Falling Out Of Love With The Game/watford

My apologies Holy Father, there never are as many as indicated because they count season ticket holders even if they are not in attendance. still my point was that it was a pretty good turn out under the circumstances.

 

I feel the same way and I moved away 8 years ago. Doesn't help that every single fixture is 'sold out' when theres clearly 1000-2000 empty seats per game. I'd still go to the utter **** show if I could

 

Good evening your eminence

 

**** me. Our fans are even more despicable than I thought

 

People have been posting about the horrible choice between watching Watford in the money-based and predictable Prem and among the cloggers in the Champ. Some have even written about abandoning Watford in favour of non-league, where football is closer to what we enjoyed in the good old days. That has got me reflecting on my diet of Second Division football when I was growing up in the 1960s.

With two-up, two-down and no playoffs, promotion or relegation were rarely in prospect, so we took each match as an entertainment in its own right rather than as one step towards the end-of-season league table. If we returning to that today, clubs would know their place and there would be much less reckless spending to get promotion and financial disaster from relegation. All parachute payments have done is to extend financial inequality to the Champ. I guess the attitudes arising from limited promotion and relegation are pretty much what it's like in non-league now, other than in cases where rich and ambitious owners take clubs like Salford and Forest Green to a new level. No chance of the EFL going for it, of course - broadcasters and fans would never stand for it.

The other aspect of taking each match as it comes was that we were really excited by the chance to see stars like Stanley Matthews (in his last season) and Brian Clough in the flesh, and disappointed if injury stopped them from playing (no rotation in those days, of course). Now we're thrilled if our opponents' best players are missing. In those days only internationals and the Cup Final were broadcast live (in blurry black-and-white), and even MOTD didn't start until 1964, so although we knew that better football was being played elsewhere we were happy with what we'd got. So here's a remedy for the dissatisfied - cancel your Sky and BT Sport subscriptions, don't watch MOTD, and just watch your club live. Going to Vicarage Road would then be much like watching non-league, except that the football would be better.

I don't buy the dread of having to watch cloggers in the Champ. There are a lot of good players at that level, many of them on load from Prem clubs. There was a lot more clogging at every level in the Sixties and Seventies. I would recommend the Chelsea-Leeds Cup Final of 1970, and even more the replay, for connoisseurs of violent football. I rewatched the first match a few years again and gave I think three virtual straight reds and two yellows to Johnny Giles, and at least one card to almost everyone else. Now I'm thinking about it, I must rewatch the replay, where the thuggery was a lot worse. Also huge fun, for the same reason, was Celtic-Estudiantes for the World Club Championship in 1968 and the Chile-Italy World Cup match in 1962.