Wem-ber-ley

It's not the same, going to an FA Cup Semi alone; the boy's in China and neither of the friends I asked wanted to join me.

Big games like this are always nervy. However thrilling the neutral sees it as, those who really care can't enjoy it in the same way.

Until it's over.

Watford had beaten Woking and QPR on the way to this semi-final. Wolves had disposed of Liverpool and Man U. They were rightly favourites and were 2-0 up after 61 minutes.

So Deulofeu's dramatic cameo as a second-half sub will go down in Hornet history. His first goal - in front of us - was sublime. And after our legend of a captain - Troy Deeney - was fouled and converted the penalty, Deulofeu scored again in extra time. An amazing comeback - the best in post-war history, apparently.

We have made our second ever FA Cup Final. I'll be there again. And I'll be able to take the younger Watford Boy, who'll be delighted. I'll enjoy it more, too.

Unbeaten in seven

Watford have not lost since the day of my birthday party when my 'Boro friend John came and delighted in seeing his team triumph 1-0 at home. It had been a mixed handful of games before that, with wins punctuating away defeats in "the most competitive league" in the country (TM). Since then, however, it has been mostly draws that have kept us unbeaten and as a consequence we have hardly moved in terms of relative league position. On Boxing Day we went one up but were held by Cardiff on Malky's first return. Clearly, if we keep this up, we will finish exactly where I predicted. I've still yet to go this season, though. Mediocrity rarely felt so rewarding.

Round up and away

After a dismal home performance against Scunthorpe, which we lost 2-0, it was even harder to convince myself to return to Vicarage Road on my birthday and final whole day in the UK for another year or so. Truth is though that this Watford Boy lost his passion for the matches a while before we left in 2008 and the sole reason for my continued attendance is a bit of time with my nephew.

Nevertheless, with the Hornets involved in a “thrilling” 3-2 away defeat (Portsmouth) and having beaten Ipswich at home in a game I did not get to (rain and broken bike stopped play), I was able to put aside the mauling at Derby and hope for a timely gift from the Golden Boys in the match against Nottingham Forest.

Jordan Mutch provided one after three minutes and my optimism held out another quarter of an hour before the Reds equalised. Another dull game finished all square but at least it was not as excruciating as the previous home match. A second “thrilling” 3-2 defeat (at Selhurst Park) since then has seen us slide into thirteenth and though the number may not bode well, most fans would take that as a final position, given a choice.

Eight hours ahead of GMT as I now am, many of the scores for the rest of the season will be looked up after a night’s sleep. This blog has become less a football diary and more a travel journal. Until the younger Watford Boy takes over the match reports, it will remain so. In the meantime, I cross my fingers for today’s trip to Turf Moor and hope for the fans’ sake that we can win a thriller again.

¡Phew!

After a run of five without a win, which included the humiliation of giving soon-to-be-relegated Peterborough their first away win of the season (and the double over us since I last wrote about the Horns), Watford beat Ipswich at Vicarage Road on Tuesday to relieve a little of the fear of relegation that has deepened since I may have counted chickens at the end of 2009.

My nephew Joss will only have seen us win three times in 2010 (all home Tuesday night games, against Bristol City and Sheffield United too) but I haven´t had a text report from him now for ages. I think he needs some nagging. It also looks less likely that I will be back in the UK to shout on the Golden Boys before the end of the season.

Instead, I intend to compensate by going to see a match in Quito on Easter Sunday when the present league leaders from this beautiful colonial city take on second-placed Barcelona (de Guyaquil), who I will be supporting because their kit is the same colours as Watford´s (they have quite a name, too).

