The Beige Season

Welcome to Oh My Word, podcast about Watford in the 1990s by Matthew and Michael. You probably know the drill by now. We are going through the seasons, taking a, you know, deeply analytical approach to events the key players, the really crap ones, the managers, the fans, and memorable moments throughout each season. This season we're talking about is the 1996-97. I think, you know, we put out a call to see what people remembered about this one. Draws was the immediate response, but there was more to it than that. And I think we're going to try and unpick some of the key events and the story of this season, which actually was in the end quite an important one.

But we will try to sort of tell the story as we could normally do and put out some of those key moments for you. So hello, Matt, how are you doing?

Hello, I'm good, thank you. Slightly nervous about this, but I think we'll get, I think we'll find some interesting storylines to tell about what was otherwise a fairly forgettable season for Watford.

If it was a colour, it would be a grey season, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, beige.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

A very beige season. So tell us what, tell us, it's the summer of '96, what the hell's going on?

Heady days, yeah. So after the run-in, the extremely exciting but ultimately ill-starred run-in at the end of the previous season, Kenny Jackett is now solely in charge of the first team. Luther is his assistant, and Taylor is remaining in this sort of general manager, sort of overseeing the operation, I think. But there is a lot of pressure on Jackett, you know, it's his first proper managerial job. Anything other than promotion is going to be seen as a failure, really. I think, you know, Watford are— so it's our first time dropped— dropping down to this level in a long time. The kind of sense is we've kept enough of the squad that whilst they weren't good enough for the previous in the division above, there's a sense that these are— these guys can get us out of this.

And in terms of playing movements, we bring in Alec Chamberlain £40 grand goalkeeper from Sunderland, Steve Talboys central experienced central midfielder, I think, by this point, from Wimbledon, and Richard Flash, who's a very young midfielder from Wolves, who Graham Taylor would presumably have known.

Chamberlain was brought in as the— he was the reserve keeper though, wasn't he? He wasn't, because we still had Kevin Miller at this time as well.

Yeah, so yeah, Miller's very definitely number one. Chamberlain, I think, brought in as someone to challenge, but perhaps not make a serious challenge, you know. It wasn't going to be— the pressure wasn't going to be on Miller straight away. So it's interesting to see how Chamberlain's career worked out. You know, he was already, let's be polite and say, experienced at this stage, but for him to stick around for 10+ years was an extraordinary achievement. He gets his chance a few times in this season, but it's the following season that he'll really sort of emerge as a key Watford player. Going out the door, Andy Hessenthaler, £235,000 to Gillingham.

So bit acrimonious at the time, as I remember. Do you have a strong memory of his exit?

I think there was a lot of yeah, the perception of it, which I think Hessenthaler was a bit fed up about, was that he was seen as sort of like being a bit of a greedy money grabber and that he wanted, you know, he wanted more than the club were prepared to offer. And, you know, I think his version of events is a bit different to that, and it was about sort of lengths of contracts. And, you know, actually Gillingham just were prepared to offer him a more sort of longer-term commitment, which at his stage in the career was, that's what he wanted. I mean, it's not as going from— that was, to a lot of people, would have been seen as a step down, wouldn't it, going from Gillingham, where undoubtedly a smaller club than Watford. And but yeah, it was it was quite acrimonious, and it wasn't how you would hope for a player like him to depart, I think, in terms of like what he'd obviously contributed during his time at Watford, to then leave and. Those terms and with a bit of ill feeling at the time.

I think, I think that's probably passed now. I think most people who are fans then will recognise that he was a great player for Watford in the '90s. But yeah, it was bad vibes at the time for sure. It was bad vibes at the time.

Probably fewer bad vibes when Jamie Moralee left. His unsuccessful stint at Watford was over and he joined Crewe on a free transfer. Derek Payne also on a free to Peterborough. Kerry Dixon left, he wasn't at the club very long obviously, and joined Doncaster. Lovely new year. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. Another player that was released was Nigel Gibbs.

I'd forgotten about this actually, but he continued training with the club and signed a month-to-month contract. And again, you know, don't think I'm spoiling the story to say that he ended up, you know, signing a proper contract with the club and sticking around for a good few more years. Very pleased we are about that. So then, yeah, despite the relegation, there is this kind of the core of that squad has remained, but no fresh investment. We have dropped down, so you can understand what the club would need to sort of cut cloth accordingly. But it was, you know, still under Petchey's ownership and still no investment from him.

