Matchday at Watford

Welcome to Oh My Word, the podcast about Watford in the 1990s. I'm Matthew and I'm here with Michael. So far we've been going through season by season through the 1990s. In this episode we're doing something slightly different — we're going to focus on the matchday experience at Vicarage Road in the 1990s. This is stuff that doesn't really cover one season or another, and it's basically another excuse to do some good old-fashioned nostalgia. Michael, hello — how are you?

I'm good. I love a bit of nostalgia, as I think we've probably gathered by now. I'm probably getting a bit too much of it — I think I may just want to retreat to my 90s happy place and never come back from there if we keep going down this road. But we're looking forward to this one. So yeah, we need to stop listening to Britpop and get to something a little bit more modern, don't we?

Today we're going to talk about the stadium, how you got there, how it changed, how it developed over the 90s, kind of what the atmosphere was like. We had new roofs going on, we had seats, we had songs and chants we don't hear anymore — personalities, some we still do, some we don't. But let's start with how we got to the ground — what was a typical matchday looking like for you from, I guess, about midday?

Yeah, I think because through the decade I had different experiences. At the beginning it was still going with my dad — finding a car park somewhere near the Rookery and walking up from there. And quite often we'd sit in the Rous Stand as well — in the posh seats with all the moaners. But as I got a bit older and started to go on my own, it was getting a train to Watford Junction and then the long walk up into town, past the indoor market — which is no longer there — in Charter Place, and making my way down to the ground through there. At that age I still wasn't drinking in pubs, so it was probably just stopping in a fast food outlet on the way — preferably not passing out in it, as happened in the previous episode. But yeah, in terms of getting to the ground, it was fairly basic for me until probably my latter teens, when we would start to go to the pubs before — primarily the Wetherspoons, but also into the Red Lion before matchdays as well, briefly, before that was closed and reopened and closed again. So yeah — how about you, Matt, how did you get in?

It was always by car, always going with family, and I'd just get there so early. We'd park — there are a bunch of terraced streets slightly to the west of the ground. I looked them up earlier: Benskin Road, Hagden Lane, things like that. We'd park there just in front of the terraced houses and walk down to the ground, kind of avoiding the hospital car park and the grammar school car park and all the paid car parks and the Harlequin car parks and stuff like that. I've only now realised that getting to the ground early was just to avoid paying those parking fees — it was completely free parking on those streets. So being in the ground more or less as it opened, tearing up yellow pages and things like that — but yeah, that was it. I only went with family throughout the 90s. It was really only into the next decade that I went by train and went to pubs and stuff. So yeah, a trip to the ground in the 90s generally consisted of going from Milton Keynes down the M1, parking somewhere as I've described, and then kind of wandering in and watching it all play out from a very early time.

Yeah. I think getting in the ground early is the thing when you're younger, isn't it — but also before everything was all-ticketed, you'd want to get in there early if you wanted to get your space. That was the advantage of getting in early — you could choose where you wanted to sit. And it would generally be — as I said last time — kind of two thirds of the way up in the middle. A good vantage point. We weren't part of the big vocal crowds at the back and the front, but it was enough to be kind of in amongst it whilst also having a great view. So yeah, I've got no complaints about the seating arrangements I had in the 90s.

I think that's probably quite a big difference in terms of how people go to the ground now, because generally now the ground's quite empty until about five minutes before kick-off when everyone's piling in. But it was the case then that people would start coming in quite a bit earlier to get their spot. The regulars would all have their spots, and then I suppose you'd still have people piling in at kick-off time because obviously people had been in the gardens and stuff and wanted to come in a bit later. But as a younger fan, yeah, I would be in there really early because I didn't have anything else to do — you'd end up watching the whole warm-up.

Yeah, exactly. The players' warm-up routine and stuff — literally there for like an hour before kick-off basically, watching the players leathering the ball back. I'd always get a programme. And not living in Watford, we'd always get the Watford Observer, which I think came out on the Friday or perhaps the Thursday, depending on where you lived. That would be a time to get in there and do some serious Watford reading — watch Alex Inglethorpe testing out his shooting or whatever. See how the reserves had been getting on. Stuart Murdoch marshalling those reserves, exactly, yeah. The Herts Senior Cup — there's always the one trophy that Watford seems to be in with a chance of winning each year. They didn't win it every year, but, you know, facing off against Baldock Town in the semi-final — I'm thinking, well, this is must-read content.

But you know, I'd just ingest that programme content into my veins. It was stuff I would read over and over again, post-match. I could probably recite some of it. The Q&As with the players were always a very insightful read, weren't they?

Oh, about favourite film, favourite car and all that. Favourite holiday and favourite food — it'd always be Chinese. Favourite holiday — Spain. Oh, I really feel I'm getting to know Andy Hessenthaler. I've still got some of those programmes. They did them sort of as a gatefold — a full photo of the featured player that week, with some Q&A as well, shedding light on such things as favourite food and favourite holiday.

My partner Jim said to me the other day, "Do you want some Watford programmes? Someone I know is getting rid of them," and I was like, "Well yeah, if they're from the 90s, that'd be bloody great." "Well, I think they're from the 2010s." I was like, yeah, not interested. We had social media by then. But I do think, yeah — I'm being a bit mean about those interviews, but the reality was you didn't actually know very much about the players as people. They didn't have a public personality outside of what you saw on the pitch, not really. You got the impression that Andy Hessenthaler just ran around all day regardless of what he was doing. But what were they actually doing in their lives when they weren't playing? Running to Tesco to do their weekly shop, presumably.