Schadenfraude too

I have been gone too long. After two months of insufflation in La Paz, we have all but completed two weeks of volunteering at animal refuge La Senda Verde near Coroico in Bolivia (the website will be improved in the near future). In the meantime, Watford have sold all their best players (Tommy Smith eventually went to Portsmouth and was followed by a petulant Mike Williamson, Tamas Priskin went to Ipswich, Jobi McAnuff and Grzegorz Rasiak followed Brendan Rogers to Reading). The latter two players combined to put Reading ahead in our Saturday showdown but Danny Graham continued his scoring form (six already in nine matches) to get us a point at the Madjeski. There is great satisfaction at seeing Ipswich and Reading poach from us and now struggle in the bottom four while we sit in a far better-than-expected seventh (Newcastle are threatening to run away with it), which makes us closer in position to bottom-of-the-Premiership Portsmouth than to either of our championship rivals.
We got old-boy Heidar Helguson back and he scored twice in a recent 3-3 "thriller" with Leicester and although now injured, I´d back him to beat Saturday´s red-carded Nathan Ellington in the goals tally even if H didn´t find the net again all year. Coventry at home tonight and if we can send them back pointless to whence they came, we might even nick a play-off position. Okay, okay: it is early days.

Fans` Favourite

Tommy Smith is a shoo-in for Player of the Season (again). Today the Horns won 3-2 at Coventry, Smith getting his sixteenth goal of the season while Tamas Priskin scored his thirteenth and Grzegorz Rasiak netted his seventh. This was our first victory after two defeats and two draws previous to those. Brendan Rodgers has proved himself more than a worthy successor for Aidy Boothroyd.

Cervezas Artesanales

I have been able to try beer from five different local breweries here in Bariloche and there are a few I have yet to partake of. Had Yeska in bottles from the supermarket, have been to the Antares bar and tried small glasses of each of their 8 beers (mine´s the Imperial Stout), tried a Diuka stout in a "natural comida" restaurant visited the Linea Sur microbrewery last night and popped into the Blest cevezeria today, though Jun suffered from her (less than) half a frambuesa.

Meanwhile, WFC conceded another after-hours penalty at Cardiff on Wednesday and went down 2-1 but got a point at Ipswich yesterday in a goalless draw. Still 16th, which I´ll drink to.

90 + 7

In our recent season in the Premiership, Watford conceded the latest goal of the entire season (96th minute) in their away game at Bolton to lose the match. Today, the ref has gone a minute better and Sheffield Wednesday have equalised at the Vic three minutes from the ton. What with the phantom goal against Reading, surely the Horns have a claim to be the unluckiest side in the land?
The younger Watford Boy - and doubtless thousands others - saw it differently. His text, which was as succinct as ever, in its entirety: "2-2 ref not fit 2 ref". Anyway, Derby lost 4-2 so we moved up a place in the table on goal difference. It`s not all bad...

Two more steps...

No text from the younger Watford Boy to let me know last night so I checked the BBC today to see we had got another three home points in our relegation clash with Forest. Tanas Priskin and Grzegorz Rasiak again did the business and, unlike last season, it is the home record this year that is so much better than the teams around us. 2-1 and another place up in the table.

Two steps forward...

Joss texted me to let me know the Horns had triumphed at the Valley. After Don Cowie had got his second goal for WFC, Charlton scored twice to be ahead at the break but second half goals from Grzegorz Rasiak and Tamas Priskin must give us confidence for the home game against Notts Forest.

Bariloche

Yesterday we went looking for a short-term let (33 days) in Bariloche, in Argentina´s Lake District, where Jun will take formal Spanish lessons and I will study less formally (at first at least). We found a beautiful little place with a view of the lake (Lago Nahuel Huapi) and are paying the equivalent of half of a hotel´s price. The town (of 100,000 or so) is managable and we went to a cool bar last night called "The Map Room", with loads of framed maps (go figure) on the wall. It was an eclectic selection that deserves further perusal. There are also a healthy number of microbreweries in town that merit taste-testing. Finally, I hope to do some paragliding if the cost is not prohibitive.
On England´s south coast, Watford lost 2-1 at Plymouth (Tommy Smith scored again) and despite their recent run, will drop back to nineteenth as Argyle and Nottingham Forest rise above them (though each has played two more games). We go to bottom club Charlton on Saturday (who lost at home to Doncaster today, how times have changed) and host Forest a week today. Seems there is plenty of opportunity for teams to save themselves, though the Addicks seem doomed, nine points off second-bottom and eleven from safety.

