Those weren’t the days

For the past couple of years I’ve been training my 11-year-old niece, Susie, to be an apprentice Hornet. She gamely froze her little backside off at the Vic last season during the 4-0 win against Huddersfield (featuring that goal), and on Saturday she enjoyed the Ipswich game – I think it helped that we were sitting directly behind the 1881, so the atmosphere was good. Anyway, she’s keen to go again.

Her parents have no interest in football, but they do live a stone’s throw from Stamford Bridge, so they keep an eye on Chelsea’s affairs. The other week, when I was round there for dinner, my sister-in-law anxiously brought up a story she’d read about Chelsea fans going on the rampage in Paris en route to their Champions League game with PSG. So Susie naturally asked why anyone would do that, and soon we were trying to explain the concept of hooliganism to her.

Inevitably, she eventually asked how much football-related violence I’d actually seen. For those of us of a certain age, this is the equivalent of ‘What did you do in the war, Grandad?’ I automatically played it down, but afterwards I found myself trying to remember what I had actually witnessed. This is what I remember:

• Standing on the Vicarage Road End terrace once when everyone suddenly started moving away from the central section, because the away fans had apparently ‘taken’ it
• The home game against West Ham early in our first season back in Division Two, when the Hammers fans invaded the pitch and police horses were used to clear them off
• My one and only trip to Kenilworth Road, when we emerged after the game to find bricks and bottles raining down on us and had to leg it back to the car

And that’s pretty much it, to be honest.

Much more prevalent, though was the sense of threat that accompanied football matches in the 70s and 80s – especially away from home. It meant that, on visits to grounds like Upton Park and Highbury, we tied our scarves around our waists, under our coats, and didn’t get them out until safely inside the home end; that, on trips to the Midlands, we didn’t dare talk too loudly on the way to the ground, for fear that our accents would betray us to the local psychos; and that we spent a lot of time being escorted to and from grounds by files of grim-faced policemen.

It all seems a long time ago now, in this age of Champions League pomp and circumstance and Sky’s relentless promotion of football as fun for all the family. But the habits acquired in those years have never really worn off. When I went to see the Hornets play at the New Den a couple of weeks ago (travelling on public transport), I didn’t dare wear my Watford shirt or scarf – just in case...

Meanwhile, in the past couple of years, I’ve had a couple of nerve-wracking train journeys in carriages packed with Palace fans where the sense of menace has been palpable, and it felt as if certain individuals just needed the slightest provocation to turn nasty.

And now I read that Watford fans visiting Loftus Road on Monday were subjected to 80s-style police escorts and searches. I was going to say that I hope that, if Susie does go on to become a football fan, her experience of matchdays is free from even the threat of violence. But, even after all these years, I’m not that optimistic.

Telling tales

Back in the late 80s, I regularly attended meetings of the London branch of the (now defunct) Football Supporters’ Association. It was a forum for debating the issues of the day and featured guest speakers from the football world.

At some point in the proceedings, one particular member would invariably stick his hand up and ask a question pertaining to Dulwich Hamlet, who he supported with a rare passion. (I seem to remember that he wore a club scarf, rosette and badges to these meetings.) Indeed, he didn’t seem to be interested in any footballing issue except insofar as if affected Dulwich Hamlet.

Most memorably, he angrily inquired of a senior executive from the BBC why the classified results on Grandstand (readers under 40, ask your parents) didn’t include the Isthmian League Division 1 South, or wherever Dulwich were plying their trade at the time. The chap from the BBC gave a perfectly reasonable answer, but Mr Dulwich wasn’t to be pacified, and it took some time to get the meeting back on track.

He was an extreme example, but I’ve come to realise over the years that most of us football fans have our hobby horse – the issue that we care so passionately about that we lose all sense of proportion when talking about it. For some, it may be the lack of attention given to their club; for others, a particular player, manager or referee. Mine, as you can tell by looking at the Labels column to the right, is Lloyd Doyley: specifically, the persistent failure of the world in general, and successive Watford managers in particular, to recognise the supreme quality of his defensive play.

Bearing this tendency in mind, anyone organising an event where football fans come into contact with real people from the football world runs the risk of it being hijacked by one or more of these single-issue obsessives. On my way to Tales From The Vicarage Live at the Watford Palace Theatre a couple of weeks ago, I was a little nervous as it how it might pan out. I had no concerns about Luther Blissett, a gold-plated club legend, and Sean Dyche is generally well thought of. Aidy Boothroyd was another matter entirely, though. Would he be booed as soon as he walked on stage? Heckled, even? (“Where’s your Plan B, Boothroyd?”)

