The Great Escape

Welcome to Oh My Word, a podcast about Watford in the 1990s. We're Matthew and Michael, two Watford fans who started supporting Watford at the turn of this decade, just as they became crap. The '90s was a decade that saved English football and changed it forever. We'll be taking each season in turn as we look at memorable moments on the Vicarage Road pitch, key players, and changes taking place behind the scenes, as well as trying to place all of it in the wider context of what was happening in football at the time. In this episode, we're looking at the 1990 to 1991 season. So Michael, how were Watford looking going into the season, and what else was going on in football and wider world at the time?

So everyone thinks of the 1990s as being, you know, the decade that really defined the future of English football. And that is by and large true with the, you know, the changes that took place in the '90s and the money that came in. And it became this sort of really glamorous, you know, Premier League full of international stars. But the decade really starts in a much different place. The UK generally is in a pretty bleak shape. It was, I had to sort of double check who was Prime Minister at the start of this season. And it was actually Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister, although coming near the end.

But you know, I suppose it was all the bad stuff was happening. There was the poll tax riots, the economy was starting to enter a recession. There wasn't a lot to cheer about. You know, we'd had the World Cup in 1990 and England had done really well, got to the semifinal, lost on penalties to Germany. And you would think that would have a lot of sort of feel-good momentum going into the season. But my recollection at that time is that football was still not like a glamorous pastime for most people. The stadiums were really like bad.

There were hardly anyone there. A lot of them were half empty. Even in the top flight, there was, you know, attendances went up and down a lot, which is not that surprising because this was a year after Hillsborough, which, you know, was the darkest days of English football. And English football hadn't really sorted itself out after that yet. And, you know, obviously still to some extent dealing with that now. It's, it's not surprising therefore that, you know, people were not exactly rushing into football stadiums. Now Watford was no different.

I mean, Watford had, as everyone knows about, you know, Watford, even if you weren't around at the time the '80s was the decade that really defined Watford as a, as a modern club in terms of the success that they had with Graham Taylor and Elton John and, you know, reaching just the kind of heights which seem pure fantasy now, and must have done then to the fans who were going. Starting our journey in the '90s is more real to us because that is when we developed our love affair with Watford, but it was a very— it was a period of, it's fair to say, a period of change and a lot of struggle for Watford having hit those heights. They would find themselves, you know, very much part of Division 2 again. They'd had a good go at trying to get straight back up after coming down at the end of the '80s but hadn't managed it. And now they were facing up to life as a Division 2 team, you know, having to try and put a competitive team together in what is, as we know and there's always been, a very tough league to get out of.

The crowds had dropped right off at Vicarage Road from being sort of full every week in the '80s, you know, 20-plus thousand. As we were starting to see sort of, you know, 6, 7 thousand sometimes at a home game at Vicarage Road. So a huge drop-off in— and just the lack of buzz, I guess, about, about Watford. And that might seem quite strange for people thinking about it now, given, you know, even though we've been up and down a bit, there's always been a decent support for the team. But it really wasn't there at the time. People were staying away and there was a tough job for Colin Lee to do, who was in charge, had been put in charge the following season replacing Steve Harrison. During the previous season, Lee was a coach of, you know, that not many people knew much about.

He had not much experience. He had been a youth team coach and had been sort of rapidly promoted. But obviously the hierarchy thought he had, you know, the minerals to do the job, otherwise, you know, they wouldn't have put him in there. And they had backed him in the market. He'd been given some signings, he brought in some players. They'd lost a couple as well. So they'd lost Tony Coton, who was their, you know, outstanding goalkeeper.

He joined Man City for a million. And Glyn Hodges, who was, you know, a playmaker in midfield, had gone to Palace. But he'd also signed several players, Joe McLaughlin, a new captain in defence, Keith Dublin, also in defence. Alan Devonshire, Mark Byrne, and Mark Gavin in midfield. And Andy Kennedy was brought in to try and bolster the attack with Gary Penrice being injured at the start of the season. So Kennedy would have to partner the reliable Paul Wilkinson up front. The other players we sort of— to just to mention before we get into the season proper is David James.

He was sort of catapulted from being Watford's third choice goalkeeper to first. Watford did have US international Tony Meola on the books, but he was struggling to get a work permit. If people like watched the World Cup in '94, I think he played for them in 1990 actually, Tony Meola played for the US national team. But that didn't, it didn't happen for him at Watford. So instead of buying another more experienced goalkeeper, they put David James in goal, who was a real rookie, 18-year-old, local lad from Welwyn Garden City. And we will hear more about him as the season progresses.

So Matt, you can tell us how the season started and where it all went from there.