I used to buy the programmes as well — that was part of my routine. I'd read a lot of it before the match and then read the rest on the train home. There were very few sections of the programme that wouldn't be read by the time I got home, apart from the many adverts from local businesses — funeral services, the many Blaupunkt adverts. I might skip over that stuff. But the statistics at the back — that was hot reading. I used to really pore over that and see like, you know, Furlong's scored twice. Watching those patterns over the course of a season — I felt that was really fun.

So then in the sort of build-up to the match in the stadium — whether that changed a lot during the 90s. When we talked in the last episode about the introduction of Harry the Hornet and him being around in the stadium from 93–94 onwards — his sort of status grew during the decade, didn't it? He became part of that pre-match routine, sort of cheering the fans up a bit. Different people obviously put that outfit on during the decade, some of them more raucous than others — thinking of certain eras. But that would become part of that pre-match routine — Harry coming on and doing a bit of a dance and trying to get everyone going a bit.

I think the actual build-up to the game is fairly standard throughout that decade in terms of the stadium and the warm-up and the pre-match routine. But what I do remember about being in the stadium when the players came out — particularly when we were in the Vicarage Road end — was that everyone would just launch bog rolls from the back of the stand. Like they'd basically emptied them all out of the toilets or something. These sort of streamers of toilet rolls flying down from the back. Yeah, I mean, I don't know when the cut-off point was when they started policing that sort of stuff. When I go now — much more frequently, you know, young family and stuff — I'm kind of both disappointed that I haven't brought a toilet roll with me and also surprised that no one else has. And the torn-up yellow pages as makeshift confetti, and the toilet rolls — I can close my eyes and see all of that stuff immediately.

I'm very much trying to conjure those images — you saw those images of like the stadium on the telly, or the Kop or something like that, you know. It's not quite the Kop, but — the newly built North Stand being turned into like a mini Boca Juniors. Like a bloodthirsty, you know, hundreds of toilet rolls flying down from the back, and ripped-up yellow pages being tossed into the air as the team comes out onto the pitch. I just think that that is something that was sadly lost — that was electrifying to be a part of. That was for a good few seasons how we greeted the players onto the pitch.

Yeah. And the North Stand — let's talk about the North Stand a bit more, because I know we talked about it briefly in the last episode. Going in there before the game — because it was just basically you walked through the turnstile and sat where you wanted — you had clusters of fans, you started to recognise who would sit together in certain areas. You'd see congregations of fans, some of them right at the back, some right at the front, of course — I was chatting to some other fans about this today. And basically we agreed that the problem with the front was that it was just great when you were really close to the players, because you could really celebrate goals with them as they came right over. But you couldn't see anything right at the front behind the goal. I still don't — it's a rubbish place to watch the game from.

Well, I think it's probably worse in the lower Rous Stand — I think you're practically underneath the overhanging upper tier and you actually have a wall in front of you. Yeah, you have to stand up to see anything. But yeah, no, I take your point, and I've never really enjoyed watching a match from right down the front. I'm sure some of our listeners will think we're a bunch of madmen — like, "That's the best place to watch the match!" But I've never particularly enjoyed watching a match really right at the front, because you get a good experience of going to the match but not a good experience of actually watching the match. There has to be a bit of give and take, really. So for me, being kind of in amongst the people but also able to see what I'm watching — that's the ideal.

The one thing I would say about the North Stand as well when they built it — they weren't very forward-thinking in terms of facilities. For anyone who's been in there — obviously the family area is now where it is, so it's still used by Watford fans in a different configuration — but when it was just all Watford fans in one stand, it really did feel like you could not get in the toilet at half-time. It was a one-in-one-out policy basically. And there was no room in there at all. It's the most basic stand that I think they could have built, which probably reflects the fact that they threw it up in about three months to get it open for the season. Whereas the Rookery Stand was built over the course of the 94–95 season — they spent a bit more time on that one, didn't they?

That's right. So all that being constructed — I quite like that period of seeing the stadiums taking shape around the country. You could see the sort of bits and components of these stands going up and wonder what it was going to look like — like watching an extension being done and seeing it take shape. It's kind of like every house on your street being done up at the same time — a nationwide building programme. It was — if you were going to an away ground you'd see the same stuff pretty much, unless you were going to a very big team that had done all this stuff a few years earlier. But yeah, as we've been over before, the Taylor Report made this stuff need to happen and lots of clubs did it within the same three, four, five-year period. We were no exception.

What did you think about the atmosphere in the Vicarage Road end? And we can talk about the Rookery Stand and the moves there as well. But the Vicarage Road end — what did you think about the atmosphere in there and how did it compare? How were your experiences of that during the 90s?

I think as we said before — I only went on the terrace once, in the Vicarage Road end, and that was for the Oxford game at the end of the final season. Other than that, I'd pretty much been up in the Rous Stand, with a few games in the East Stand as well. And it really did make a difference being in the Vicarage Road end — having the roof over you, seeming like you were with the people who wanted to generate more of an atmosphere, who were more interested in sitting behind the goal and shouting and cheering and throwing things. I noticed a big difference. That difference was probably magnified by my age — being sort of 13, 14 years old. I really did notice the difference from moving from one part of the ground to the other. It felt a little bit more adult, and I felt like I was a little bit more part of the atmosphere, not just experiencing the atmosphere from afar.

Did you ever get onto the pitch at all?