Scrooge McDuck still at the helm.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he was at home diving off a diving board into his piles of coins, but wouldn't bring any of them to Vicarage West.

I think every season that we've started, it feels like we've said, "But there were very little incomings at Vicarage West." Every summer, there's sort of at least 20 players left, and we signed one reserve goalkeeper, and that's basically the sum total. That's just— you can just copy and paste that into every episode.

I can do, I can do. Yeah, I'm definitely going to keep this bit and just use it again. But you're absolutely right, what it does leave us with is a small squad that is therefore susceptible to these injury crises that we seem to have every single season. If you don't flesh out the squad with good quality squad players, you're really going to struggle. And you know, guess what? That happened again this year. It happens every year.

You know, the people that were brought in to supplement the first team were youth team players. Connolly had already had his kind of shining moment in the previous season and he was still there. And this season sees the emergence of Gifton Noel-Williams, Wayne Andrews, Clint Easton, Darren Ward, and Paul Robinson also play a decent number of games each. So these are players who would hang around for various amounts of time, each of them, but you know, in their Watford careers. But this is where they all got their starts. Speaking of younger players, Robert Page is now kind of firmly established as a first-choice centre-back, and he's named as captain after Hessenthaler's exit. So this is kind of a bit of a rejig in the central defence, just in the pecking order more than anything else.

You've got Millen and Page who are seen as, I think, the primary two. Jackett plays around with a back three at the beginning of the season, and Steve Palmer is involved there. But then you've got David Holdsworth and Colin Foster, and they're pretty out of favour for a couple of reasons. But yeah, Page has kind of leapfrogged a lot of them and is installed in captain. You know, people— I think people could see at the time what a mature player he was, kind of wise beyond his years. So, you know, looking back, it's no surprise to see that he was named as club captain at 21. It doesn't seem strange at all.

Yeah, but it's still— it's, it's pretty remarkable, isn't it, to be named captain at that age? I think it's not— it doesn't happen very—. Oh, it is.

Yeah. I just think with the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't seem quite so strange because of the career that he's gone on to have. But yeah, certainly at the time, you know, that would have raised a lot of eyebrows.

Yeah. I mean, it— I guess it's just the— you know, managers can obviously see certain characteristics in a player, and it was he evident in Robert Page that he had those sort of leadership qualities. Obviously must have carried himself very well in the dressing room at quite a young age to be able to, you know, be the alpha, I guess, of the group at 21. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of senior pros in that team. There's a lot of like guys who played a lot of football, you know. You think of like players like— by that stage you had players like Tommy Mooney, Gary Porter.

Craig Ramage, etc. Like, they're all, you know, Kevin Miller, they'd all played a lot of games you know, in the First Division and in the Second Division. And you've got a 21-year-old as captain, but taking orders from this Welsh kid. Well, we'll come on to see how that works out over the next few seasons, I guess.

We will indeed. Yeah, so kind of just to kind of like sum up the squad, I think, you know, we've got some good defensive options. Like last season, the midfield is industrious and workmanlike, but where's the creativity? And up front we've got, we've got Devon White, but other than that we've got some decent finishers, but not a lot of kind of creativity and presence kind of in forward areas. You know, David Connolly and Kevin Phillips, when fit, can be relied upon to score goals, but who is making the chances for them to score those goals? Connolly is now a full international as well. He broke through obviously at the end of last season and got his chance with Republic of Ireland over the summer.

And what would they be wearing? They'd be wearing the same home kit. CTX are coming in to replace Blaupunkt as shirt sponsor. I'm kind of tempted to just start mocking up some audio ads for some of these sponsors and just slipping them in as if they're our podcast sponsors and can try and imagine what CTX would want to say as their brand messaging. But they also appear on the away kit, and this is the AC Milan away kit, the red and black vertical stripes with white shorts. So I think kind of joining the dots now, following on from our last episode with Pete Fincham, and thanks everybody for the great feedback on that, we really enjoyed having Pete on, it was great to hear his stories. I think this season gave Pete and a number of fans like him an opportunity to tick off a load of grounds they'd never been to before.

I went to a couple of away games this season and it was. A relatively eye-opening experience. In the early '90s, before the Taylor Report, before some of these grounds were modernised, there were some terrible grounds in the top divisions, but there are some even worse ones lower down. What was your match-going experience like this year, Michael?

