MY WATFORD WOBBLE
JONNY BRICK EXPLAINS WHY HE’S QUESTIONING HIS SUPPORT FOR HIS FAVOURITE FOOTBALL TEAM...
I’M in a bit of a pickle. I don’t know if I support my football team any more. Obviously I support the club, the mighty Hornets of WD18 who are enjoying another season in the top division and their eighth in the Premier League, six of those coming in the last seven seasons.
I am in awe of how they opened the club suites to the NHS so that I could have my Covid jabs in view of the lush pitch, which is the best it has ever looked. I admire the stadium, which has four fine stands and good sightlines from every seat.
I am so proud of the Sensory Room, where neurodivergent fans can have their own area to show their love of Watford FC, and I admire the friendliness of many fans who act as marshals before home games and can travel to away games.
I am also pleased that Watford were not among the Stupid Six who wanted to break away from the Premier League back in the spring.
The women’s side are back in the second tier and the club are supporting their efforts in an impressive (but probably business-minded) manner.
My problem with the club is what outsiders don’t like. The structure of the club is as follows:
Owner Gino Pozzo, who bought the club for £15m in 2012 and is actually on site and visible
Chairman/CEO Scott Duxbury, a trained lawyer who has previously worked at Manchester United and, less successfully, West Ham. He is Gino’s representative on earth
Head of Recruitment Cristiano Giarreta, the fourth man to hold the most important non-C-suite position since 2012
Claudio Ranieri who (at time of writing, lol, bantz) manages the football squad and picks a tactic to suit the personnel who can defeat the opposition
The fans, who remember the bad old days before the Pozzo Era
The ghost of Graham Taylor, now represented as a mural as well as a statue
One person missing from this list, although I am sure he will come back to Watford regularly, is Troy Deeney.
Watford allowed him to leave the club just before he brought out his book Redemption, which you may have read by now. In it, he tells a story which is as much about masculinity and fatherhood as it is about captaining a Premier League club. Now at his beloved Birmingham City, the True Blue will always have a bit of yellow in his blood.
No longer are Watford the B team of the Pozzos’ other club Udinese; in fact, if you look at a typical Udinese squad in 2021-22 you’ll see that plenty of players came from Watford themselves: Stefano Okaka, Gerard Deulofeu, Marvin Zeegelaar, Isaac Success, Roberto Pereyra and Fernando Forestieri all play in zebra stripes these days. What’s more, there are no players in the Watford squad this season loaned in from Udinese!
This may be due to a combination of Brexit red tape and Covid-19 difficulties, but it is definitely a right step to ‘grow our own’ and sign players who are suited to English football.
Watford have upgraded the forward line, bringing in Nigerian star Emmanuel Dennis, Manchester United youth graduates Ashley Fletcher and Joshua King, and Colombian Cucho Hernandez, signed initially in 2016 by the Pozzos when they owned Granada. These are straight swaps for Success, Deeney and Andre Gray, who is on loan at QPR.
The departure of Will Hughes to Crystal Palace was depressing since his skills and temperament suit the Premier League but, for contractual reasons, an impasse meant an inevitable departure.
Ditto Nathaniel Chalobah, a relative veteran who first played for Watford as a teenager in 2012, who pushed through a move to Fulham to be reunited with Marco Silva, and took his pal Domingos Quina with him.
Replacing Hughesy and Chabs were loan signing Peter Etebo, another Nigerian contracted to Stoke City; 88-cap Slovakian international Juraj Kucka, who signed from Parma; Imran Louza, a Moroccan 22-year-old who may well play international football alongside Watford left-back Adam Masina if he doesn’t declare for France, for whom he is capped at youth level; and, excitingly, Moussa Sissoko, who followed Danny Rose across from White Hart Lane and is effectively a replacement for the much-missed Etienne Capoue.
Ozan Tufan has also come in on loan from Fenerbahce, bringing interested Turkish football fans to Watford’s social media pages. I reckon he will come into the team in the winter when Watford lose half of the first XI (Ismaila Sarr included) to the African Cup of Nations.