You know what, I don't think I ever did — properly. The only time I've ever been on the pitch was, I think, the Sunderland game in the late 90s where Gifton Noel-Williams got injured by Paul Butler. And the only time I'd been on the pitch at all was when we were literally marched from one stand to another. That was very much being stewarded — I wasn't on the pitch to have fun. I was on the pitch to get somewhere else. Yeah, never went on the pitch for fun.

Well, there was quite a period — for a few years in the middle of the decade — when after a goal a few people would just sort of jump onto the pitch to celebrate with the players. Yeah, I know. We were never far enough down to the front to be able to do that easily. I might jump down a row or two, you know, but yeah — I was never able to touch Craig Ramage, let's put it that way.

No. If you look back at the next few seasons, definitely there were some goals — I remember Jamie Moralee scoring against Luton in a game that we lost, but he opened the scoring, and there were sort of many a lad sort of jumping over the hoardings and bundling around with him. And Craig Ramage getting a winner against Port Vale at about the 87th minute in injury time, and everyone sort of charging on and celebrating with him. It was quite slippery because it'd been raining, and definitely a few of the lads who'd had a few beers — you'd see them sort of sliding on their backsides.

Were you one of those?

I wasn't in that mob — but I definitely — there were a couple of goals where I just sort of spontaneously jumped over the hoardings, jumped up and down a bit and then jumped back over again into the stand. It wasn't seen as a big deal — I think the home fans and the stewarding and policing of that at Watford, they just let you get on with it a bit because there wasn't really trouble at Watford. Even though they weren't supposed to do that, no one ever kicked off about it too much. It did change towards the end of the decade — things started to get a bit more officious. I think in the middle of the decade the stewarding was just some friendly old boys, and they weren't going to try to stop everyone, especially because people just sort of jumped off again. But you did occasionally get literally right out there with the players in the moment, and that was great fun. Me and some friends did sit at the front for a while just for that — just in case there was an opportunity to be involved in the goal celebrations. Just in case Watford scored.

Yeah, basically. The rarity of it happening, but I mean — people didn't get thrown out for it sometimes either. It's not like they were always ticked off for it. So it did happen. But yeah, that was just something that — you know, you couldn't possibly imagine it now. You'd get a banning order.

Yeah, exactly. So that was quite different. Can you think of any particular chants or songs that we used to have during the 90s that you don't really hear anymore?

The one that sticks to my mind is the real basic stuff — just a lot of focus on the goalkeepers. I just remember that a lot. A lot of back and forth with the goalkeepers during a game. Not mean-spirited exactly, but there would be a lot of interaction with the keepers during a game. It sort of ran the spectrum — because in the second half, the goalkeeper runs out towards you and there's a kind of smattering of polite applause. I think Watford was kind of known for that, or at least got notable for that at the time — receiving the opposition goalkeeper quite warmly. But then there'd be the putting the keeper off during his goal kicks, you know — the standard noise going up as they ran up. Yeah, Arsenal have just done a video about that. It's brilliant — it was actually really good. One of the few bits of decent football social media stuff. Yeah, and the chip from Dave Seaman in there.

Yeah — anyway, that was the putting-the-keeper-off-his-goal-kick noise, which obviously never actually put them off because they all just expected it all the time. But it was part of the routine, wasn't it? And then you'd have the warm reception, and the putting them off, and then the kind of general outright abuse because — "You fat bastard, who ate all the pies?" — all that sort of stuff, because some of these 90s keepers didn't necessarily keep the physique of an Andy Hessenthaler perhaps.

No — they were not always the adonis type frames, goalkeepers of this era, as we've touched on in previous episodes. They were more, you know... Robust. Yeah, robust frames. So there was quite a bit of that — or occasionally commenting on someone's hair or lack of hair. Just any marginal gains, isn't it? But I just remember some keepers just joining in with it a bit and having a laugh. They'd always get a warm reception for that.

There's the Peterborough away game that we talked about last week — one of the stewards there was a quite chunky lad and he was getting a bit of banter from the Watford fans. And he just pulled out a Mars bar, shoved it in his gob, slapped his belly, and everyone just let out a massive roar. Not saying that was necessarily the right thing to do, but it was entertaining, and he was giving it right back to the fans and they enjoyed it.

I've got in my notes about the stuff that went on at Vicarage Road — which I don't know if anyone else knows about — the Sunderland game. I'm pretty sure that was the only game that Watford had cheerleaders in the 90s as well. It might well have been the only one. I think they sort of rolled out the full lot — I believe they tried to do all sorts. I can just remember the cheerleaders sort of running out with girls doing cartwheels and stuff. And then — never seen again, I think. Because some clubs did try to have them for a while. I think Watford had a little experiment with that and that was that.

I think there was sort of a general desire to Americanise some of the matchday experience in the 90s, particularly the mid to late 90s — it would be cheerleaders, impossibly loud music, stuff like that. And it never really took off. I don't think in any ground. It's just not our sort of thing, is it?

It's not our sort of thing. The only entertainment you really need is a good half-time shootout — and I think that is good wholesome entertainment. Get some school kids on the pitch to do a shootout. I used to enjoy those. You'd sort of have a little laugh with your mate, have a little side bet on which team was going to win. I mean, that should be how penalties are decided at the senior level and I'm confident of this. The idea of running from the centre circle — or at least from midway — and taking on the keeper. It's a true test of footballing ability. It was always the team which had the best keepers that won, because sometimes they'd have all these little kids who looked like seven or eight-year-olds and then sometimes they'd have this massive lad in goal. Where did they get him? This has really come from nowhere.