Three on the trot

We arrived in El Bolson, Argentina, yesterday. Our Bible, Lonely Planet, describes it as Hippie Heaven (or something along those lines) but apart from a market that is not so different from any traveller-oriented one, I can't see why. The mountain setting, though, is breathtaking. Planned to leave tomorrow for Bariloche and Spanish lessons. That plan may yet change. Think we are both happy to be in short sleeves and open shoes again after the cold of Patagonia.
At the Vic, Watford beat Palace for the second time in 2009, winning 2-0 for the third game in a row and easing our relegation fears still further. Another new boy, Don Cowie, scored one and assisted with the other. With so many of the thirteen remaining games against teams right around us, home wins will ensure our safety.

New Watford Boy

Waiting at Esquel bus terminal to take Ruta 40 south after we had hitched into Argentina the day before my last entries, I got talking to a Californian, Clay, who is a Chelsea fan. We chewed the football fat and compared travellers' tales and spent some time together in El Chalten too (when we arrived some 26 hours later). The trekking there to the Fitz Roy range was good but Jun was ill and pissed off that I went out for a few drinks so we left the following day for El Calafate.
Clay caught up before we took advantage of the town's access to Perito Moreno glacier, probably the single most impressive sight of my travels so far, so we did that together too. WFC have a new fan (second-team status) but I have not rethought my views on Chelsea. His new allegiance coincided with important away victories for both sides, Tamas Priskin and new boy Mike Williamson both scoring as we won 2-0 at Blackpool.
We got to Peurto Natales the same day and met up with our Chilean friend Jackie, who has taken a holiday to head south from the capital. I travelled with her and her friend Ximena to Parque Nacional Paine for an eight-and-a-half-hour trek that took in the towers there. Unfortunately, that was all I managed, leaving the same evening with a temperature and a nose that wouldn't stop dripping. We head north tomorrow.

Tommy Smith

He gets the ball, he scores a goal, Tommy Tommy Smith. The Horns beat the Swans at the Vic 2-0 tonight and moved out of the relegation zone with games in hand over the teams around us. If they can keep the home form....

Living the dream

Waiting out fifteen and a half hours in a small town for a long bus journey, we had time to see if our computer could be sorted (no), buy a mobile, a hat and a top to replace the WFC hoodie I left on a bus a week ago, dawdle over dinner, do twelve laps of the centre, walk up a hill and down again and sit down in the same park twice. This is the second time I´ve been on the internet, and if this place weren´t closing in an hour, I´d be here for four.
As we cut up boiled eggs for rolls in the park with nowhere else to go at about one o´clock, Jun commented that we were "living the dream". We laughed about that. Having hitchhiked into Argentina yesterday, we can´t really complain about how things are going but I missed out on the chance to white-water raft one of the world´s best rivers (Futaleufu) because I chose a "family company" and we were unable to climb a volcano in Pucon because of the weather.
Still, mustn´t grumble. We´ve seen sealions in Valdivia, penguins in Ancud and scenery to sit down and contemplate throughout the Andes regions. My Spanish is beginning to improve at last and Jun is learning too. We trekked to the top of an Andean peak (a small one) two days ago and head into deepest Patagonia when our bus leaves this depot at two in the morning.
In Watford, Joss was unable to go to the Chelsea FA Cup match (I guess his dad hadn´t sussed that he needed to buy tickets before a certain point). Tamas Priskin put us ahead in the second half, but Nicolas Anelka got a hattrick for them. A home league game was postponed and we still sit third bottom and in real relegation trouble. Did I mention I lost my WFC hoodie?

Almost Famous

Monday we climbed the “incense burner” (557 metres above sea level) and at the top, first a solitary guy and later an excited group of students asked if they could have their photos taken with me. One of the males of the group commented that I looked like David Beckham (I don’t remember the glasses and earrings phase either).