Yeah, I think you can, you can easily split the season up into kind of 4 clear sections. Spoiler alert, I guess, for anyone who hasn't kept up with the season more than 30 years ago, but it kind of went terrible, okay, terrible again, and then great. And the great was good enough to keep us up in the end, but that start really was dreadful. There were no wins in August or September. We couldn't score and we couldn't defend either. Those defensive issues were really obvious from that first game of the season, we played Millwall at home. We lost 2-1, and it's quite funny to look back at the official Watford video season review, so obviously VHS at the time, YouTube now, had some pretty strong words after one of the goals in the Millwall match.

It said, in the second half, Alan Devonshire's rather futile attempts to hold Jimmy Carter go unheeded. Carter's cross is deep yet predictable. Boudot, who is supposed to be marking Malcolm Allen, 2-0 to the Lions, and 68 minutes gone. Some defenders seem stunned, others just argue. None seem to grasp their own failings.

So kind of pulling no punches there from the first match of the season. A few more games, we draw against Plymouth, and then there are 5 losses in a row, which put us bottom of the table. After one of the matches, Colin Lee's asked about it, and he simply says, "We were rubbish," which kind of tells the story, really, for that first 2 or 3 months of the season. This run of crap results includes a League Cup loss against Norwich. Again, the comms describes David Holdsworth's challenge as inept. Incidentally, later on in that match, Holdsworth gets really easily knocked off the ball by Rawlins, Ruel Fox. You might remember 5 foot 5 or 5 foot 6 of Ruel Fox.

So holds out 3 outs just by pushing him over and stamping on him. And there's this bit of a mini brawl. It's one of those things you're sort of duty-bound to say, well, that's not what we want to see in football. But of course, as fans, yes, we absolutely do want to see that. Thank you very much for putting it in highlight video. That's very good. I really enjoyed revisiting that many years on.

After that, we draw against Ipswich. Paul Wilkinson scores his first goal of the season. We will talk much more about him as we go on. By the time we lose 3-0 at home to Middlesbrough, it's early October, we're bottom of the table, we've lost all of our home games, we've only scored 4 goals all season. So it is pretty miserable, pretty bleak stuff. Kind of out of the blue, there are 2 wins. We beat Blackburn, they're just about to be taken over by Jack Walker and his millions, and beat Charlton as well.

So that's our first win in the season at the 12th attempt. Wilkinson scores in both games. It doesn't turn out to be a turning point though. The home form in particular doesn't get solved at all. In fact, we lose the next home game against Portsmouth. We only get our first home point of the season against Oxford, and that was in the last game of October. So, you know, well into the season, I'm still absolutely dreadful.

We get spanked up at the plastic pitch at Oldham. And by the way, there's a really great goal in that game. Neil Redfearn, who'd left Watford a year or two before, has this brilliant chip into the far corner, like on the run, it was really, really good. Conversely, we score a goal against Bristol Rovers, which is the absolute epitome of direct route one football. James absolutely cannons it deep into the Rovers' half. Wilkinson wins the flick on and Kennedy, in one of his few goals of the season, kind of sweeps it home. We play them again, we lose in the much missed Zenith Data Systems Cup.

Then we go up to Newcastle, Porter, Gary Porter, absolutely skies a penalty and we lose again. So at this point, we're, well, what, the end of November, we've won two, 2 of our 20 games all season, serving up absolutely dire football week in, week out. And the chairman, Jack Petchey, another, you know, big character. We'll be talking about him in the following seasons. He sacks Colin Lee. I think nowadays we pretty much expect Watford managers or head coaches to be sacked in the autumn or winter, or even sooner if they're not winning enough games.

But at the time, it seemed much more unusual to see a manager really of any team go before Christmas. But I don't think any Watford fan at the time was, you know, sad to see him go. We were looking nailed on for relegation. It was really miserable. You could say he suffered a bit from injuries. Gary Penrice in particular was out for a while. And as you said, we sold, you know, Tony Coton and Glyn Hodges.

Both of them had won Player of the Season in the previous couple of years. His signings generally were pretty crap, perhaps with the exception of Keith Dublin, I thought was slightly underrated. But the club desperately needed a change if they were, you know, to kind of salvage anything from the season. So yeah, Lee's gone. Petchey appoints Steve Perryman, who was someone with actually a decent football reputation. He had a really long playing career at Spurs from the late '60s through to like the early '80s, I guess, maybe even later. And he'd actually pitched up at Brentford.

He was their player-manager. So we go into December with a new manager and frankly a lot of ground to make up.

Yeah, I think the things that struck me about that first bit of the season were looking back on it, were firstly the plastic pitch at Oldham. Yeah, that is like— I know that there was a few of those because Luton had one as well, didn't they? And QPR as well. And QPR. It's not even like when you think of like AstroTurf now and the you know, the 4G, 5G pitches or whatever there. It literally looks like a green carpet that they're playing on, and they're wearing trainers, like, and it just looks absolutely absurd that was like, that was a surface that footballers would play on. It's like a sort of like '80s sports centre with a stadium built around it.

