I am a Watford fan. That’s not an admission of guilt, it’s a fact. One of which I am especially proud and always have been.
Now as some of you will have noticed, after a slightly shaky start, the Golden Boys have gone on something of a run. Indeed, as I write this we sit in second in the championship after beating Derby 2-1 yesterday albeit with a somewhat dodgy performance.
However, despite our success this season we are, as a club, currently facing something that we have rarely faced before. You see in the past we have always been regarded as ‘the family club’ and as such, have been thought of in many circles as being either neutral or even bland. That is not the case at the moment for everyone seems to hate us.
The reason for this change stems from the takeover of the club by the Pozzo family who also own both Udinese and Granada. For with amazing foresight, when they took over they decided to bolster our squad by sending some of the fringe players from their other teams to Vicarage Road on loan. And by some, I mean quite a few.
This was apparently fine whilst we were losing 5-1 at Derby early on in the season, but when the side began to gel together people began to take notice. When we started winning (and scoring for fun) it began to wind people up. Big time.
Things came to a head when Crystal Palace manager Ian Holloway ranted on Sky Sports about our loanee’s prior to our live game a few weeks back and seemingly within hours, various journalists at TalkSport had jumped on the bandwagon. By the middle of the following week, Watford had taken on the mantle of everything that was wrong with the English game and my fellow Hornets, many of whom had jumped to the stout defence of their club, were bordering on scum because they could not, or would not, listen to ‘reason’ (sic).
I won’t go into the hypocrisy of the statements made by Holloway whose own team is full of loanees including one he only sold on the proviso that Palace could borrow him back for the rest of the season, nor the ridiculous statements made on the terminally ill station that is TalkSport, most of which were only made to chase listeners. Nor will I provide a breakdown of the actual Watford team to disprove much of what has been alleged or even talk about the phenomenal youth academy at Vicarage Road which is already churning out a steady stream of quality young players. All of whom have benefited markedly from working with world class players. I won’t do that, because it would amount to my appearing to defend my club, and the reality is that there is nothing to defend.
What I will do however, is make three simple points on this issue;
- Neither Watford as a club nor the Pozzo’s as our owners, have done anything wrong.
- Almost every single club in the English game (including Palace and Peterborough) would welcome a ‘Pozzo’ to their club and would not hesitate to do so.
- We don’t care. In fact, we are loving it.
And that about sums it up.
My latest novel, Wings of a Sparrow, continues its climb up the fiction charts and continues to attract excellent reviews so could I say a huge thanks to all those who have so far purchased a copy.
And for those who have asked, yes, it was originally written with Watford and L*t*n in mind but our near neighbours wouldn’t give me permission to use their name in the text and so to avoid any potential legal issues, I had to switch to two more generic clubs.
If you would like a copy, please click on the cover to the left and it’ll take you to Amazon. It is however, also available from all online retailers including iTunes.
Finally, work on the movie adaptation of Top Dog continues apace. Watch this space.