Saturday 13th January
After he’d shown me the corpse of a rat on the pavement (last week it was the skeleton of some animal I guessed had been a fox), Joss and I cycled down Ebury Way to the game (it was no ‘match’ today) and got in a couple of minutes late. There are certainly no regrets or a feeling that we might have missed anything. The first half was lamentable: we stood off them all over the park, allowing them to pass around us like it was a training match. Any hope that last week would provide new confidence died quickly. The reds put two in the goal in front of us though the first looked like it involved a foul on our keeper Foster. As the stand I was in collectively booed the players off at half time, we were as dead as that rodent.
It has been said that the Play-Off Final was won in the tunnel. One wonders if this game was too. Liverpool came off the back of a 6-3 midweek home defeat to a second-string youthful Arsenal team and though they didn’t shine, they looked determined. “I heard Rafa Benitez (Liverpool’s manager) is leaving Liverpool to work for Michael Jackson…because of his capacity to manage to get 11 kids to come and spank you at home.” It’s a shit joke but it is worse for Watford.
Betty has talked sometimes about “the Watford way” and this means primarily energy and work rate. What was lacking today was the “belief” that I have seen in matches, even our 4-0 mauling at Stamford Bridge. There were no yellow cards because there was no “heart”/“desire”/“soul”/“grit”. It’s hard to define. We tried harder in the second half from where I sat, and Jordan Stewart powered a long curling shot against the bar from about 30 yards but this after we’d let in a third at the beginning of the half. Yeah, it was even deader soon after we’d dragged ourselves back out.
A few minutes before the end Joss asked if we should leave, and we went to buy programmes and a T-shirt for me and jacket for him in the club shop. When we got back he joined Phil in the bedroom on the X-Box, I had a cuppa and cycled over to see Trevor, Sarah and Kasey in South Oxhey. I think Kasey is getting used to me a bit so she didn’t cry ALL the time I was holding her. Borrowed an eighties Name That Tune game and bought a Family Railcard at Harrow & Wealdstone in preparation for the away games ahead.
If we play like this next week at Aston Villa, our season has gone some way other than the Watford one.
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