It's very Digweed. My cousin Rory — a couple of years younger than me — he did it. He played for some sports association, he went to a Queens School team I think, some sports team he played for. He's the footballer of the family — perhaps less so now, but at the time he was the one where we thought, "Is he going to make it? He might make it." He didn't make it, almost. But he did the half-time shootout and he scored. It was the game against Stoke in 95 or 96 — we won 3–0 I think on the day, and that was the only match I remember where my wider extended family all went. We were all sat in a row. It's probably the only game my sister ever went to. My mum is now a massive Watford fan but she wasn't at the time, and it was the only time I think she's ever been. And Rory comes out, tucks it away, and the commentator says, "Rory Collins puts it away with aplomb." Which is a proper football cliché as well, isn't it? And did he dine out on that forever? I don't know — I've probably never spoken to him about it since. I probably should bring it up next time I speak to him. But I always enjoyed watching that, and when one of your kin puts it away with aplomb — that's a proud moment.

A proud moment, absolutely. I'm pretty certain I would have smashed it over the bar or fallen over on my way to the goal. Obviously, yeah — me too.

What about — I mentioned Z-Cars earlier. That was a constant throughout the 90s, wasn't it?

I mean, was there any? In my memory it's certainly a very long-standing thing. I kind of feel like every 10 years or so they try to change it and they try to do something different. I think there were a few other things — I can remember a period where "Jerusalem" was the big thing when the players were coming out. That was early 90s, wasn't it? That wasn't replacing Z-Cars, but it was alongside it as well. Stirring stuff. Stirring stuff, yes. And I think "Kernkraft 400" by Zombie Nation as well — and "Jerusalem" playing as Barry Ashby runs out. Let me be the model of... Keith Dublin. Let's keep it to what we know. Yeah, but yeah, "Kernkraft 400" as well. There are a few songs you can associate with pre-match and with the immediacy just before kick-off as well. But they've obviously never been able to knock away Z-Cars, much as they might have liked at different points. The fans have always been very resistant to that.

I will admit that I don't have any particular fondness for Z-Cars myself — probably not the way to word it — but if they changed Z-Cars to something else, I wouldn't cry about it. But you know, it's traditional, I suppose, and tradition is a big part of being a football fan and a Watford tradition at that. So who am I to suggest they do anything different?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about some of the people, faces and sights around the games at that time as well, because there were definitely some characters that we remember. Let's talk briefly about Harry, who we mentioned earlier.

My memories of Harry the Hornet — particularly the early iterations — like the Millwall game that we talked about last season, which was a bit of a turning point in the season. Harry running past the away fans, giving it the large, basically doing some insults and crowd baiting, which is probably not what your mascot is supposed to do. But he would really get stuck in, the early iterations of Harry. And I'm guessing that was largely down to the person behind the mask — basically a fan who'd got that job and was just having a real laugh with it. If you were a fan, that's only natural, isn't it? "Great, I can just charge around, do some stupid dancing, wind up the away fans."

I think it's kind of gone in peaks and troughs over the years. And as you say, it's probably very much down to the person inhabiting the insect. Certainly the Selhurst Park years and all the Zaha stuff — we were back on form with that — and there's been a few years where it's very much just a sort of Pixar or Dreamworks character just sort of in the background of the stadium.

Yeah, it got a bit bland for a while, definitely. I think sort of later in the 90s actually it got quite bland. But Harry did win the Mascot Grand National, which I think is worth calling out. Yeah, he did. I think that was the year 2000, but the Mascot Grand National did start in the 90s. There was a controversy in 2001 — not to steer too far away from the 90s — but the inhabitant of the winning costume turned out to be a UK 400-metre hurdles champion.

Who were they running for?

Exactly! I forget, I think it was Brentford — but certainly, you know, ringers. No one expects ringers in the Mascot Grand National, but quite a ringer they had. Good, good.

And there was, yes, the marriage of Harry.

The dreaded marriage. I was there. Oh, my God. They were talking about this on Five Live recently, actually — I can't remember how it came up. I think it was because that comedian, the fan who has a radio show — he was mentioning it when they were talking about the sort of best of Harry. I think this was one of the more cringe moments that Watford had. Not really sure what they expected to happen.

No, it was a very odd idea — because they created Harriet, hadn't they, Harriet the Hornet, to sort of have a bit more gender diversity among the Watford mascots. So suddenly they introduced Harriet. It was a bit like introducing Poochie on The Simpsons. It didn't — Harriet needed to go back to her home planet.

Yeah, Harriet died on the way back to her home planet. But the only really entertaining thing about that was that the Wolves mascot was the master of ceremonies, wasn't he? It was bizarre because it was a televised game — I think it was like a Friday night game or something. Yeah, I was at the match. I don't remember the game much but yeah, there was this ridiculous ceremony going on in front of everything. And Watford fans were all quite bemused, like, "Are we actually supposed to be part of this? Is this supposed to be like a serious event?" I think the Wolves fans probably took it even less seriously than that. It was a little bit like someone's idea that they thought would be quite funny, and then when they actually went to implement it, it was just quite awkward and they probably shouldn't have bothered. But never mind — it gave us a talking point.

After that era, Harry the Hornet was much more sort of child-friendly, focused, less likely to cause trouble — a bit more sterile. I certainly liked the earlier incarnations of Harry myself.