So I had quite a limited match-going experience this season because weekends were working in the motorist centre, which for people in the sort of home counties will be maybe be familiar with. It's a sort of like a budget sort of low-rent version of Halfords, basically. And that was my Saturday and Sunday morning job for. For the foreseeable which, you know, so I was basically selling people engine oil and oil filters and windscreen wipers and things like that, even though I knew nothing about cars at all. But so it did— it was restricting my opportunities to get to Vicarage Road this season, which I hated. I absolutely hated not being able to go to football whenever I wanted because I was just getting really used to it. But I also needed some money, so I so more midweek games, they were the priorities for me.

And the odd, the odd weekend game if I was, you know, got the Saturday off work, then I would go to football. But it was, yeah, it was, it was strange that the fixture list, when you looked at the fixtures and it came out, I mean, it did, there was a lot. It's interesting just seeing who is in that division at the time, really, in terms of, you know, you've got teams like York in there, haven't you? There are clubs like, you know Burnley were in there with us as well, you know, like there's Bournemouth obviously down there, a few others as well that I think are not either sort of not in the league anymore or certainly struggling. And I think, or Bury, you obviously don't exist anymore. And, you know yeah, it was, it was a bit of a sharp dose of reality looking through the fixture list for this season and seeing who we were up against, I guess, because it I did feel like you're really going through the provinces now. Not to, not to pay any disrespect to them but it was, yeah.

It was suddenly like, I don't know who half of these teams are or where they are. But as we discussed with Pete last week, that's the beauty of following a football team, is that you get to put some dots on the map in terms of where these towns are and you get an education. Exactly, exactly.

Just lastly, before we jump in properly, the internet age is very much upon us now, and it's funny going back and looking at the programmes because they're. They're mocked up like a Windows 95 desktop. Each of the pages is its window and it's got kind of, well, it essentially looks like what the Watford Observer website looks like now, kind of all these like ad sections and pop-ups and things like that, kind of cascading windows on top of each other. Exactly, all these kind of like modals and pop-ups and stuff. It looks horrible, but looked very futuristic at the time.

I remember, I think they weren't the only people to do that. I think that was a bit of a thing at the time with sort of— Oh, it absolutely was a thing.

Yeah, this was kind of one of the, you know, prevailing cultural aesthetics.

Yeah, make your written content look like it's digital, basically, was because that's what everyone really wants, obviously.

Yeah, we're all a cyber programme outside of football. Just very briefly, in terms of broader culture stuff, this is Oasis played Knebworth this summer before the season started. Which is kind of a— I would say deal from— yeah, I thought you might have been. How did that go for you?

As far as my, like, Oasis gig going went, that was definitely, like, the worst Oasis gig. It was not— it did just, like— it was a big event, but it wasn't— it wasn't a particularly good gig. But it was very, like— it was extremely '90s because it was a bit like a sort of one-day festival because you had. The Manic Street Preachers, Ocean Colour Scene, Chemical Brothers, and Prodigy I think were there as well. So it was a— it was good. They were probably all worth seeing more than Oasis on that day, who I think were off their heads and did not play a particularly good show.

But have you seen the documentary? I haven't yet.

I've seen Supersonic, but they now brought out like a Knebworth live film as well, which I haven't seen yet. I'll get around to watching it at some point, but that.

Yeah, worth watching that. I think the prevailing wisdom now is that Oasis probably should have called it a day then. Yeah, they didn't. Some would say earlier, but anyway the Spice Girls also— we saw the birth of the Spice Girls around this time. And TFI Friday— I've forgotten about TFI Friday. This is kind of. This is Britpop, the program, isn't it?

And lad culture.

Lad culture, exactly that. Exactly that. And Trainspotting was released as well around the time, around the beginning of the season, kind of a fun film that me and my friends went to watch.

Certainly was a fun watch. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you want to get us going in the season then, Michael? How are we doing at the beginning of it?

Yeah. So as you said, reasonable expectations going into the start of the season because of the, you know, just what they just always are when you've been relegated, you always think, well, We weren't good enough for that league, but we should be good enough for this one. Headed down to the south coast, it was a sunny August day down in Bournemouth, our lovely friends Bournemouth. We didn't have quite the intense rivalry and loathing that we have with Bournemouth now, certainly I don't remember it that way anyway, but we did go down there expecting to get a result at Dean Court and we did on the opening day, 2-1, thanks to David Connolly and Devon White, the big man, little man partnership nice sunny day and Watford played a 3-4-3 formation. Very sort of revolutionary from Jackett there, trying to obviously trying to make them a bit more dynamic. We'll see how that works out over the, over the next few weeks. It was followed by 3 defeats with no goals scored.