And also, like, thinking of those, the players that you mentioned, like, the debias that Colin Lee had and that sort of that woeful start of the season. Andy Kennedy, just like the clips— admittedly, this is sort of jogging memories looking at him on the video, but the rare moments that he actually does score. He really gives it the large to the crowd as well.

He scores on his debut, doesn't he? He scored in that Millwall game and it was a, you know, it was a decent finish really. It was a, from memory, it's kind of, you know, a volley from about 8 yards, 10 yards or something. But he gives it the, you know, the arms up, you know, like the double, double arms up in the air. He's milking it.

Yeah. And that was about, that was about as good as it got for him, unfortunately. Yeah, like you say, moving on to December, it looks absolutely bleak. Perryman in interview since that. He's— he was of the view that Watford should have been doing better. He was, you know, they've been a bit unlucky and he thought with the squad that they had, they should be higher up the league, which sounds quite familiar to Watford fans in terms of, you know, where they should be and where they are. And it was very much like, oh, there's a lot of, you know, confidence was low and with a fresh start, you know, new manager, the players who've been forgotten get an opportunity to prove themselves again, or the ones who had not gone too well for get a second chance of it.

So. It did work to begin with. Clearly, like, there were some better results in December, and they certainly stopped just losing every week because it had been absolutely dire. They seem to have done something to get them more defensively solid. Firstly, I think Glenn Roeder playing a sweeper, even though Holdsworth being— David Holdsworth being injured was a loss and he missed the rest of the season. But putting Roeder in a sweeper, Glenn Roeder was very experienced and a bit of a natural leader at the back, and that certainly seemed to get them organized. Paul Wilkinson also started to find his touch, started scoring, and then against Plymouth in December, we finally got the first home win of the season.

Still bottom, but Paul Wilkinson was the original '90s bags man for Watford, was starting to score on a regular basis, and his moustachioed strike partner Gary Penrice returned to the side as well. A lot of moustaches in this Watford team. Alan Devonshire also had a fairly healthy, healthy moustache on him as well. But Penrice and Wilkinson have been absolutely brilliant the season before, and Penrice has been out with a long-term injury, so he came back into the team, scored in another win away at Millwall, 2-0 win away at Millwall in December, which is a very good away win, not an easy place to go. And they kept going. They got a draw with Leicester, then they beat Port Vale, Penrice on the scoresheet again, salvaged a very late draw with Swindon in December.

And it was a very solid month and completely turning around the month previously. They were actually at, you know, by the end of the month had just got themselves out of the relegation zone and their heads above water. Penrice, I think, was quoted as saying, because he'd come back from that long-term injury, that he wasn't fully fit yet. And he said one of his legs was actually much larger than the other because one of his legs had been in plaster for such a long time. You don't think of footballers having their legs in plaster now. Like, I don't know if that's just the kind of old-school image of someone nursing an injury, of just having their leg in a cast. Like, you just, you just hardly ever see that now, do you?

Even if it's quite a bad—.

Yeah, now it's like a kind of lightweight, high-tech kind of, like, you know, close-fitting thing, probably to spend most of your time in some sort of recovery chamber rather than— Yeah, you know, the idea of the, you know, the leg caked in plaster for 6 months just doesn't fit anymore, does it?

No, too big, like NHS crutches under your arms, like the real, like, you know, Victorian medicine. And that probably was the practice at Watford at the time, to be fair. Penrice, yeah, I mean, it was a really— you know, him and Wilkinson have both spoken, you know, very glowingly to each other about the relationship that they had on the pitch and how, you know, how much they enjoyed playing together. So that obviously was a boost for Perryman to be able to get them back on the pitch, but, but it didn't last too long. So even though they sort of by the end of the year were looking like they were, I think, right there, they're moving in the right direction. Perryman's got them organized.

They're coming up the table. They're out of the relegation zone. They've got their best forwards on the pitch now scoring goals. They're not letting too many in. And we should also point out at the moment that David James is performing admirably in between the sticks for Watford as a teenager. But then it doesn't last and it starts to it starts to turn sour again.

Yeah, it does. There's a, there's another run of terrible results. It's 7 defeats in 11, I think. David Byrne gets injured, which no one cares about. Glenn Roeder gets injured, which everybody cares about. He's out for, you know, I think 6 weeks. Perryman's got no sweeper to replace him, but he persists with this sweeper system.

But then we don't have, we didn't have anyone else at the back that had that sort of combination of the leadership skills that you mentioned, you know, a tactical understanding and actually a bit of technical skill as well. No one could really replace him and fulfil that role. So it just goes back to Potter again. We got Shrewsbury in the FA Cup and they were the third tier, so division below us, but we lose 4-1 and that means we've lost every cup game that we've played this season. We lost to Bristol Rovers in the Zenith Data Systems and we lost both legs against Norwich in the League Cup without scoring. Willie Falconer scores in the goal and in the next match as well, play West Ham, and he nearly scores a really brilliant goal.