Who else did we use to see around the ground? I mean, one that we have to mention — because he's very 90s — is the beloved Old Git. Yes.

You can't, just his name alone takes you right back to 90s TV and 90s comedy. Harry Hill's Stuff and things like that. The "Oi!" It's the fact that the cheering would start to build as more people spotted him. It would start as a faint sort of "Oi!" and then grow in volume as more and more people spotted him. And he'd be walking around the ground, so it would go across like a Mexican wave — it was amazing.

Peter Lawson — that's his name. Peter Lawson, who is sadly no longer with us. But I loved reading the article about him in the Watford Observer, because even the headline of the article — it's about people sharing memories of the Old Git of Vicarage Road. And his family were apparently quite happy to have it referenced as the Old Git, because they said that's what everyone called him and he used to quite enjoy it and liked his notoriety, his status as the Old Git of Vicarage Road. But just imagine your uncle or your granddad being known as the Old Git — just because you were 60 years old or whatever he was at the time. And he wasn't even that old necessarily. But he would just — "Old Git! Old Git! Give us a wave!" Yeah.

Are you familiar with the legend of Gladys Protheroe?

I had — so is this fanzine-related? It may have been born there, yeah. I had a publication that was Gladys Protheroe-related, I think. But I don't know — why don't you tell us a bit more about it?

Well, I'm by no means an expert — this is coming completely from memory. I haven't thought about it in years until you just mentioned something just now. But my memory of Gladys Protheroe is that she was an invented person, an invented character. And it was always her 70th or 80th birthday, or her 500th Watford match, or something like that. And we'd get in some of the away game programme announcements — someone would ask for a dedication to be read out because it was her birthday or something like that. All fun, you know — I'm sure that happened lots of times and would get a cheer. I do remember going to a match where the home team had organised some sort of gift or celebration on the pitch. And they were waiting for Gladys Protheroe to come out. She never did. This may be something I've misremembered, and I'm sure lots of our listeners can correct the record on exactly what happened. But yeah, my memory of Gladys Protheroe was that she was probably a fanzine-created character that never existed — and suddenly there was a point where, oh shit, the joke had gone too far. People were wanting to do something to honour her in some way. And she does not exist and is unable to accept the reward.

Did you ever buy many of the fanzines during that time?

Yeah, we used to get Clap Your Hands. I know there were some other ones as well — Yellow Experience, something with beers in the title. I will have forgotten many more and I know many of our listeners will either have written them or bought them, so apologies for not remembering all of them. But yeah, I do remember reading them. There was a golden era of fanzines though, wasn't there, because it was some way that fans could fill the gap in the media that was available.

Yeah, exactly. Where else are you going to put those words? Literally no way — that was pub talk to a certain degree, wasn't it? But it was written up in such a funny and intelligent way. I would devour those. I think there was quite a crossover — I was reading about this previously — quite a crossover with the music fanzine culture and football fanzine culture, particularly in the sort of 80s that probably spilled into the 90s as well. That fan-led publications, taking a more irreverent look at things — it kind of bled over into other media, didn't it? We had Standing Room Only on the BBC — that was the BBC sort of fanzine culture. Yeah, obviously. So yeah, by no means restricted to single clubs — it was up and down the land and there was a national appetite for it. And thankfully When Saturday Comes is still around.

Yeah, I think that sort of contributed over time to football becoming a bit cool. There's the era of Fantasy Football League in the 90s — Skinner and Baddiel and that show, which was very much like, yeah, they were a couple of lads who were kind of into bands and music but also into football and beer. And it's also kind of — you can extrapolate from the end of the 80s, when we spoke about the early 90s seasons — it was very much with the view of football trying to rid itself of its hooliganism element, of not being a pastime associated with hooliganism, and becoming something much more mainstream. And obviously this was to a degree driven by the increased exposure through the Sky deal and stuff like that. But it just became cool, and it became wrapped up in this Cool Britannia type stuff as well to a degree. And as we spoke about last time, with Britpop and stuff like that, there was a desire to make it kind of much more of a national conversation than it had been for a while.

Yeah, I think that's right. And then because it became cool, it then became mainstream, didn't it? It's like it goes from being a thing at the start of the decade which is almost forgotten about — as we talked about in the very first episode, the fact that hardly anyone was going to football at that time, like crowds were generally quite sparse, even in the big stadiums for most games. Remember being able to go to a game — you could basically look at the fixtures for London clubs and if your team was playing away and you just wanted to go to a game, you could just choose a game and turn up and get in because nothing was sold out. You could always get a seat or a place to stand somewhere. And then gradually, as the decade progressed, it got that sort of cultural boost you just described, and it becomes a very established mainstream part of culture — and now very exclusive in terms of how expensive it is and how difficult it is to participate in. That's sort of a victim of its own success, I guess.

Yeah, you just see — in cultural terms — that rise from it being kind of cult through to mainstream, and you get the reaction against that. I've posted stuff on Twitter or Facebook and people have been going, "Are you talking about sports ball again?" And it's like — I don't have to do that, you know.

I think things that become very much more popular obviously have more to push back against, don't they? So maybe football now is in a position where it deserves to be pushed back against — but I don't think in the 90s, it wasn't necessarily so. I think there was a lot more — it wasn't as centralised, as controlled as it is now. Certainly not. The Premier League obviously was a different experience even then — there was more money in it and it was changing much more rapidly. But in the lower leagues, where Watford were operating — it was not a particularly slick operation. It was still very much — some guys got paid to play football, but ultimately the rest of the club still felt a bit done on the hoof at times, a bit amateurish in terms of the approach. Which was appealing, because you felt a bit more a part of something because of that. And you started to notice people around the ground, to notice characters.