So the new formation taking a little bit of fine-tuning and bedding in. I think, you know, the other thing to note from that opening few games is David Connolly injured his hamstring in the third game of the season. And would miss the next 10 games. So immediately, as you mentioned, like the concerns about players getting injured and the strain that were put on the squad. Connolly, I think, would have been expected to hit the ground running after a decent end to last season where he scored a few goals. You'd hope that at this level he'd be a bit of a handful and, you know, be scoring quite regularly, but he's out.

We really needed him as well because Phillips is out injured.

He's out for— yeah, I mean, Phillips is just out of the equation. He's, he's not even, you know, consideration, at least for the first half of the season, really. So Connolly is expected to carry the burden of the goal scorer, and he's out for 10 games. So that is not a great start. After those 3 defeats, they get a bit of an upturn in form again with several wins on the bounce in league and cup. And we start to see a few different goal scorers getting involved, trying to pick up the slack.

I think it's worth noting Wayne Andrews during this early stage of the season. So here's another youth team graduate, incredibly quick. I remember about Wayne Andrews, like, really, really rapid acceleration, very fast. Not all— could sometimes sort of look a bit get a bit closed out of games and struggle to impose himself, I think, a bit. But he was very young and raw, and so we're still sort of learning the finer arts of forward play at this level. Where things could get a bit rough and dirty. But he scores a couple of goals.

I think a particularly good one was. During a run of 5 victories in league and cup was an away game at Notts County. Tommy Mooney scored a brace so, and we were 2-0 up, pegged back to 2-all in the last 10 minutes, and Wayne Andrews scores a really well-taken winner in the, in the last minute where he sort of holds off the defender on the run and manages to sort of angle his finish past the goalkeeper. And things are looking You know, not— it's not a bad start considering we dropped down here. The opening few games were not great and we were really struggling for goals, but then having. So I swung that around again and got a few wins on the bounce. We'd seen off Walsall in the League Cup after losing the first leg and got through to the next round, and then got a few victories in the league at home and away.

Jackett had abandoned fairly quickly his 3-4-3. I think the great experiment had been concluded to be a failure fairly early on, so he went back to a good old-fashioned 4-4-2. But we won 4 league games in a row after a pretty unimpressive start and have gone up to second. So overall you'd say that's, that's not a bad return on your first few games of the season as we sort of motored through September. The last game I'll just sort of touch on was the League Cup the next round of the League Cup against Sunderland. And worth noting here that Tony Coton was playing for Sunderland, who'd been promoted to the Premier League the season before. So another old boy returned and kept a clean sheet as Sunderland won 2-0.

But Coton still doing the business between the sticks.

I think he got in a bit of afters with one of our players. I can't remember who it was. Yeah, I think there was a bit of— I mean, it might have just been absolutely nothing and just a bit of verbal or something like that. Okay. I can remember the crowd kind of having a moan at Coton and then just kind of forgetting about it immediately afterwards because it's Tony Coton. Fair enough, fair enough.

So yeah, so then, Matt, tell us sort of where we went from there.

Well, you've taken us through to, where are we, kind of mid to late September.

Yeah.

A few wins, a few losses, no draws though. Kenny Jackett notes that there haven't been any draws yet. He does this in one of his programme notes, and it was just probably just the most stupid thing he possibly could have said, because we go on this run starting in sort of October-ish, where we do very little other than draw matches. It becomes an incredibly boring period. That Peterborough game, was unfortunate because we lose 3 players to injury 2 of them are quite serious. Wayne Andrews goes off injured, Ramage goes off having torn his knee ligaments, and Gary Porter goes off with what's later diagnosed as a broken leg, which means that's the last game that Gary Porter plays for Watford. He was released from his contract at the end of the season.

So a bit of a shocker.

Yeah, he wouldn't have planned it to have ended like that. I mean, he didn't have a good season in the previous season in '95-'96. But I think we can, we can look back on Porter's Watford career, a long Watford career. You know, there are obvious highlights, the hat-trick against Bolton being one of them, but, you know, a good servant to the club. You know, it kind of had to fill in at left-back in the later part of his career, and he absolutely was not a left-back. But, you know, a great left-sided player, generally brought some creativity to the team and was good at set pieces as well. So I've got nothing but good things to say about Gary Porter, really.

