10 reasons why it’s great to be a Hornet

I’m sure I’m not the only Watford fan who is still utterly incapable of calm, dispassionate analysis of our season or the implications of yesterday’s results for the club’s future. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I keep spontaneously breaking into a rendition of ‘Tommie Hoban’s having a party...’ and finding myself grinning stupidly at inappropriate moments.

Still, I had to mark the moment somehow, so here’s my list of 10 reasons why it’s great to be a Hornet right now:

1) The Pozzo family...

2) ... thanks to whom we finally have a proper four-sided ground again, complete with stands rightly named after the two people who did more than anything to establish the Watford FC we know and love today

3) We’ve got Lloydinho...

4) ... and, possibly more importantly for the outcome of this season, Troydeeneyo

5) The 1881, who’ve achieved the improbable feat of making Vicarage Road a cauldron of noise

6) The many and varied media channels that comment on and support the Hornets, all of them unfailingly classy and intelligent: the Watford Observer’s simultaneously passionate and objective reports, the brilliant From The Rookery End podcast, the always shrewd and witty BHappy blogs, the ever-growing archive of Watford lore that is the Tales From The Vicarage series of books, plus other bloggers and tweeters too numerous to mention

7) Goals galore. While Chelsea fans watch their team bore their way to the Premier League title, we’ve seen lots and lots and lots of fabulous goals this season. And I write as someone who missed the home win against Blackpool

8) Slav. A different kind of manager, and exactly what we needed this season. Focused, intelligent and fearless. Deserves a shot at the big time

9) We will hopefully never again have to play our supposed rivals from a horrible town in Bedfordshire that I can’t bring myself to name, who are currently, and deservedly, marooned in League Two

10 Last, but most certainly not least... We are going up, I said we are going up!

Approaching the bell

Most track and field events are fairly easy for the casual viewer to appreciate. All the track races up to and including 1500m are over in less than four minutes, while each individual jump or throw is self-contained; even if you don’t see the whole competition, success and failure are usually easy to tell apart.

The 10,000m, though, is more of an acquired taste: 25 laps of the track in which nothing much seems to happen until the very end. Indeed, unless you attend an athletics meeting in the flesh, you’re unlikely to get the chance to watch an entire race from start to finish; TV producers tend to show the start and finish, filling in the dull middle laps by covering the field events. You can often see the 10,000m runners in the background, on their way to completing yet another circuit of the track.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. I reckon a 10,000m race has a lot in common with this season in the Championship. After a blanket start, a few runners soon drop off the back of the pack, clearly destined to be lapped (relegated). The rest trail round and round the track in a long line in which the exact order changes regularly. More are gradually dropped as the relentless pace takes its toll. Meanwhile, at the front, the big guns take it in turns to lead, focusing on being in the right position at the business end of the race.

And when the end is finally in sight, with 600m or so to go, the strongest runners slip into a higher gear and sprint the final lap, trusting that they’ve got enough in the tank to hold off the opposition. Mo Farah is the modern master of the sprint finish, of course, taking off as if turbocharged. In the big races in recent years, no one has been able to stay with him.

I won’t spell out all the parallels with the Championship season. The point is that the runners in this particular race are approaching the bell that signals the final lap. The pack is down to eight – though a couple of those are barely clinging on to their hopes of automatic promotion – and this weekend’s fixtures are the equivalent of one of those periodic surges when the leaders try to shape off the weaker runners. The question is, are we Mo Farah (or at least one of the Ethiopians and Kenyans who invariably win silver and bronze behind him)?

No one knows how this race is going to end. But if we’re still in the leading pack on Monday night, we’ll have given ourselves the best possible chance of going up automatically. C’mon you ’Orns!

Nineties nostalgia, pt. 4 – It takes a small man to beat a small team

I really can’t cope with the tension of the Championship promotion battle any more, and the idea of having to wait nearly a fortnight for the next instalment of the story is agonising. So let’s go back in time to an altogether simpler age. An age when Watford sometimes got easy FA Cup draws – that’s how long ago it was.

It’s December 1996, and Watford’s reward for struggling past Northampton Town in the 1st Round of the FA Cup is a home tie against Ashford Town of the Dr Marten’s Premier League. Who of the what? You may well ask. Ashford went bust in 2010, though the town now has a new club (Ashford United) which plays in what is basically the Kent county league. As for the shoemakers, they were sponsoring the Southern League at the time. All in all, a fairly straightforward tie for Kenny Jackett’s team, then sitting 8th in Division Two (that’s League One in old money).

A cursory glance at the back page of the programme reinforces the impression. That day the Hornets had Miller in goal; Gibbs and Robinson at full-back; a classic central defence pairing of Millen and Page; Bazeley and Slater on the wings; and Mooney, Noel-Williams and Penrice forming what was presumably an attacking trio, with only Palmer left to hold down the centre of midfield. That’s pretty much a classic mid- to late 90s line-up, and not that different from the one GT would take all the way to the Premier League a couple of seasons later.