He plays a 1-2 with someone on the edge of the box, kind of dribbles past a couple of players, tries to take it around the keeper, and he can't quite score before West Ham defender just boots it behind for the corner. You likened it to me as a bit like Georgi Kinkladze, something he was going to do in a few years' time. And he's a bit of a poor man's version of that, is— but it would have been a great goal. There's also a David James save in that match, which is kind of in a similar way kind of vaguely reminiscent of that sort of Gordon Banks, David Seaman style of save where he gets down low to his right and claws the ball away from off the line. And Falconer is in the headlines again in the next match 'cause he gets sent off. We give away 2 penalties and lose 3-0 to Brighton.

We then go through a run of more draws, more narrow defeats. We just can't win a game at all. Wilkinson scores a few, Penrice does as well. They both score, we go 2-0 up against Sheffield Wednesday and they both score. But Wednesday come back to draw the match and Trevor Francis was playing that game. I kind of forgotten that he's his career stretched just into the '90s. We play Bristol Rovers again away this time.

There's a brilliant bit of commentary on the video, some superbly biased Bristolian commentary. We lose 3-1, but he's great.

Comms I've ever heard.

Yeah, like every sort of short sideways pass is beautiful. They— there's a succession of about 3 or 4 of those in a row, and he's like, they're really knocking it around well now. It's pretty funny to listen to. It's we probably the same thing happened from Watford commentary, but it's just great to hear that. And his voice as well, not so much the accent, you know, lovely accent down in Bristol, but his delivery of some of these lines is really funny.

Yeah, there's a moment in that where Watford is in suits, he's so over the top about. It's what you want from a local commentator, basically, just like completely partisan. And like you say, everything, everything's wonderful, everything's deserved, is his catchphrase. Exactly. But there's a, there's a, the contrast between Rovers taking the lead and then Watford getting a penalty is about as extreme as you can imagine, where he just like. Penalty, and there it is. And it's just like the moment he just does not care at all about hiding any sort of bias.

But that is like part of those, those videos.

Yeah, it's part of the charm, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, at this point, obviously, what do you do when you're playing as badly as this? Well, probably not sell one of your best players, but that is what happens next. Penrice, by this time he's got 5 in 14 and he goes to Villa for a million pounds. A bit of a bold strategy.

We signed Peter Nicholas, who's a kind of, from, I remember him, kind of a long career for Wales, kind of a tough central midfielder. Get Nigel Callaghan back on loan, I want to say from Derby, somewhere, one of those teams anyway, one of those Midlands teams. But all in all, I mean, it's his proper relegation form. We're bottom, we having got off the bottom, we fall back to the bottom again. They have this kind of big team meeting after we lose 3-0 at home to Blackburn, just presumably just to try and work out what the hell they're going to do, because it's the end of March, there's what, 10 or 11 games to go, and things are looking absolutely dismal.

Yeah, I think this is a point where Steve Perryman— I was looking at reading an old interview with Steve Perryman where he was asked if there were games that stood out for him, and he didn't specify the actual match, but it was during this, during that period. Of bad results where he says, for a depressing answer, I'd have to say we had a 3-0 defeat at home and someone threw a dustbin on the pitch and they had lit the contents. That was a negative which I can't imagine. That's like the sort of Watford equivalent of the flaming Vespa at the San Siro, but instead it was a flaming dustbin. But I like that, you know, that was— someone had really gone to the trouble of getting a dustbin and chucking it on the pitch and setting the contents on fire.

That's tough to imagine how they got that in through the turnstiles, but I imagine it is a true story.

Yeah. But yes, the mood, the mood had once again soured and it was all looking it was all going wrong again, basically. So back to the bottom apparently, you know, after that Blackburn game. I think that was the result that Perryman was talking about, a 3-0 defeat at home, bottom of the league on the 19th of March. Not a huge amount of time left to start to turn it around, but they did have a big team meeting. How often does that, you know, we hear about that as well, you know, getting everyone together, and it kick-started another good run.

I think, like, you know, we saw that last season with Watford in their run-up getting promoted after a couple of dire results where the players just sort of got together and sorted it out. And it seems like something similar happened here, and the run of results was incredible from March through April into May. It started away at Middlesbrough with a 2-1 win, which included the goal of the season from David Byrne. He didn't really contribute a hell of a lot, David Byrne, that season, apart from an absolutely outrageous goal away at Middlesbrough where he sort of drops his shoulder, cuts inside, and curls one into top corner from 25 yards, followed by a backflip celebration, and that was his last kick of a ball for Watford. He went out on loan after that and was never in the first team again. So thank you, David.

Gary Porter buries a brilliant free kick in that game as well. He did kick the ball for Watford many times afterwards and is a legend. Yeah. Yes. But following that, some more wins followed, particularly memorable run of results, 3 wins on the bounce, a win over Leicester with Paul Wilkinson on the scoresheet, away at Swindon. That was when Glenn Hoddle had been installed at Swindon as player-manager, another rarity these days. But Hoddle had turned up at Swindon, taken over from Ossie Ardiles.

