international exertions, rather than dropped, which would be madness. One day I’m going to have to pick a new favourite player, but let’s not hope it’s for a few more seasons yet. On the evidence of yesterday, we still need his speed and nous at the back.

First impressions

It’s been a feature of recent years that I don’t get to see much of Watford’s start to the season. Having a wife whose birthday (which is invariably celebrated lavishly with family and friends) is on August 4th doesn’t help, and the Bank Holiday weekend is another regular occasion for family gatherings a long way from Hertfordshire. The fixture computer is rarely helpful, and I can’t remember the last time I actually got to see the Hornets’ first home game.

This year it’s been spectacularly unhelpful, to the extent that my first home game will be against Charlton on September 14th. So I made a point of marking yesterday’s game at Reading on the calendar early and ringing it in red pen. I wanted to see this latest Watford team for myself.

My first impressions weren’t great. Just as in the early months of last season, the Hornets looked a bit lost. There was clearly an ambition to play a silky passing game based on a combination of patient possession and rapier-like penetration, but it simply wasn’t working. Giving away a goal in the first five minutes didn’t help, of course.

But after the break (and especially after Fabbrini’s introduction) it was a different story. I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account; you can read plenty of those elsewhere. I just wanted to say that as we built up attacking momentum, it was absolutely thrilling to watch. You could sense the Reading players thinking “Holy sh*t, where did that come from?” The draw was absolutely deserved, and given another 10 minutes, I’m sure we’d have won.

As Gianfranco Zola has been at pains to point out, this team is still very much a work in progress, with a number of players who are new to English football, let alone Watford. If that’s what they can do (against, let’s not forget, what’s likely to be one of the stronger teams in this year’s Championship) when they’re still getting to know each other, god help the rest of the division once they really get into gear. I haven’t felt so excited about a Watford team since John Barnes was thin.

Wanna bet?

This week, at the age of 50, I did something I’ve never done before: I went into a bookmaker’s and placed a bet.

I’ve done plenty of betting in the past (I wrote about it here), mainly on football, but always online. I didn’t have anything against the idea of going into a betting shop; it was just easier, particularly with the kind of small bets I was putting on matches, to do it at my desk at work on a Friday lunchtime.

This week, though, I decided it was time to step it up a notch. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a growing conviction that Watford really are going to be the dominant force in the Championship this season, and I decided to back that conviction with some cold hard cash. A savvy colleague at work pointed me towards the Oddschecker site so that I could find the best odds on Watford to win the Championship, and then directed me towards the nearest branch of Coral. (It turned out to be 100 yards from the office – I’d walked past it hundreds of times without ever noticing it.)

In case you’re interested, I got 12-1, and you can still get those odds at Coral and one or two other places. According to Oddschecker, over 20% of online bets placed on the Championship winner have gone on the Hornets, and we’re as low as 9-1 with some betting sites, and falling.

It’s that, as much as the strength of our squad, the skill of our manager and the acumen of our owners, that gives me such confidence about the coming season. If there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that the bookies will do anything to avoid losing money.

Time out

When it comes to the summer (what used to be called the ‘close season’, though the phrase seems to have slipped out of currency), football fans fall into two camps.

There are some who just can’t do without their fix, and latch on to any football they can find with the urgency of the true addict. You can see them on Twitter, desperately swapping news of televised games. During June they fed their habit with the European Under-21 Championships, the Confederations Cup and the early rounds of qualifying for next season’s European club competitions. Now that July’s here there are pre-season friendlies and those daft competitions that tend to get screened on Channel 5, and those will see them through to August and the resumption of proper football.

I fall into the other camp. Much as I love football, I cherish the two months’ break between seasons when I can forget all about it.* I enjoy watching most top-level sport (pretty much anything not involving cars or horses – that’s not sport, it’s transport), and I love the traditional landmarks of an English summer; Wimbledon, the Open, Test cricket, a major athletics championship (it’s the Worlds this year).

I’ve happily ignored the football listed above, and while I will take a passing interest in Watford’s friendlies, there’s no point investing too much emotion in them. Last year, I seem to remember that Piero Mingoia played a prominent role in pre-season, and that didn’t exactly turn out to be a significant indicator of things to come, did it? I’ve never been to a pre-season friendly, however glamorous (didn’t we play Milan or Juventus, or someone like that, a few years ago?), and I doubt I ever will.

Yes, yes, there are new signings, loanees coming on board full-time, a promising squad taking shape… It’s all important, of course, but I’m not going to let the news from Vicarage Road (or northern Italy) take over my life. I’ll start getting excited some time around August 1st, when there’s a proper competitive fixture in the offing and the team news actually means something.

Until then, I’m on a break.


*This is more complicated in those summers when there’s a World Cup or European Championship, but that’s a subject for another day.