I needn’t have worried on that score; Aidy got as warm an ovation as his fellow panellists, and there was no heckling. But some of the questions directed at him in the second half of the evening had a definite edge to them, and threatened to cast a chill over the benevolent warmth that characterised the show as a whole. It’s a tribute to his self-deprecating charm that the atmosphere remained light and good-humoured, even when discussing the catastrophic signing of Nathan Ellington. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that he still talks a better game than he plays – a theory that his career at Watford, and his subsequent downward spiral through the divisions, would appear to support. It’s a shame that Adam Leventhal never got round to asking him, as promised, about his new job in charge of England’s Under-20s.

Adam’s role as MC was central to the success of the evening. I’d previously only seen him sat behind a desk on Sky Sports News, trying to look excited about the latest half-arsed football transfer rumours, but here he was the perfect chat show host, funny and inclusive and acting as a sympathetic bridge between the fans in the stalls and the club legends on the stage.

Others will have made extensive notes on the content of the evening, and a fortnight later, I can’t recall many details of the conversations on stage. A few things stick in the memory, though. For instance, Luther’s obvious, and ongoing, obsession with scoring goals, as revealed in a series of anecdotes. (And I never knew that he won the Golden Boot as the top scorer in the whole of Europe in our first season in the First Division. In my defence, it was my first year at university, and in those pre-internet days it was easier to miss such items of incidental football news.)

Aidy, as mentioned, was funny and charming throughout. But the star of the show was Sean Dyche, who should seriously consider a career in entertainment if football management doesn’t work out for him. (Though I’m pretty sure it will.) Drily witty and quietly serious by turns, he was an enthralling presence on stage, and I doubt there was a single person in the audience that night who didn’t leave thinking more highly of him than they had done before.

I arrived at the Palace not sure what to expect, but TFTV Live turned out to be a joy from start to finish.   Who knew that a live football chat show could be such fun?

You can prove anything with statistics

The excellent news was announced this week that Lloyd Doyley’s contract has been extended by another year. The only puzzling thing is why the club has kept offering him one-year contracts for the past few seasons, rather than tying him down to a longer deal. Maybe they just take him for granted.

They, and we, shouldn’t. Recently I came across a section of the club website that I hadn’t looked at properly before, the Stats page, and the figures for central defenders make interesting reading:

Angella - 35 games, 42 fouls, 6 yellow cards, 1 red card
Cassetti - 32 games, 35 fouls, 8 yellow, 0 red
Ekstrand - 30 games, 27 fouls, 10 yellow, 0 red
Doyley - 23 games, 6 fouls, 1 yellow, 0 red

I’d say that fouls and yellow cards are a pretty good yardstick by which to measure a defender’s skill: after all, if they get their positioning right and time their tackles correctly, they don’t commit fouls and don’t get booked. Now I rate all four of these players highly, but the stats clearly show who the best defender is. Angella commits an average of 1.2 fouls a game and gets booked once every six games: Cassetti has a similar fouls/game average, 1.1, but gets booked once every four matches: and Ekstrand is on 0.9 fouls a game, but one booking every three (which isn’t going to make him popular with the manager – sorry, Head Coach).

Now look at Lloyd: 0.2 fouls a game (or, to put it another way, one every five games) and just one yellow all season. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why he is indisputably the best defender at the club (and has been for years). Angella may score more goals, Cassetti may have a better beard, Ekstrand may speak better Swedish (okay, I’m struggling here), but if you want someone to actually stop the opposition scoring goals, Lloyd’s should be the first name on the teamsheet every week.

Confused? You will be

Yesterday afternoon, as I watched that most paradoxical of footballing events, a dull thrashing (one bloke near me actually nodded off towards the end of the first half), it occurred to me that this has been a highly contradictory and confusing season for Watford fans. Consider the following:

• We’ve scored six goals once, five once, four twice and three four times, and yet there have been long stretches when it was hard to see where the next score was going to come from.
• Conversely, we’ve conceded three or more goals eight times, yet the defence features some of our strongest players. (Angella, Cassetti, Doyley and Pudil will surely all feature strongly in the Player of the Season awards.)
• We’re not a remotely nasty or violent team, yet we’ve had four players sent off, and I read a couple of weeks ago that we’d been awarded more yellow cards than any other team in the Championship.
• In the autumn, we were invincible away, but couldn’t buy a win at home. Now the opposite is the case.