Dan Gosling joins veterans Craig Cathcart, Tom Cleverley and Ben ‘Cycling GK’ Foster to form Watford’s
English spine. Except for Gosling, those players came on loan from Manchester United in the mid-to-late-2000s, something Rose did before he became an England international and part of Mauricio Pochettino’s squad.
It is quite bizarre that Maurizio, Poch Jr, is part of the under-23s side, which makes me think there’s a Poch connection as well as a Man United one at Watford.
So, with all this new personnel and with matches against Arsenal, Man United and Chelsea coming up in November, why is my love for Watford fading?
I think it’s because I realise that the club is run as a business, so it’s like supporting M&S or Aldi FC. Given the mess Watford were in after the ITV Digital collapse, I suppose I ought to be glad that there is a structure in place to ensure the Premier League money (£150m a season) is spent wisely.
I imagine the top earners are on no more than £3.5m a year, while the incentives for the likes of Cucho, Joao Pedro and Sarr – the last of these pivotal to the promotion push in 2020-21 – help their performances in a yellow shirt.
But we all know what will happen if they play too well. It happened to Richarlison, who went to Everton at a fair profit, and before that to the likes of Paul Furlong, who in the 1990s had to be sold to fund the redevelopment of what is now the Graham Taylor Stand.
Why should I invest my emotions in Sarr, Cucho and Pedro when their entire existence at Watford is to effectively be fattened up and sold to be converted into foie gras by a bigger club, which will in turn fund the purchase of (to continue the metaphor) another turkey?
A club such as Watford builds its core squad around top young talent like Louza, Sarr and the South American imports, while ensuring that the dressing room contains players who can communicate with the press and fans.
William Troost-Ekong, whose wife’s family are Watford season-ticket holders, is endearing himself to the faithful, while Christian Kabasele’s social media skills are as useful as his towering defensive performances. Yet the sale of Ben Wilmot, who came into the club with much promise but whose path to the first team was blocked by both Kaba and Ekong, is another example of the necessary aversion to risk.
Watford are not the only team who are afraid to bring players through from the Academy, instead choosing to bring in experience and nous rather than blood raw talent like Joseph Hungbo, Sonny Blu Lo-Everton and Dan Phillips, who are spending 2021-22 on loan to Ross County, Yeovil Town and Gillingham respectively. Yet Southampton and Norwich City do well to grow their own, and Dwight McNeil is a fine ambassador for what Burnley are doing beneath the first team.
Watford seem more like a cargo ship surviving a storm than a mighty yacht. They want to be a supermarket but they’re really a cornershop. Against sides whose turnover approaches £500m, who can splurge £100m-plus on new personnel and, in Man United’s case, have a billion-pound roster, Watford hardly spent a penny over the summer. This may have something to do with Duxbury’s point, in an interview with The Athletic, that Watford spent a lot of the parachute money after relegation in 2020 and fell into ‘financial abyss’ caused by the lockdown.
Today this ‘young competitive squad’ will try to keep the team in the top tier, but this is a recalibration for Duxbury, who wanted to make Watford ‘best of the rest’ a few years ago.
With Leeds United, West Ham United, Everton and Leicester City filling out a sort of unimpeachable Top 10 along with the two Manchester clubs, three London clubs (Arsenal are there on turnover, not on current form) and Liverpool, Watford need to pick up ten home wins against the likes of Norwich City, Burnley, Brentford, Newcastle United, Southampton and Crystal Palace. Three points came at home to Aston Villa but not against Wolves, and an away defeat against Brighton & Hove Albion came from two mistakes, one a particularly gruesome hospital pass from the back. Perhaps Watford will come up against Chelsea on an off-day, as happened when the Javi Gracia era began with a 4-1 victory at the Vic in February 2018. We’ll be the fourth game of five in a two-week period in November but, more likely, Lukaku and co will steamroller a team who spend far less on wages and care more about a win at home to Southampton than to a team going off to play in the Club World Cup.
I suppose, after all, I don’t think I’m less likely to cheer Watford on. It was good to beat Norwich away from home in mid-September, but we did the same in 2019-20 thanks to a sublime Danny Welbeck overhead kick.
I just hope that Sarr, Cucho and Pedro stick around even if Watford, somewhat against the odds, aren’t relegated next spring. Otherwise, I’m cheering a balance sheet, not a balanced lineup.