He later obviously had great success at Swindon. We'll come, we'll run into them again in following seasons. But Watford got the better of him this time with Nigel Callaghan scoring on his return to the club. He's returned on loan. See, I didn't remember. Because I didn't really follow Watford in the '80s, I didn't understand the significance of Nigel Callaghan. Obviously, to a lot of players, a lot of Watford fans, he was, you know, the man.

And particularly, you know, spoken of in the same terms as John Barnes for a lot of players, for a lot of fans, in terms of being, you know, this sort of wizard-like baller, you know, bucket of tricks on the wing, on the opposite flank to Barnes, and have been, you know, a really influential player throughout Graham Taylor's era at Watford when they achieved so much in the top flight. Scored a free kick and also Steve Butler, who was one of Perryman's signings that season, got on the scoresheet as well. He didn't score many, Steve Butler, but that was a really important goal. The following game at home to Wolves, I have very fond memories of because it was my birthday and we beat them 3-1 at the Vic with a Paul Wilkinson hat-trick. That was his only hat-trick. Two very tidy finishes and a late penalty to see off a Wolves resurgence, winning 3-1. And Watford were really on fire.

They'd taken 13 points from the last 15. They did then have a little wobble losing away at Notts County, but then beating Charlton at home, got a decent draw at home against West Brom with Glenn Roeder, we all— Captain Marvel performance from him, diving header to keep us in touch with the pack. It meant we needed 6 points from the last 3 games to stay up. And, you know, looking at that, you'd think, well, that's. That's, that's doable, but it's, it's tough. It doesn't give you much room for manoeuvre 6 from 9. So they got the first one out the way with an away win at Portsmouth, Willie Falconer, and then went to Oxford.

And for those of us fortunate enough to go to the Manor Ground— I wasn't, I wasn't at the Manor Ground that day, but I can only imagine how good the buzz was in the away end with 3,500 Watford fans at what was a tiny ground, sort of packed onto that away terrace at Oxford. And it really was like tight to the pitch there. You were really, really on top of things and Watford managed to battle their way to a 1-0 win thanks to Paul Wilkinson again, and actually secured survival with it with a game to spare. So one of the sort of famous escape escapism, escapism of Watford's history. It came, you know, I think. Again, going back to Perryman, they said, like, I think from that sort of run of games of like last 10 games, they got I think 7 wins and a couple of draws. And from the position that they were in when they went into that run, if you'd actually said that's what you need to survive, they probably have all packed it in and gone home because they would have said we're never going to pull that off because they were in such bad form going into the idea of winning 7 and get— and drawing 2 of their last 10 would seem like absolute fantasy land.

But they did it. They pulled it off. Perryman, you know, and huge credit, he'd somehow managed to turn the corner again, get them organised for the second time in the season and get them on that run of form again. The last game of the season was kind of, I suppose, the most, you know, reflective of what had gone before. It was a home defeat to Bristol City. They lost 3-2. Paul Wilkinson scored a brace. They clearly had goals and creativity in the team, which wasn't a problem, but keeping them out and stupid mistakes was.

They let in some really sloppy goals in the second half and lost 3-2. But at that point, people didn't really care too much because survival had been secured. So they probably had taken their foot off the gas a little bit in that last game. And those are Paul Wilkinson's last goals for the club as he moved on in the summer. So I mean, I just think we'll come on back to just sort of the general thoughts on that season and, you know, where, how Watford managed to navigate that. I mean, I think it was such a bizarre up and down, like, you know, I think the way that you phrased it at the start in terms of those four sections, the distinct sections.

When you think of, I mean, I compare it to problems that Watford are having at the moment in the Premier League, for example, and we've had, you know, basically just been relentlessly bad for the entire season with a couple of victories. But this was something different, wasn't it? Because this was like really like distinct chunks of form where they either couldn't win for love nor money, or they suddenly became really solid and unbeatable, and then they lost it again. And I don't know, it's just like, it's not really like any other season that I've experienced with Watford.

Yeah, and I completely agree. Yeah, when we were about to— terrible, you know, we couldn't score and we couldn't defend, and then we'd go those two patches, first one in the first months of 1991, they were okay, they were sort of mid-table form. But that run-in was promotion form really, wasn't it? And yeah, we weren't conceding, we were keeping clean sheets, we were scoring, you know, 1, 2, sometimes 3 goals a match. Wilkinson was brilliant that year, wasn't he? I mean, he scored 19. The next highest goal scorer was, well, it was Penrice and Falconer, both got 5.