Appearances can be deceptive, though. It turns out this was only Robbo’s 6th first-team game and Gifton’s 11th, while Slater had only made his Watford debut the previous week. Still, there should have been enough skill and experience to see off Ashford. Yet at half-time it was 0-0 and the atmosphere was starting to get a bit twitchy.

Enter a new hero (or so it seemed at the time). Say what you like about David Connolly (and plenty have), he’s scored goals wherever he’s played: brought on for Mooney, he scored a second-half hat-trick. Two goals for Bazeley against the tiring non-leaguers made for a slightly flattering 5-0 scoreline.

The programme is in the same garish, PC-inspired style as the one from 1997 I looked at a while ago. On the cover is Gary Porter, currently sidelined with a broken leg, while Steve Palmer gets the centre spread interview, in which he talks positively about having to play in defence, despite being a midfielder by trade. How little he knew of what lay ahead.

Also in the future lay the extensive career of Ade Akinbiyi, highlighted for scoring the winner for Norwich against Watford’s reserves in a recent game. Altogether less extensive would be the career of Richard Flash, a player so elusive that many Watford fans still refuse to believe he actually existed. Yet he’s listed here in the reserve team line-ups, so at least a few must actually have got to see him play.

As for Watford’s FA Cup run, it was ended in the 4th Round by Manchester City. Some things never change.

Telling tales

I haven’t checked, but I imagine BBC Sport’s summation of yesterday’s game was along the lines of ‘Promotion-chasing Watford thrash depleted Reading’. Every football match is a story that can be reduced to a one-line summary, of course – triumph for one side, disaster for the other, etc – but there’s always more to it than that, and this one was particularly rich in sub-plots.

The most unusual story (and thank goodness for that) was the one that led to the emotional shows of support for Nic Cruwys before and during the game; the players’ T-shirts, a giant banner, a moving round of applause during the 44th minute, more during the half-time interview with Ollie Floyd. Little that occurred during the match roused the crowd to such levels of passion.

That’s because of another odd story that probably had more bearing on the final result than any of the others; the scheduling of Reading’s FA Cup replay with Bradford on Monday evening, giving them a fixture sequence of Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Monday. In the circumstances, it wasn’t much of a surprise that, with only a couple of exceptions, the Reading line-up elicited a reaction of “Who?” from all but the most knowledgeable Hornets fans. Nor that they were no match for a Watford team coming into the game on a run of 6 wins from the past 8 games.

In that team, the big story last weekend was Fernando Forestieri’s altercation with Bakary Sako – like many Hornets, I’ve spent the week fending off the jeers of fans of other teams. So, given a rare chance to play pretty much an entire game, the big question was whether he would take it. And boy, did he. After his two exquisite assists, it felt like the whole crowd was willing him to score one for himself, and when he did, the catharsis was there for all to see. Fessi is back, and that can only be a good thing.

There are more stories, of course. Troy Deeney’s relentless progress towards becoming the first Watford player to score 20 goals three seasons running. Matty Vydra’s unerring touch when put through on goal. Heurelho Gomes’s alarming distribution. Daniel Tozser’s irritating habit of hitting simple passes approximately three times as hard as they need to be, creating problems out of nothing.

But the biggest one of all is the one we don’t know the ending to yet. Are Watford writing the story of a promotion-winning season? I have to say, it feels increasingly like they are. Slav has built a machine for winning football matches by any means necessary, using different formations and styles, showboating or slogging it out toe-to-toe with the opposition, with the end results ranging from extravagant tonkings to slim victories. It’s a real page-turner, that’s for sure.

Refreshingly early

Amid the drama of the past week, I clean forgot to celebrate Championship Survival Day. Mind you, last year it slipped my mind altogether, so I’m getting better.

You could argue that the concept isn’t relevant any more – that we’re now one of the big hitters in this division, among the favourites to go up at the start of each season. We can take it for granted that we’re not going to be relegated, can’t we?

Well, yes and no. Football is a funny old game, as they say, and circumstances can change with remarkable speed. Look at Portsmouth and Coventry City, to name but two clubs whose fans probably thought they were guaranteed Championship football or better for the forseeable future.

Yes, we may well be promoted to the Premier League this year. But until that happens, I see no harm in celebrating the fact that we are at least guaranteed a crack at it next season if it doesn’t happen this time. And the fact that we can celebrate in early February is definitely a good sign.

Nineties nostalgia, pt. 3 – Ooh ahh

I’ll be honest, I struggled to find a programme worth saving from the 1991/92 season. In the end I plumped for the January 1992 fixture against Newcastle, purely because it was one of the few games from that season that sparked any kind of memory.