Yeah, no, agreed. Just yeah, a bit of a shocker to have an injury treble like that in one game.

And yeah, particularly two of them, you know, you'd be expecting on form, you'd be expecting Ramage and Porter to be starting every match, and for them to have long, essentially long-term injuries That doesn't bode terribly well. We play the second leg of the Sunderland game next, and this is notable because 16-year-old Gifton Noel-Williams comes on, he's on the bench, he comes off to be our youngest ever player. And kind of really the creative spark in the team now with Ramage and Porter out is Gary Penrice. Which probably isn't a great place to be. Penrice, you know, does okay actually in this season because he has to. He's the only player that can be relied upon to have any sort of, I think, guile and creativity in that area of midfield where he's— where he has to play. He's no longer playing as a striker, but we don't play a formation where he can kind of sit behind the strikers either.

He's very much one of the two in central midfield which you would never would have expected when we have— when we first signed Gary Penrice back in the day. But he's there and he's gotta do a job and he kind of ends up doing it relatively well. We played Preston at the beginning of October, and that sets us on the start of a 22-game unbeaten run in the league. So bear in mind, we're 6th at the time, so you think that 22-game unbeaten run is going to end in just handing us the Championship trophy there and then, but it didn't quite work out that way. Around this time as well, I mentioned earlier about the rejig of the central defensive hierarchy, if you like, and having not appeared all season David Holdsworth is sold to Sheffield United for £450 grand. So I think that's— if he's your, essentially, your fourth or perhaps even fifth choice centre-back. In the third tier, to get £450 grand for him, it is great.

I mean, he's joining a bigger club, let's make no argument about that, you know. It wasn't just because of form that he was being left out there. There were contract disputes and the fact that he probably did want to make a move anyway. But Colin Foster is also put on the transfer list at this time. So, you know, he'd done so well when he came in and then his form kind of tailed off, I think. I think his lack of pace caught up with him somewhat and his positioning kind of let him down a bit. And by this time, yeah, he's more or less out of the picture.

There was a Watford Observer interview with Taylor around this time and he says, "What you see is what you get." And by that, what he means is there's no money available for transfers. You know, we might sell someone for £450 grand, but it's not going to be reinvested back into the squad. So, you know, the same story that we hear every season, as you mentioned at the beginning. But I remember there being a bit of consternation about that, about Taylor kind of getting involved in his overseeing role and kind of saying that, but he was just making clear to the fans, I think, what needed to be said. You know, we shouldn't be expecting, as fans, we shouldn't be expecting to see huge investment because just the money wasn't there. We end this period kind of end of October, we draw against Luton and it's the 5th draw in a row. And I was there at this match and I remember Dominic Ludden got injured very early on and he was replaced by a 17-year-old Paul Robinson off the bench for, I'm fairly sure that was his debut.

But my abiding memory of it is him walking on the pitch and kind of looking at Keith Millen next to him and Keith Millen's going, "No, you need to stand there." like, you know, you need to do this. And he's kind of, you think that Robinson would have this stuff, you know, he's obviously been playing football all of his 17 years, most of his 17 years. But yeah, I don't know if the moment was too much for him or not, but he acquitted himself well. We drew the match 1-1, Paul Showler scored a pretty powerful goal for Luton, they took the lead with about 15 minutes to go. But I think a lot of Watford fans who remember this era will remember Darren Bazeley scoring a last-minute equalizer, it was a bit of an ugly goal, the fans spilled on the pitch afterwards to celebrate. Were you were you one of those fans, or were you at the fake Halfords that day?

No, because it was a midweek game, so I was at this one.

It was I was at it as well, I just don't remember it was midweek.

Yeah, no, it was it was either a Tuesday or Wednesday night, so me and some, me and some mates went to this one. I remember going in my mate's Vauxhall Astra, and we were a bit late, so he was possibly. Going a little bit over the speed limit on the on the A41 and his car was just sort of shaking and the steering wheel was shaking. It felt like it was about to explode because we were trying to get there for kickoff. But yeah, it was an awful game from Banbury. I remember like there being quite a decent atmosphere for it but it was, it was an absolute shocker in terms of quality. And I agree with you, like, I think Watford were probably quite fortunate to get something out of it.