Tuesday we headed in the same approximate direction to Yuanmingyuan to see the ruins of the Imperial Palace an Anglo-French force destroyed in 1860. Again I was invited to be in a couple of photos. Later, we met up with a friend from London, Maria, who planned this coincidental trip last year and we met her brother and a couple of her cousins, one of whom is David Lee, a Hong Kong movie and TV star. At the restaurant where we ate they got out the camera and took his picture and requested an autograph, then inexplicably asked me to sign too (later I wished I’d signed Tony Blair). At the bar of the five star hotel we went to later, people stopped talking and pointed (not for me anymore) and one awestruck girl came over just to say hello. Jun was pretty starstruck too.
A text from Joss indicated that Richard Lee is making a bit of a name for himself as a penalty saver, performing the feat again tonight as Watford squandered a 2-0 half-time lead to draw 2-2 at home to Cardiff. JJ and Hoskins scored but Priskin got himself sent off (again) and we were apparently under the cosh from then till the end.

First Impressions of a Future

Towards the end of the eight-hour BA flight (with movies on demand and tasty veggie meals), we flew over hundreds of miles of chocolate-coloured mountains, which seemed from above like a combination of millions of toblerone and a vast crumpled blanket. Breathtaking. We had a very short carousel wait for the packs we need and the cases of presents I lugged and were then out of the enormous Beijing terminal onto an equally outsized expressway to the city centre, replete with the obligatory “bad” drivers, including a police car straddling lanes as he spoke on his mobile. Before we reached the forest of fluted high rises, toasting rapid growth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of greenery lining both airport transit tracks and the Olympic-sign-blazoned route to the heart of the world’s economic beast, even spying a mountain-biking group in full lycra get-up between the trees.

Not long after I spotted my first foreigner (also cycling), we were at “Convenient Hotel” waiting for our room (we got there before check-out time and the place was busy, as an angry rant from a turned-away almost-guest attested). I decided to wander down a smaller road and passed two street/communal toilets (many homes didn’t/still don’t have their own) before settling on a likely place for a haircut. As I smiled at the hairdresser, she offered “massa massa” but I gestured that I wanted my head shaved. This was gigglingly achieved and then the offer of a massage re-emerged as hands stroked my groin, lips were flexed and I was shown a bed behind a curtain. “Ni bai” (200) was the price but my refusal lead to a halving. Excuses were made but not understood and I got away with nothing more than a blush and an overpriced cut (about £2.50).

After a rest when the room became available, we ate tofu, noodles, mushrooms, spinach and slices of an unidentified root vegetable from an enormous hotpot bowl and I washed it down with Yanjing beer from the bottle, forgoing the use of the shrink-wrapped crockery. Then we taxied it to a bar area near a lake that translates as “back sea”, joined in ti zhenzu (keepy-uppie with a coloured and weighted shuttlecock) and people-watched in a few locations. One of the main points of discussion was the changes that have led to the sort of prices some of the places could charge and Jun put it down to the number of foreigners and the endemic corruption. With absolutely no evidence, I was inclined to believe that at least some of the young locals we saw enjoying their Saturday night had legitimately earned large amounts in the boom this country has enjoyed.

We got back and our forty-hour day was iced with the news that Watford had won their first away match of the season, 3-0 at Southampton. Tamas Priskin scored two and Richard Lee made a penalty-save double. Result!