A couple of years earlier, I’d done a one-year postgraduate journalism course, and one of my friends there was a bloke called John Mulvey, whose sole ambition was to write for the NME. His admirable single-mindedness had paid off, and by 1992 he was firmly established at the country’s leading weekly music magazine. What’s more, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, he had decided to bring a band he was interviewing to Vicarage Road for the Newcastle game, to add a bit of colour to the piece I suppose. This would be a much better story if I could remember who the band was, but I can’t. Presumably they were Newcastle fans, or maybe they just happened to be in Watford for the weekend.

Either way, I remember meeting John and a couple of guys from the band (and I really wish I could say they turned out to be Blur or the Stone Roses or someone) on the Vicarage Road End terrace before the game and standing with them as the Hornets dashed into a 2-0 lead in the first 10 minutes. As you do, I was rubbing my hands in anticipation of a record scoreline, but the Watford team of the early ’90s wasn’t so obliging, and the game ended 2-2.

The programme is a thin thing of 32 pages, with a rather old-fashioned look and feel. For all the bright colours, it feels very parochial, and two items epitomise this. One is a paragraph on the supporters club page about unclaimed prizes from the Junior Hornets New Year Raffle, which include Scalextric, a bottle of sherry and a half-bottle of whisky. The other, on a page of miscellaneous news, is an apology for the directions to Cambridge United printed in the previous programme; apparently “they were in fact a good route to Cambridge City!” So near, and yet so far.

Dominating the programme, as indeed he did the era in some respects, is Andy Hessenthaler, who is pictured on the cover, on the centre spread (as part of an interview) and on the news pages. He’d only been at the club since the previous September, but had quickly made an impression. It’s no surprise to learn from the interview that he did a lot of cross-country running as a boy, though I wasn’t aware that he was a self-employed ceramic tiler before Watford gave him the opportunity to play football for a living.

What else is there to say of this underwhelming era, when we were expected to get excited about a team including Trevor Putney, Peter Nicholas, Keith Waugh and Jason Drysdale? Well, one thing that’s noticeable is the number of products of the youth system who featured that season. Apart from Drysdale, Nigel Gibbs, David Holdsworth, Gary Porter and Luther Blissett (in his third and final spell at the club) all started that day, while Darren Bazeley came on as a sub and David James was missing his first game of the season. Richard Johnson had just broken into the first-team squad, Jason Solomon and Barry Ashby had played a few games, and Robert Page was a fixture in the youth team. Whatever else happened during the dog days of the 1990s, we never stopped bringing young players through into the first team. I wonder if we’ll ever see that many Academy products in the starting line-up for a league game again?

Five on five

I don’t usually comment on games I’ve just watched, and I’m risking trespassing on BHaPPY’s territory, but here are five random observations (definitely not properly thought-through thunks) on today’s tonking of a lacklustre Charlton:

1) It was good to see six former Academy players in the matchday squad, even if five of them started on the bench. It may have been largely down to an unusual set of circumstances – a number of injuries combined with Slav’s banishment of a group of assorted ne’er-do-wells from the first-team squad – but it was pleasingly reminiscent of the Mackay/Dyche era, when homegrown talent was given a chance to shine. Nice to see George Byers make his debut, too. Slav doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type, so presumably he feels the player is a serious contender for future appearances.

2) Still on the subject of homegrown players, what did Tommy Hoban do to annoy his teammates in training this week? He was the recipient of far more awkward passes today than any player has a right to receive in a month, let alone a single game.

3) When the teams were read out for the first time at about 2.15, and Juan Carlos Paredes’ name was called, there was an audible exclamation of  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” from somewhere behind me in the Rookery. An understandable reaction, given the Ecuadorian’s recent performances. He looked better going forward today – more decisive – but still made errors that might have been more expensive against a better team; getting caught in possession or out of position. He still feels like a luxury player in this league, rather than an essential selection.

4) Odion Ighalo: what can you say? He’s been getting better with every game, and today was the best I’ve seen him play. He’s developing a fantastic understanding with Troy that was demonstrated in numerous nifty interchanges of passes, and his pace, strength and speed of reaction make him a constant danger. It’s just a shame he didn’t quite manage a hat-trick.

5) Nothing’s ever perfect, and the one thing that spoiled the game for me was that period during the second half when Harry the Hornet started a Mexican wave. I’ve always hated this inane ritual, with its implication that whatever you’re watching isn’t entertaining enough and needs pepping up with some audience participation. It’s a professional football match, not a *&$%ing pantomime, and there are 22 players out there sweating their guts out. Frankly, doing a Mexican wave is a bit insulting to them. It may be that this was a one-off to celebrate Miguel Layun’s (excellent) home debut, in which case I’ll let it slide. God forbid this becomes a regular occurence at the Vic.