But they did, and I wasn't on the pitch, but. But they were good scenes and must have been particularly unpleasant for Luton to witness. They must have thought that they'd nicked it. But there we are. Still no victory for Watford though against Luton. I think so far we haven't, we haven't reported on a single— I think the only time we've beaten Luton in the '90s so far was in a maybe in an Anglo-Italian Cup. I think we beat them in at home in front of about 12 people.

But so someone probably like Alex Inglethorpe. I think it may well have been Alex Inglethorpe, yes. But and that doesn't really— it just doesn't really count, does it?

It doesn't feel— it doesn't feel like a first team match.

A bit like beating them in the Evening Standard 5-a-side Masters. It's not— it's not— it doesn't quite— it doesn't quite count. But so where are we? We draw that game and we end October in 7th, so just outside the playoffs. And, you know, it's been very up and down so far. We've had a few good runs but as you said, Matt, with, you know, we're on this. We've begun this unbeaten run, but there's been a lot of draws, so we need to start turning some of those into wins if we're really going to start to, you know, have a decent chance of automatic promotion.

And November starts pretty well. We offer— I suppose the first bit of good news, Nigel Gibbs is finally offered a proper contract. I don't recall a situation like this before where you've had a really long-serving player essentially released, then stays with the club, trains really hard, proves themselves, and then gets re-signed again and goes on to play a load more games for them. It's quite— it's quite an unusual circumstances. I guess you wouldn't expect it to pan out that way. I get— I'm, I'm guessing that this is purely down to— it was purely down to finances. And Gibbs had like— he basically had 2 years out with injury, hadn't he?

And the club had, you know, he had to prove that he before they handed him a contract that he could—.

It's probably, probably is illustrated by the fact that, you know, he played most of the games, but it wasn't until the beginning of November. Yeah, he was, he was offered this contract. So, you know, they really were looking to ensure that he was going to get fit and stay fit.

Yeah, which must have been a difficult time for him, I suppose, as well, because in the back of your mind it's like. If I, if I get another injury now, that's— I'm done basically. Yes. Yeah, I'm finished because no one will give me a contract now if I get injured again. So having to perform, play well to sort of prove that you've still got something, and just cross everything that you don't get an injury. Thankfully he didn't, and he celebrated his new contract with a goal against Brentford. So another rare Nigel Gibbs goal.

So a good, a good home win against Brentford, 2-0, and they're back up and running at this point. Devon White he's probably got— it's fair to say he's got the crowd a little bit on his back. He's been in the team but he's not scoring, and he's, you know, he's never really— apart from a short spell at the end of last season, he's never been a regular goal scorer. He's only scored twice so far this season, and he's dropped for this game against Brentford and replaced by Gifton Williams. So you mentioned earlier him making his debut, but Gifton is now getting into the starting lineup. So clearly impressing the coaches to the point that a 16-year-old is considered ready to start at this level. We have a few more positive results during the next few weeks.

In the FA Cup first round, we're away at Northampton. And it's just— I'm putting this one out because, A, it's our first, first-round FA Cup match since the 1970s. So we, you know, we hadn't been involved at this stage for a long time. But also because it was won by a very sweet left-footed curler from Darren Bazeley. He sort of cuts in from the touchline and sends a swooping one right into the top corner. And I think this game was on TV as one of the televised first round matches, because I remember seeing that goal from Bazeley flying into the net. What the TV cameras or TV network that was covering it won't have had was Mike Vince's inimitable commentary, because this was.

Also featured an 'Oh my word' as Bazeley struck that one and it hit the back of the net. So lovely to hear Mike marking a sweet strike in his own unique style, and I think it was a strike that was worthy of an 'Oh my word' because it was a real beauty. We move on, we move on. We faced Wycombe Wanderers. I think this was our first meeting against Wycombe in the Football League. And we won it with a very late winner from David Connolly, which then brought us to a home tie against Blackpool. Match finished 2-2, but it's notable for a couple of things.

Firstly, Stuart Slater had signed on a free from Leicester, and I don't know how much people sort of knew about Slater, but he was— he'd started when he was a young player, he was really rated, Stuart Slater, particularly when he was at West Ham. He was one of those players who people thought was going to go on to do really good things. He was a really, really sort of talented winger, very tricky, excellent like dribbler, just a real natural sort of ability to go past players as you used to see, like proper old-fashioned winger who could just weave in and out of tackles and beat his man and put crosses in. And we hadn't had much of that, have we, at Watford at that time?

So not at all.