Throwing away love

Thursday 16th October 2008

Even my final(ish) game (home against Preston two Saturdays ago) couldn’t inspire me. Watford had already lost two away matches in a row (2-1 at Sheffield United and 3-2 at Burnley) and I was hoping that I’d shout my part in a thriller. Although Joss and I had missed the first two goals this time - three already in the short bit-season we have together - I was unable, despite the assurances of the guy behind me that there were more goals to come in a game where the defences were apparently asleep, to do my job as a supporter.
Ennui/dread? Past/present? Either way I was tense. The past has been perfect, the future not simple (thank you Carrie from one of the few episodes I’ve watched). Six minutes after we’d sat, Tommy Smith added to John Harley’s equaliser and promise seemed to be fulfilled but the rest was imperfect and goalless. At the end, the faint resolve I’d had to say “goodbye” to those around me I’d never said “hello” to dissolved in Englishness.
Since then and the international break, it’s been donate, box, clean, and look for tenants. Hardly had time to see people (though haven’t been that in demand anyway) except for the well-attended “Bon Voyage” party I organised last Saturday at Salvador and Amanda and now we’re off. We’ve filled to an eight foot ceiling a 25 square foot storage unit in Wood Green with stuff which is mostly mine. That space does not include the twenty years of letters and cards I was nagged to recycle by a wife who sometimes seems to have no past except when it comes to a memory of my failings.
So, do you get my mood?
Football: Elton John spoke out about the board and the finances. You’re going to have to look into the whole shebang in a lot more detail than I have to decide if he’s right but a season in the premiership (remember the argument about the £40 million income I had at my nephew’s funeral?) and £20million plus for five of our best players in the meantime (Ashley Young, Hameur Bouazza, Marlon King, Danny Shittu, Darius Henderson) and yet there’s no money left and even what was “ring-fenced” for stadium improvement has disappeared. The PM’s belated denial of cash bonuses to those bankers who’ve profited from failure has no equivalent at Vicarage Road. If the economy at large is experiencing a “credit crunch”, the Horns have had a “dividend drain”. Where’s it all gone?
Leaving: I could have improved on the relatively last-minute nature of my boxing up. Having known for months that we would leave, I think I should have planned and selected what to do with what. Instead, I found myself cutting stamps off envelopes containing letters I received before I even got to Manchester from people I still hold dear. Much of that history exists now only in a faulty memory, most of the rest is lost to a mixed-recycling bank that probably means construction filling. I may yet walk on, around on even below part of the mulch of ink and paper that all those words have become.
I felt the love then but not now. As I worked through that trunk of well wishes, clichés, poetry and pretension, I measured my present relationships with those whose past words I cast into the “bags for life” I’d use to carry them downstairs. Some, I’d forgotten: mostly the students who’d signed group “thank you” cards but there were letters from people I couldn’t place. Others were part of the continental drift that ensues from regular movement and change. Most were still there and are still here. I threw away letters telling me of split-ups, requesting advice in the face of temptation, making eternal declarations, describing the most profound feelings and… The hundreds of words of a blog entry are too limited to do justice to the tens of thousands lost to my biographers.

And I am sorry.

Pause

A real own goal

Watford v West Ham (Carling Cup 3^rd Round)

Tuesday 23^rd September

Taking two Hammers with me to the game required a warning in order that they couldn’t throw any victory in my face (in the ground at least). After a couple of pints in Watford’s Wetherspoons, we met Joss inside and settled down to Gianfranco Zola’s first English cup game as a manager. The Horns have injuries aplenty, meaning starts for Ross Jenkins, Jordan Parkes, Al Bangura, Lionel Ainsowrth and Scott Loach (who impressed on Saturday). The Irons’ defence was pretty much first choice but they had a few squad players on show too.

Not long after we’d got there, Loach held on to a shot well when there were West Ham players following up but the first of many references to Saturday’s events (eventually given as a John Eustace own goal) was when Ainsworth shot wide and we started singing “1-0 to the Golden Boys”: anything that went even vaguely close was celebrated as a goal by someone today. “The goal that never was” has made worldwide sports news, the first time we’ve managed that for quite a while.

With such inspiration, the fans shouted the team on and the eleven on the pitch played well against a more than competent (but less than inspired) West Ham, who had their own chances in a game mostly played out in the middle of the field. The drink motivated me to raise my voice a little more than usual, affording me approving glances (from kids, I admit) in what I thought was the absence of our main cheerleader (until I saw him sitting in a different place a little later).

Again the litany was sung in its entirety though I found myself spluttering solo through some lines of our most basic chants. With twenty minutes to go, Tommy Smith crossed and a deflection off one of their defenders put us in front, a fact I made sure Tim was fully aware of. Despite having to sing “We’ve only got ten men” when Jay Demerit limped off with seven or eight minutes left, WFC held on to move into the last sixteen and a game I’ll be in Japan for. Only one match left for me.