So, you know, he really was carrying the team in terms of scoring goals so that we could win matches. But yeah, very, like you say, we have regularly have rubbish seasons as Watford fans, but this one was a real curiosity. It was a genuinely interesting season, kind of fun to look back on. I don't have particularly clear memories of going to any of the games. I know that I was at some of them, but yeah, it was, it was really fun. And, you know, if you're gonna finish just above the relegation zone, it's kind of, it's good to get out of it at the end.

It's good to have your good form at the end of the season because it kind of, like you said before about the end of the previous season, it can kind of catapult you into the next season with a degree of positivity, I think, kind of.

Yeah, I mean, I think like Wilkinson, he doesn't, maybe it's just the era that he played in that he doesn't get talked about quite as much as some other Watford strikers of yesteryear. I mean, I think he does amongst people who saw him at that time, because when you watch it back and you see how consistent he was and how brave he was as a striker as well, he was hurling himself at crosses and a lot of it was quite agricultural in terms of the defending that you would get there. I mean, players used to get booted all over the pitch and you had to be pretty tough. But he was, he was like a really tidy finisher, really brave, and a really good link man as well. And yeah, I think it's no surprise that he ended up getting a move to a, you know, to a better club to play at a, you know, a higher standard because his talent deserved it. It's just a shame that he wasn't able to get there with Watford at the time because, you know, you wonder what it would have been like if they had him and Penrice fully fit.

From the start of the season, would they have been, you know, dragged into it as quickly as they had, or would they— if they'd carried on the form from the previous year, would that have made them more of a mid-table side than a relegation side. But he was a phenomenal goalscorer for Watford for the few seasons that we had him, and one of your favourites, I believe, Matt, with the— and immortalised in woollen form.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, my grandmother used to make these kind of little knitted figures, and she was, something she did the whole time, all of my childhood I can remember, she just completely internalised this knitting pattern and would turn out like Father Christmases and snowmen and indeed football players as well. So yeah, she must have caught wind that Wilco was one of my favourites, and she, pretty accurate representation, I thought.

Yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's a very, there's a definite resemblance. No question about that.

Yeah, I'll stick it on my, I'll stick it on my Twitter feed or something so people can see if they haven't seen it. I think I shared it with you about 10 or 12 years ago, so I'll have to go and dig out the photo 'cause I can't unfortunately dig out the toy.

And we should also mention David James as well, shouldn't we? And talk about his season.

Yeah, Player of the Season, deservedly so. The club knew, and I think fans even back then, there was less media access to the club back in those days, but I think fans for the most part knew that we had a very talented young keeper. There had been talk of him playing in that cup, the cup semifinal a few years before, kind of as a 16-year-old or something like that. And in the end, we got Gary Plumley in, the winemaker, instead. But this was the year that, like you say, we sold Coton, Meola wasn't getting a work permit, so he was the default number one, but played brilliantly. He was only at the club for a couple of years, and, you know, isn't really identified with the club so much.

You know, he's had so much success elsewhere. But yeah, he was great. He was great, deservedly Player of the Season.

There's lots of goalkeepers that get thrown into things quite young, but very few rookie goalkeepers actually hold down the first team spot because usually they're just, they're just not trusted. They don't have the presence, I think, to command their area the same as, you know, a more experienced goalkeeper does. You just— and generally managers don't, don't trust them either, I think, you know, honestly. They— managers might not say that, but there's not very— there's very few goalkeepers that start playing regular first team professional football at 18, and he was one. And, you know, I'm trying to think of the other ones. I'm thinking Buffon. Yes, I'm putting him in that category.

But yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, Buffon, I think, started playing for Parma when he was 17. And yeah, Donnarumma was similar age to James, I think, sort of 18 when he was getting into the Milan team. I mean, I'm being, you know, slightly joking, but I think you look at James's career, like the move to Liverpool wasn't as successful as maybe people thought it was going to be. But he was a phenomenal young talent and that season in particular, he was, yeah, like you say, Player of the Season, and deservedly so, because he was absolutely outstanding and made some really, like, remarkable saves that, you know, without that would have cost us points that would have seen us relegated.

Yeah, and I think he made some mistakes, but you'd expect that for a young keeper. And I think the mistakes that he made were overshadowed by, or positively overshadowed by all those good performances. And you know, there were a few games where he just kept us in it.

Yeah, and there were lots of mistakes. You just, again, like, it's like this, you don't want to sort of be too harsh on what went before, but looking again, like, back at the, this season and revisiting it, like, you do still have some fairly awful goals scored, right, at both ends. Yeah. I mean, at the, the defending generally that you see some fairly— some absolute howlers from both teams. So yeah, I don't think the odd mistake from David James matters too much. But what else, what else can we reflect on this season?

I don't think we've actually said it, but we finished in 20th position. That was actually our lowest league position since '79, which, which I think obviously says a lot about the success in the '80s. It was a time of massive reorganisation in league, so there was lots of differences in numbers of teams going up and down. So the teams that came out of Division 2, which we were in. Oldham, West Ham, and Sheffield Wednesday went up automatically. Oldham were really good in the early '90s. It's kind of, I think youngsters today probably have had no idea, but you know, Joe Royle at the helm, they played some really good football.