It's interesting, but also because of the people who were both going a lot at that time — I mean, I think part of that crowd behind the goal was Jon Marks, who's the commentator — he was a regular. We speak to Matt Rowson on Twitter a lot, and obviously he was going there as well. And we saw the start of things like — we talked about the fanzines — but then the start of Blind, Stupid and Desperate, the web fanzine, which as Matt pointed out to us, he and Grant started back at the very beginning of 1995 — after, I think, the first match Matt's report was of was the Boxing Day game against Portsmouth that we won, which I was at. The fact that that was the birthing of what we now call internet fan culture — I don't think of the mid-90s as being the internet age, I think of that sort of coming around 97, 98 — but 1995 was when that started. Obviously the internet was around, but I don't know how many people were actually using it. But no one knew how big that was going to become, and having that opened up to fans to be able to use that medium to share things — I love looking at that website because it's still there, BSAD.org, and I love looking back at some of their season reviews, and the "Gone But Not Forgotten" columns that they did about various players.

Yeah, the whole of us — it's brilliant. It's exactly the type of writing we were talking about in terms of what you can't get from your mainstream outlets, particularly for Watford, who were always struggling for that sort of exposure. The Watford Observer was really the only print publication that would have anything to do with the club. You know, when GT came back to the club in the mid to late 90s and Elton John did as well — that shone a spotlight on the club in the national media sense. Yeah, other than that, who was writing about Watford? It was the fans, wasn't it?

Yeah. So we should talk about that in terms of how you would actually keep up with Watford if you weren't at the games, because there was something quite different about how you would get information about them — how you would even just know the basics, like, a match report. I hardly ever read a match report now, but then you would actually devour them, because I'd be like, I want to know what happened in this match — I haven't seen anything on TV, I haven't heard it on the radio, I haven't got an internet report to go on. There's very little to actually go on in terms of that.

No, you need Mike Vince to put it into words, and you need Terry Challis's column to put it into context. Did you, were you able to get the Watford Observer?

No, not easily — not up in Milton Keynes. So we would get it when we went to Watford. My cousin Rory's side of the family — who I mentioned earlier — they're in Watford, still are, so we would see them on a pretty regular basis and would catch up on what the Observer said. They'd always leave copies for us to read. It's kind of baffling now — can you imagine someone leaving a local newspaper for somebody? It just doesn't make any sense now. But at the time, the Watford Observer was a large, proper broadsheet newspaper, in my memory filled to the rafters with news and rumours and reports and stuff like that. It really enabled you to relive matches that you'd been to, or to understand what actually happened — what was the ebb and flow like in a game that you didn't see, or maybe you just saw the goals at midnight on ITV or whatever it was. So yeah, that was really all we had in terms of print publication for most of the 1990s.

Matt from BSAD was telling us — when he was at university, his grandparents would send him up copies of the Observer, so he'd get the match reports a week later. And I think that was probably how a lot of people managed it — if they were away, they'd be trying to get someone to actually get hold of it for them, rip out the back pages and all the Watford bits and stick that in an envelope for them, save a bit on postage. Because I could get the Watford Observer in my corner of Hertfordshire, but it came out on the Friday, so you were actually getting match reports retrospectively anyway — quite a way after the event. And then you'd have a bit of preview about what was going on as well. Just trying to get any scraps of information about what was going on at the club — that was really the source. There was nothing else.

Well, that's not strictly true — you could, as some people have experienced, you could use a premium rate phone number. You could ring the Hornet Hotline. If you really, really wanted to. It was kind of advertised as news and rumours — but you could also listen to live commentary of the games. At 39p a minute it would cost a minimum of 35 pounds to listen to a whole match. You could call up and listen to what I imagine was the hospital radio feed of the match. Other than Elton John, who's going to do that?

Elton John didn't need to do it because he had a phone line to the club anyway. Well, there would just be the play-by-play stuff — but I do remember it being kind of advertised on teletext and things like that. And it would be an example of like, "Watford to sign star player or something." And you'd think — "Mum, Dad, I've got to ring this up, I've got to find out who the star player is! It's going to be Darren Anderton!" Or whoever. And you'd clearly ring up and find out that it was Danny Hill and he played one game in 1996 on loan and was absolutely awful.

Did they actually let you ring up and find out, or did you just find out after the event?

My memory is I did ring up and find out. And it was one of those things where you ring up and there's like three minutes of describing the service you're receiving before it tells you the actual thing.

Oh yeah. It was a real cash grab. Pretty grim, pretty low. Those things — because they kind of knew that it was mostly kids who were phoning up, but then their parents had to pick up the bill. But that was your alternative — ClubCall. You used to see those on the hoardings at the ground, the numbers. Because all the clubs had them.

And the other thing that people pointed out to us is teletext and Ceefax as well. You didn't really get a match report if you were a smaller club — I think if you were a big club you probably would get a little match report on teletext. But you'd go to — speaking about Ceefax — to the football pages on 302, and you'd see the first half-dozen lines carefully written with headlines that matched the width of the screen exactly — the exact number of characters. And then everything else was kind of locked behind 312 on Ceefax — News in Brief. I'd always go to 302 in the morning and see if there were any new stories or match reports that looked interesting. And then I would immediately go to 312 to see if we'd signed anyone. Not that I would necessarily even know those players before we signed them. But yeah — who had Watford signed? Were they in the market for someone? 312, News in Brief — the absolute gold mine of information.