Obviously, some of these patterns can be attributed to the change of manager halfway through the season. The high turnover of players can’t help, either. Yesterday’s two debuts took the total number of players used this season up to 35 – that’s three whole teams worth, plus change. Poor Troy Deeney has had to try to forge a working partnership with Forestieri, Acuna, Fabbrini, Ranegie, Park and Anya, and life’s too short to try to list all the combinations of players who’ve been used in midfield.

Even here, there’s a contradiction: despite the riches of our squad, the 18 players who featured on the pitch and the bench against Barnsley actually picked themselves – thanks to injuries, suspensions and loans, the only other member of the first-team squad who was available for selection was third-choice goalie Gary Woods. Hence the naming of a bench featuring two midfielders and four central defenders. Against more demanding opposition, we could easily have come unstuck.

Perversely, it reminded me of the days when Sean Dyche was in charge – when money was so tight that the team more or less picked itself, and when promising youngsters got a chance to show what they could do in the first team, gaining valuable experience in the process. (In the current squad, Ross Jenkins still ranks third in the list of first-team appearances, even if he has been effectively declared a non-person by being denied a squad number.) Compare and contrast the fate of Uche Ikpeazu, so short of opportunities to play football that he’s been sent on loan to Crewe, who then complained that he’s not fit enough.

Where am I going with all this? I’m not entirely sure. Like I say, I’m confused. If there was an end to the relentless shuffling of the pack in sight, the emergence of a settled first team which then, carefully augmented in the close season, could make a decent challenge for promotion next year, then I’d be happy. But, as Matt Rowson pointed out recently over on BHaPPY, an equally likely scenario is that a large tranche of the current squad will disappear in the summer, to be replaced by a fresh batch of undoubtedly talented players who won’t necessarily adjust immediately to the championship. And then the whole confusing merry-go-round will start again.

How the other half live

When it was confirmed that Watford would be playing Manchester City in the FA Cup 4th Round, I didn’t even consider going to the game. It’s a long way to go to get tonked, as I told friends who asked if I was going to make the trip.

Then a client at work, whose firm is one of City’s sponsors, invited me to attend and partake of the full corporate hospitality experience. (She didn’t actually know I was a Watford fan – she just invited the team she works with.) Suddenly travelling to Manchester didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

I know, I know. But it’s amazing what the offer of free booze and a comfy seat does to your scruples.

So at about one o’clock yesterday afternoon, I found myself walking into the executive entrance of the Etihad, past ranks of plebs (as I temporarily thought of them) who were standing in the rain, cordoned off by crash barriers, watching a bloke perform ball tricks.

Lunch in the Mancunian Suite was very pleasant; good company, fantastic food courtesy of one of Jamie Oliver’s franchises, a few glasses of Rioja. As kick-off approached and I settled into my padded seat, I was convinced that the pineapple parfait would prove to be the highlight of the day.

That’s the thing about football: you never know when it’s going to catch you unawares. As the drama of the first half unfolded, my main concern was to keep my mouth shut. I just about managed to keep my goal celebrations down to a private fist pump, but I would have loved to be with the rest of the Hornets fans way off to my right, singing and chanting in glee. But in case I needed an incentive to keep quiet, City fanatic and former world champion boxer Ricky Hatton was sitting three seats away, and I sensed it wouldn’t be a good idea to irritate him.

Half-time brought more booze and food (a small portion of chicken curry and rice served in a mug – very odd), and the chance to observe the perplexity of a room full of wealthy City fans who clearly weren’t used to their side being 2-0 down – to anyone, let alone a no-mark Championship team. Then it was back outside for the inevitable denouement, for I was sure our lead couldn’t last another 45 minutes. (Mind you, to show that the fatalism of the football fan is all-pervasive, someone asked Hatton if City were going to get back into the game: “There’s more chance of me making a comeback,” he said.)