‘Tales From The Vicarage: The Interviews’ by Lionel Birnie & Adam Leventhal

When I heard that the third volume in the excellent Tales From The Vicarage series was going to consist solely of interviews, I can’t pretend I wasn’t a little disappointed. I’m obviously a little biased, having contributed a mini-memoir of my Watford-supporting life to the first volume, but I’ve also enjoyed the other personal pieces in both the previous books – not to mention Olly Wicken’s highly original short stories.

What’s more, I have my reservations about the whole concept of interviews with footballers and football managers, as I explained in my review of the recent TFTV live event. A whole book of them sounded as if it might risk being a bit, well, monotonous.

Lionel Birnie and Adam Leventhal were obviously aware of this risk, and have done their best to vary the style and pace of the 11 interviews in the book. Thus, the Sean Dyche interview is divided into themed segments (‘The Man’, ‘The Player’, etc); Adam’s encounter with Paul Furlong is interspersed with vignettes of his 14-year-old self and his hero-worship of the striker; the Ray Lewington chapter is presented entirely in the manager’s own words as he tells the stories behind the major milestones of his eventful reign.

In the days when albums were the yardstick by which musicians were judged, it was said that you should always lead with your strongest song, and Lionel and Adam have heeded that advice. The Sean Dyche interview kicks off the book and it’s a riot. Having seen Dyche at both the live TFTV events, I sort of knew what to expect, but he’s still full of surprises – I’m still struggling to reconcile what I know of the man with his newly-revealed passion for high-quality footwear. Adam’s interview reveals a great deal about a likeable, witty but also deeply serious man who, if there’s any justice, will manage England one day.

The other highlights for me were interviews with players I haven’t heard much from before: Micah Hyde, who – among other things – gives his perspective on the issues facing prospective black managers (of which he is one), and David and Dean Holdsworth, identical twins who prove to be anything but in person.

There are no duds, though I get the impression that Ronnie Rosenthal wasn’t quite as forthcoming as some of the others. Then again, his role in Hornet history is a fairly minor one, albeit important at the time. If I have a gripe (and it’s a trivial one), it’s that too many of those featured had overlapping careers at Vicarage Road. The introduction claims that these stories span 30 years, but the Holdsworths are the only ones featured who played in the 1980s (both making their debut in 1988), and then it was another few years before Furlong and Hyde appeared.

As a journalist myself, I know as well as anyone that arranging an interview isn’t quite as straightforward as picking up the phone and saying “fancy a chat?” But if there are to be future volumes of the TFTV series – and I hope there are – then I’d like to hear from a few personalities from the 70s, or even earlier. There’s one name in particular that crops up in every interview with a player who came through the youth system in the late 70s and early 80s (and the Holdsworths tell a hilarious anecdote about him here): it’s about time we heard from Tom Walley in his own words.

Alternate title

A bonus for New Year’s Day – 10 Smiths songs that could equally well have served as the title for that last entry:

I want the one I can’t have
I started something I couldn’t finish
What difference does it make?
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before

Nowhere fast

You just haven’t earned it yet, baby
These things take time
There is a light that never goes out

Please, please, please let me get what I want

Some girls are bigger than others

How soon is now?

A new year has begun, but the situation for Watford fans is pretty much the same as it has been ever since the Pozzos arrived. Essentially, we are the footballing equivalent of a lovesick teenager, desperate to win over the object of our affection – glamorous, certainly, but not completely unobtainable. In theory, at least.

Seen in this light, the play-off final against Palace was the school end-of-year dance where she arrived as our date, but left with someone else. Last season she wasn’t really interested, despite a few promising moments. And this year we’re back on the rollercoaster, hope alternating with despair.

So the Wolves game last week was that day you bump into her in the street in the rain, can’t think of anything to say, and end up looking wet and foolish. The Cardiff game a few days later was the school trip where, after a slow start, you remember how to be clever and charming and she laughs at your jokes (four times), and suddenly all is right with the world again.

(To extend this simile into the near future, the FA Cup tie against Chelsea on Sunday is the posh dance where you’ve somehow been paired with the richest and most beautiful girl in school, and which is almost certain to end in your complete humiliation.)

Like any lovelorn sixth-former, we spend our spare time agonising over the details that might make all the difference. Should we wear our snazziest shirt to the party on Saturday night, or the smart but understated one? 3-5-2 or 4-3-3? Go all out to impress her or play it cool? Vydra or Ighalo? Decisions, decisions.

Ultimately, all we can do is keep up the pursuit, hoping that the stars will align and we will achieve our heart’s desire. And, just to complicate matters, there’s a dark suspicion at the back of our minds that if we do succeed, the reality won’t live up to the anticipation – but let’s pursue that thought another day. New Year’s Day is nothing if not a time to be hopeful.