Yeah, when you were waiting for the results to come in — like, you could have the live scores, couldn't you, but they wouldn't all appear on one page at once? They'd cycle around. So you'd have to wait for the page to come around to see if the score had changed. That was always like: "It's coming up, it's coming up, it's coming up... Still no change... Still no... Oh! Bazeley 90."

I do remember that happening once — the change happened quite late, the spring came on and Watford had scored — that was quite a rush. It had something of the BBC video printer on Grandstand, you know, where it would be coming up on the bottom of the screen. I know they still do that on Final Score, but there's something particularly pleasing about the old video printer graphic.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There were two great things about the video printer — "SEVEN" when someone called Seven-Seven scored, and then when your club scores a last-minute equaliser or winner — yeah, I'm going to enjoy my tea tonight.

And what about radio? Yeah — Three Counties. I spent a lot of time listening to Three Counties in the 90s. They went through a range of commentators. There's a guy called Nick London who did it in the 90s — I think he might have been the one that was around for the 4–1 win at Luton in 1997. He's now employed by QPR as their sort of John Marks — he does the club commentary. And I live right on the Buckinghamshire-Bedfordshire border and he lives just up the hill from me, and I've seen him around.

Simon Oxley was also working there. He was a Luton fan — very, very definitely a Luton fan. I think he's now sports editor or something there. But he would occasionally do Watford games, and he was majestically even-handed — he would celebrate Watford goals as if he were a Watford fan, possibly even against Luton as well. And David Croft was there as well. He's now the voice of Formula One — he does all the F1 commentary. But his breakthrough in broadcasting was, I think, Three Counties doing the Watford matches.

Okay. There was another person who had a bit of a breakthrough there — and that was Malcolm Allen, who was a Welsh striker who came through or was signed as a young player at Watford in the late 80s. And I can remember sitting down at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon taking in the BBC Three Counties Radio coverage — and for some reason, Malcolm Allen was sort of the person at the desk, going out to the different reporters at different grounds. And it was very, very clear from the very first moment that he had absolutely no idea how to do that job. It felt like he'd probably been put forward as a co-commentator or something at one of the matches, and someone said, "No — the sports editor's got the flu, you're going to have to do this." And there was so much dead air, so many wrong button presses, jingles coming in at the wrong moment. I can remember being extremely embarrassed for him. And I don't know — one of our listeners is going to tell me this actually happened in 2009, but in my memory it was the late 90s. I looked him up earlier and he's gone on to have a successful punditry and co-commentator career in Welsh football, so all power to him — because he didn't start very well at all. Malcolm Allen's nightmare broadcasting debut.

And Three Counties was just — they always seemed to prefer Luton to Watford. They seemed to just be very much on the Luton side. And that's probably just me being younger and a bit like the sort of social media fans now, thinking everyone's got a media agenda. I was convinced there was an agenda against Watford.

Yeah, Three Counties had a sort of gold tier, silver tier and bronze tier of coverage, didn't they. Watford were very much the bronze, and Luton were very much the gold. It seemed like they just got much more excited about Luton achievements than anything Watford did. And Simon Oxley clearly loved Luton and didn't have any tremendous affection for Watford. That came through in the broadcasting. So yeah, that used to rattle me — used to rattle me in the days before I knew what being rattled was.

Sounds like something I'm very familiar with now.

Very familiar with now. I'm rattled on a regular basis — and usually it's Watford doing the rattling.

The other way to keep up with matches, of course, was at the end of the season with the highlights videos. And of course we spoke about Mike Vince before.

There's a lot of things we can say about him. I think he was a pretty fantastic commentator, I should say that. As I said before, all commentators have their clichés and their crutches — he's absolutely no stranger to that, and we can name very many of them. And in the late 90s there's one involving Michel Ngonge which I can't wait to talk to you about. I'll keep that in my pocket for now.

The music and the production — there was a gradual improvement over the years, but quite gradual. I think they also sort of flirted with different approaches. Because the first video that we both associate with Vince is the 89–91 period, where he's actually doing sort of commentary on the games — commentating on the goals — which is where the "Oh my word" catchphrase came from, because he says that about five or six times in different situations when Watford score goals. But then in some of the other videos he takes on more of a narrative role, as a storyteller — Mike Vince telling you from match to match what was going on and how Watford were faring, whilst also trying to describe the action. And cutting away to interviews with the players as well.

Cutting away to some of the best content, clearly. Yes, absolutely. The media training was done on a bit of a shoestring in those days for the Watford players. Not particularly comfortable in front of the camera. I loved — I just devoured those videos. I couldn't wait to get them. They would obviously spend the summer months cutting and pasting — literally cutting and pasting bits of tape together to make this season review video. Because they also had to get footage from other grounds — it's not like there was a bank of footage that the TV networks would have that they could just pull from.

Yeah, no archive. They would be sort of getting it off the other grounds, and sometimes the away footage had the home team's commentary on it as well. So you'd have to listen to that. And sometimes they just wouldn't bother — they'd say, "Well, we lost one-nil away at Grimsby in the 17th minute, and then did something else." Yeah.