West Ham were top going into the run-in, but Oldham, you know, pipped them to the post. Notts County went up in the playoffs, so there were 4 going up. I was intrigued to see that Millwall also got to the playoffs. Sheringham got 38 goals for them that year. Oh, there's incredible, incredible amount of goals. They made the playoffs but didn't go up, so they sold him to Forest. Not even the start of his career, he must have been sort of 24, 25 at that time as well.

Obviously he had a long and storied career at the top level. I was really, really surprised to see such a high goal-scoring figure. Arsenal won Division One, so what's now the Premier League. They went ahead of Liverpool and Dalglish had quit mid-season when they were top and Alan Hansen retired in March. So there were some kind of big changes in the Liverpool management and playing hierarchy, which no doubt would've affected them. Dalglish famously was really affected by the events of Hillsborough, famously went to the funerals of everyone who sadly lost their lives. I don't know for sure how big of a reason that was, that he left, but believe he did.

He would end up going back to Blackburn the next season. Jack Walker, as we said earlier, has invested a lot of money in Blackburn, and they were one of the real success stories of that early '90s period, they really transformed themselves from a, you know, mid-table, second-tier team into, well, one of the best teams in the country.

Yeah, it's interesting when we see the footage of us playing them in this video in Ewood Park, it looks really basic in comparison to Watford, actually. It's one of the few games I think Watford win this season. And yeah, it's just before Blackburn go through their transformation, but it's very much at that stage they're just another second division fodder, aren't they? And really like, you know, a nowhere club. Yeah.

So this was also this is Spurs winning the FA Cup against Forest, and people might remember that from Gascoigne's performance. He was difficult to calm down, I think you might say. I remember reading and seeing interviews with him in the years afterwards, and he said, you know, he'd had to have an injection the night before to get him to sleep. He was so like wound up and so excited about it, and that really showed on the pitch. He should have been sent off very early on. Kind of a ridiculous— I mean, it's not even a challenge. He just stands there and plants the studs into the chest.

Of Gary Parker. Should have definitely have been sent off. Minutes later, just scythes down Gary Charles, gives away a free kick on the edge of the box, and Stuart Pearce scores that, scores from that. But that actually injured Gascoigne, and a really bad injury. He was out for a year. I think his move from Spurs to Lazio had already been agreed, but he wouldn't end up making that move for another year. He did his cruciate ligament in that challenge.

So yeah, quite a game to remember, I guess, for a young Paul Gascoigne at the time. And that's it, really. I mean, like, in terms of going into the next season one of the stories, I guess, of the '90s is Watford's— Watford would have a great striker for one or two years, and then they would be sold to make money to pay debt, and we would fish around with a bunch of low, you know, lower league strikers that didn't quite fit the bill, didn't score goals. And that's really what's happened here. Wilkinson goes to Middlesbrough. We get Luther Blissett back at the end of his career from Bournemouth, but other players have been signed.

Steve Butler had been signed towards the end of the season. He did put in a few assists, Butler, in the run-in. I think he's not fondly remembered as a great Watford striker. So, and Hessenthaler, Andy Hessenthaler arrives from Redbridge Forest as well for sort of £60 grand or so, and he was a— that's a great signing, I think. You know, he wasn't a young player at the time either. He was in his mid-20s, I think. Obviously ended up playing until he was about 65, I think.

But he was a really great signing. So those are kind of the two key signings, I suppose, for looking ahead to the '90 to '91 season, which is the last season before the formation of the Premier League. And, you know, it's around this time that Sky Sports launches as well. The merger between Sky and British Sky, British Sports Broadcasting, BSB, whatever they were called, British Satellite Broadcasting.

British Satellite, yeah.

So Sky Sports launches, football very quickly becomes their enormous investment. And that really, I think, plays a huge part in the next, not even just 10 or 20 years, but then, you know, the next generation of football. The increase in money in the game quickly changed. Clubs were able to afford to sign notable, you know, worldwide star players. The quality of football improved, the quality of pitches and stadiums improved. And it really kind of was part of this transformational aspect of the 1990s in English and British football, I think.

The one thing you haven't mentioned there, which is really important, is that it was the end of our kit deal with Umbro as well, which, 'cause that kit, the kit for 1991 is actually pretty nice, I think. Yeah, it's not bad, is it?

Yeah.

They've reproduced that in the club shop now. It's the Herald and Post one. And yeah, it's a very classic, simple, old school Umbro design. It looks more like a sort of an '80s kit, I suppose, because it's, you know, that sort of simple, like, polo shirt almost kind of design. Shorter shorts. Yeah, shorter.

This is before the early to mid-'90s boom in massive baggy shirts and shorts.