As the game entered its final 10 minutes, I was beginning to dare to dream. It’s the hope that kills you... Well, we all know what happened. I managed to applaud politely as those around me roared in relief as City’s third and fourth goals went in (it was around this time that someone, presumably a fellow Hornet, was hauled out of the executive seating near us and firmly ejected, gesticulating wildly as he went), and then it was back inside for a final drink and a dainty little cake, before we finally left our luxury accommodation to queue in the rain for a taxi back to the station.

Befuddled with booze and brooding on shattered dreams, I didn’t enjoy the journey back to Euston. At least I wasn’t in the same carriage as my colleagues, who had to spend two hours in the company of some boisterous Brighton fans determined to celebrate their win at Port Vale as noisily as possible.

I’m glad I went, and I hope it will prove to be the case that I witnessed the turning point of Watford’s season. The corporate hospitality experience is fun, but only as an occasional treat. (I’ve done it a few times before, at grounds as diverse as White Hart Lane and Griffin Park.) If you can’t shout and sing in support of your team, watching football isn’t half as much fun.

‘Tales From The Vicarage, Volume II’, edited by Lionel Birnie

I never got around to reviewing the first volume of Tales From The Vicarage, mainly because I was a contributor, and thus somewhat lacking in objectivity. Such scruples are unnecessary this time, as I’m not in Volume II, so I’m free to give it both barrels.

Only kidding. Like its predecessor, Volume II is a joyous read for any Watford fan; 13 pieces that cover a range of topics related to our beloved club, all long enough to engage without overstaying their welcome.

Although it’s a miscellany, a couple of themes emerge. One, unsurprisingly, is Watford’s links with Italy. Paolo Tomaselli’s guide to the Pozzos, including interviews with key figures in the regime, is essential reading, and worth the price of the book on its own for its insights into the way the club is likely to develop over the next few years. Someone should send a copy to every journalist and pundit who’s lazily expressed the view that “the Pozzos were Everything That Was Wrong With English Football”.

That’s a quote from the second Italian-themed article, editor Lionel Birnie’s account of Gianfranco Zola’s season in charge of Watford. It’s impassioned and well crafted, though for me it’s too soon after the event to need recapping. The true significance of 2012/13 will take a few years to become clear.

Maybe that time lag explains the proliferation of pieces on the 1990s, the other main theme of the anthology. My favourite of these is Ian Grant’s characteristically droll survey of the ‘doldrums’ of the mid-90s, embroidered with his trademark gift for metaphor. Take this one:

“Games against Luton in the nineties had a private, depressing darkness about them, utterly incomprehensible to the outside world, like a squabble over half a can of cheap lager between two street drinkers descending into squalid, disgraceful wrestling in a suspiciously-coloured puddle.”

I wish I’d written that.

He bookends his story with an impressionistic account of the day we came out of the darkness, the 1999 Play-Off Final victory against Bolton, and his BHaPPY co-editor Matt Rowson provides a complementary piece on the night that made it possible, the semi-final second leg at St Andrew’s. He evokes the tension of the penalty shoot-out beautifully – it took me right back to the pub in Central London where I watched the game with 100-odd Hornets fans, and ended up hugging total strangers.

Also on the 90s theme, Nigel Gibbs picks his Watford ‘dream team’ from those he played with or coached at Vicarage Road. There are no surprises in his selections, but his insights and stories are interesting. One of his selections, Kevin Phillips, gets a whole chapter to himself as Lionel Birnie  interviews the striker who ended our Premiership dreams in May. All these years (and clubs) on, it’s salutory to be reminded of the strength of character that took him from part-time football for Baldock to Watford, and eventually the England team.

Away from the 90s, Mike Walters’ memories of his trip to Sofia in 1983 to watch Watford in the UEFA Cup inspired me to watch the grainy footage of the goals on YouTube, though I didn’t really need the extended quotes from Graham Taylor and Neil Price that bulk out the story.

I’m not going to go through every piece, but I can’t end without mentioning Olly Wicken. As in Volume I, he provides the only piece of fiction. His tale of a deceased Watford supporter who ends up in a conflicted Hornet Heaven is surprisingly thought-provoking, asking difficult questions about what we, as fans, take from our club’s past and want for its future. It’s also both touching and extremely funny, with gags that creep up on you unawares. I particularly enjoyed this one:

“He had to make do with thinking the word ‘bugger’ time and time again in the surrounding silence. It felt like sitting in the Upper Rous.”

If that made you smile, buy this book. You won’t regret it.

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