But they never quite captured the moment — particularly the big games, I think — because they'd gloss over them. There's one thing I noticed actually from the stuff we've done so far — looking back at some of those big games like the Leeds cup game, the Bolton victory, or the Peterborough away win — they go over them in about three seconds and then it's on to the next game. And you're like — that's not a three-second edit. That's one of the most amazing experiences of my life. You're not doing it justice. But they just go through, game after game, all the goals — all of a season in an hour. A couple of interviews with the manager at the end going, "Well, we could have done better, but overall we're happy and look forward to doing better next season." And that was that.

Yeah, I had a whole shelf of those by the end of the 90s.

No, I love the resolution being like 160p or something, and the frame rate being sub-20 frames per second. I can specifically remember — we will come on to Watford's mid to late 90s travails, but we were relegated and then promoted alongside Bristol City, and we played them very early on in the next season. Richard Johnson scored one of the most stupendous goals I can possibly imagine. I just have never seen a ball struck with such velocity. And I had a VCR player at the time with a kind of frame-by-frame advance thing on it, and I remember frame-by-frame advancing through Richard Johnson's goal. And there's one frame where the ball is on his instep, one frame where it's on the penalty spot, and one frame where it's in the back of the net. And it's just a combination of the poor frame rate of VHS — probably only about 20 to 24 frames per second anyway — and the absolute velocity of this strike. Just disgusting, really.

Yeah, there was a lot that you didn't get. You'd watch those videos and they were entertaining to watch, but there was a lot that completely failed to capture, which you could argue is still true now. But I think because of the way football is covered now, and the technology — there's a lot more spectacle to it. Probably too much, probably too much. Those moments — the big moments that we've talked about — you get hardly anything of the sense of occasion through in those little tapes. He just goes through them quickly. Your memories of the season last for hours and hours if you think about them, and then to put them into a 45 or 60 minute package — you're predisposed to focus too much on the goals that don't matter and skip over the goals that do. It's a funny experience.

Thanks to Mike Vince for helping us along on that journey. Thank you, Mike. Legendary man.

So, I think we've covered quite a lot, haven't we — in terms of the stadium changes, the atmosphere, characters and faces, the matchday and fan culture of the time — changes in fan media, the fanzines, the birth of internet fan culture. And what that would then lead to in the decades that followed. We talked about the videos as well, which we both have very fond memories of and enjoy watching back. For me, I think, yeah — there are obviously things that have changed. In some ways it's easier now. I'm grateful for the fact that because I can't get to games all the time, it's easier to follow from afar — if you can't get a live stream of the game, you can usually fairly quickly keep up with what's going on through social media, audio, whatever it is. And then you can see the goals very quickly as well. Match reports are up seconds after the games are finished. Interviews with the players and staff on the websites and things like that. All of that's there in a way that it wasn't then.

And I'm not moaning about that because it's great — especially living a bit further away from the ground now and having young children, I can't go to every game. But there are things that I do get nostalgic about — some of the things that were a bit more slapdash, a bit more basic — and the fact that you kind of had to be there to actually get it. What some of my mates who weren't Watford fans, who just followed Liverpool or Man United from afar in their home counties, didn't really get about what I was enjoying as a Watford fan. Some of the stuff that we've talked about — it's all really about being there, isn't it? It was very much the live experience, supplemented by whatever scraps of information you could scavenge around for.

Yeah, I do agree with all of that. I think it's about getting the information where you can, enjoying the matchday experience and the variety of ways that that unfolds. Like you say, your friends — they're not going to care about your stories of the Old Git and all the rest of them. They're just our stories, and that's part of how we experienced the matches, and they're our memories. We don't want to gatekeep that stuff, and hopefully we'll be telling people in this podcast who weren't there how it was — what it was like watching Watford throughout this decade and how the entire matchday experience really changed an awful lot. It went from something that very few people were doing with you, and by the end of the decade it was something that thousands — tens of thousands — of people wanted to do with you. A real change in the Watford matchday experience, which was obviously part of a broader uptake and interest in football over the decade. And we played our part in that, and we were influenced by it. And our memories won't change — but they're nothing like the memories of fans that have come 10 and 20 years afterwards. It's very different.

Yeah, which is absolutely, you know — and it will change your relationship with the game. I think that's not about saying this was better or this was worse — it's just what it is. And I think there are definitely things I enjoyed about this time that were separate from how good the football team were. And that's probably a really important point, because so much of the 90s — as we traditionally introduce this podcast — was when we became crap. We weren't crap all the way through the 90s, but the first half largely we were. But our matchday experience wasn't always crap even if the results were. This was a seminal part of our football education, of our growing to love Watford as we still do, even if we don't go quite as much as we did then.

Yeah, I think it's a really important part of my life. So hopefully we've touched on some things that mean something to you as our listeners as well. I know that we have a lot of interaction with you on Twitter, which is great, and we're really enjoying that — you're sharing your memories with us, and I think there's a lot that we are mutually remembering and going on our rosy nostalgia road back in time together. So please do continue to share things with us. Please don't feel you have to wait to be asked — any sort of memories, artefacts, or particular highlights you want to share with us, please do, because it helps us jog our memories as well.

We're going to talk about the 94–95 season next — another of our favourite seasons I think. That one sees Roeder's second full season in charge — having avoided the drop last time. We will talk about how we fare there, and the usual things — pulling out some of the key players and the matches that particularly stand out. So if there's anything you want to share about the 94–95 season as well, please do get in touch. Otherwise, thank you very much for listening.

Thank you, Matt. It was good fun, and we will be back again soon with the 94–95 season. Thank you and goodbye.

Cheers everyone.