Baggy shorts. Yeah. But it was, it was a class— that was a really good kit. It was, it was, it was very simple and understated, but. But one of the better kits of this decade, I think. And yeah, it was the last time, I think, that we sort of had that sort of like a classic manufacturer for that decade as well, though.

It was the last big name manufacturer as well. I think we had sort of Puma and Diadora in the early 2000s, but it wasn't really until what, Adidas in the— when we were promoted again, that was the next—. Umbro were like them.

Yeah, Umbro was the big— they were like, at the time, were like everyone, all the big clubs pretty much had Umbro apart from a few that had Adidas. But generally like most of them were Umbro, weren't they? Like Manchester United was Umbro at the time. Yeah. So yeah, so I guess that kind of almost like indicates. It probably didn't. The fact that it was the end of an Umbro deal was probably just like— it was just a natural timing of things.

But it does kind of indicate where Watford are a club in decline at that stage from where they have been in the previous decade and not really showing any signs of turning that around. It was very much like you say, selling off the assets cutting your cloth and trying to start again really. But it's so hard to do in that league. And Watford were not a big fish in that league, even despite their success in the '80s. Like, there were bigger clubs there as there are now. And so it was, it was going to be a battle. And I think, you know, we'll see that as the decade continues, that it was, it was tough.

But it was not also like— I suppose the only other thing I wanted to say about the season was it was a season that I, you know, really started to weirdly fall in love with Watford despite them being absolutely awful for most of it. I think because, because it was when I started to go and it wasn't like you, it wasn't going every week at this stage, but starting to become more familiar just with like with a match day and going to the stadium and the sights and the smells. And I can still have like really vivid recollections of some of that. And even like the music that they were playing over the pre-match, like Tannoy, like particularly remember that season. It was The Look by Roxette and The Whole of the Moon by Waterboys. Like, those, those two songs associate really, like, vividly with pre-match Vicarage Road atmosphere.

Quite different songs. Like, the Waterboys has that sort of, like, melancholy and sort of regretful lamentful tone to it, which is probably quite appropriate for that season, given that Watford had, had done quite well in previous years and were now looking sort of a bit of a feeling sorry for themselves and fairly sorrowful. And The Look which sort of has '80s sort of yuppie, you can achieve anything kind of vibe to it. Both great songs, but they like, they really like, they really take me to the stadium and I can almost smell the fried onions from the burger stands when I hear them. And I think that's like the thing, you know, despite it being an absolutely rubbish season, the fact that you remember it and remember it with fondness is like, which sounds like really cliché, but it's like, that is part of it, isn't it? It's like, that's why you bother, is because you sort of get hooked on something and it's hard to like, it's not tangible, it's hard to like specify exactly what it is, but something about that experience makes you want more.

And once you're like, once you're in, it's very hard to give it up. So that's why I did enjoy like looking back on this season. And I think, you know, there's obviously some other seasons which were more positive in the '90s, which we'll come on to. But I did enjoy looking back on this season for that reason, because it was the one where I got into it, is the one, you know, going with my dad quite a lot and starting to feel like this is my team and I don't really care that they're crap. Like, they're— they are my team, this is my stadium, and Paul Wilkinson is the best striker on the face of the earth. And it's like you start to sort of get that. Get that connection, and you never really lose it after that, do you?

I don't know how you feel about this season, but that's definitely what it meant to me.

Yeah, I think the kind of semi-religious experience that you had with this season probably came for me the next season, or maybe the one after. But I'd been going very irregularly for a couple of years. I did go to some games in the late '80s. Just don't have any particularly strong memories of being at any of these games. But I've watched the highlights video, you know. I watched it in the '90s. I watched it probably in the— probably every day, decade since.

So it was really nice to revisit that and rekindle some of those memories, even if they aren't necessarily memories of being at the ground. But I absolutely get that about this idea of a kind of multi-sensory experience of being at the ground. You know, the— you said the smell of the onions. I can kind of close my eyes and, you know, smell the cigar smoke of the bloke that was sat in front of me or something like that. You know, comes up with very vivid experiences that I only had at football matches. And it was great. I did absolutely fall in love with it as well, like you.

And yeah, so stronger areas of some of the other seasons that we're going to talk to, but that doesn't mean that this wasn't an important season, an interesting season to look back on. And thankfully, just a bloody relief we didn't go down that year.

Yeah, definitely. Well, yes, as you said, Matt, the next season will be the 1991-92.

That was the centenary season.

Centenary. Yeah. So a special crest, a laurel wreath around the badge and everything.

So really only get that once every 100 years.

Yeah, it really went to town. The centenary season, Luther's return. So we will enjoy looking back on that one and pulling out some of those moments from that season and seeing how Watford fared in their 100th season as a football club. So thanks for joining us for this first episode. We'll be looking forward to going through that centenary season in the next episode and.

Goodbye.

Oh my word! No wonder the smiles are there.