So it was, it was a real— it was quite exciting to have someone with that talent, but obviously he came with The caveat for that is, you know, he came with a pretty bad injury record as well and had suffered a lot of bad injuries, I think, over his career to date. So you were never sure exactly how many games you're going to get out of him, but. But we signed him, and then the biggest story from this game was Gifton. Gifton becomes the youngest ever goalscorer which several of our listeners have picked out as, you know, Paul Goldsmith and several others I think picked out as one of their moments of the season. A fantastic moment for, you know, one of the, you know, the great young players of this era to get on a scoresheet aged 16. It was, you know, a bit of a bit of a scrappy goal, but he did a smart finish in the end. He sort of latched onto a loose ball in the box and smashed it home.

So yeah, he'd had some chances in the, in the matches running up to it, hadn't he? Some good chances as well. So obviously, like, absolutely delighted for him to finally break his duck.

Yeah, absolutely. That followed 4 more draws in the league though, you know. So that was That was the first of 5 consecutive draws in the league, which is not great. They just couldn't, they just couldn't win matches. They were either— the goals were the real problem. There was just, you know, a lack of cutting edge up front, I think for Watford at this time. Lots of very boring games.

I will pull out the cup game. We played Ashford Town in the second round, a non-league side, so we were obviously. Fancy to go through. It was actually nil-nil after 60 minutes, but we ended up winning 5-nil with David Connolly coming on as a sub and scoring a hat-trick against a part-time defence. I believe this was the game where he was famously quoted afterwards as saying, 'I have nothing to prove at this level,' which irked many fans in hindsight who, you know, He obviously went on to have a bit of a reputation as having a bit of a big head and believing he was a bit, you know, better, better than Watford. But he did score a very smartly taken hat-trick and we needed his goals at the time, so. We'll talk about Connolly some more towards the end of the season, I'm sure.

Last thing I want to say about this period— Notts County at home on Boxing Day. So another bore draw, nil-nil. We'd played— we played Gillingham on the 21st of December and Notts County on the 26th, and they were, they were both at home and they were both nil-nil and they were both incredibly dull. So talk about, you know, a bore fest to celebrate your Christmas. Pete Fincham called this the Christmas of Hate, which I can't argue with. I mean, 2 nil-nil draws, yeah, really, really summed up this period. And, you know, the struggle that we're having turning draws into wins going into the new year, Matt.

Yeah, well, we do get a win at the beginning of the year, but it's it's against Torquay in the Auto Windscreens Shield. It's our first match in the Auto Windscreens Shield, so 2,298 people can say that they were there. And I don't think this is one of those Peterboroughs or Sunderlands or Southamptons, where many poor— many more people claim to be there. I think probably people will say that they weren't there even if they were. It was really, really cold, heavy snow. And there's— in reports after the match were that if Torquay had taken— it had scored and it had gone to extra time, the match would have been abandoned at that point and would have to have been replayed. But luckily, Page and Connolly with penalties score, and we beat Torquay 2-1 and go through to the next round.

We have another cup game, so after having beaten Northampton and Ashford Town, we draw Oxford in the third round of the FA Cup at home, and the match was postponed twice. So It was postponed once, then it was postponed like literally at kickoff. And then, so this was the third time that the match was due to be played. And before kickoff, there was a floodlight failure. They did manage to get the game going, but it started an hour late. Despite all this disruption, it ended up being one of our best performances of the season. I enjoyed Devon White's goal, it was good.

Kind of what the sort of goal that Noel-Williams would go on to sort of claim as his own, you know, good chest control, picking the ball out of the air and turning around and finishing into the corner. And the other one was pure Route 1. He flicks on a goal kick and Connolly runs through and scores. But we're through to the fourth round of the FA Cup, which is at least given these cup games. We're winning them and going through, which is at least punctuating the tedium of our league campaign, which, you know, is properly boring. We draw the next match, but at least it's against Luton, so at least it's fairly, fairly exciting. I watched this one on Sky.

It was our 7th league draw in a row. It was nil-nil. I watched it on Sky, but I don't really remember much about the game, and watching the highlights didn't really bring back any great memories. Did it for you?

It was another crap game. It was another very poor, low-quality derby. I don't think there's anything more we need to say about it, Matt.

No, that's— in fairness, I probably should have worked that out based on the pattern of the season. But yeah, a hard-fought draw. We'd only played 2 games in January. The weather was so bad that lots of matches were being postponed. So we had the two cup games and two league games. We end January 9th. So you'll remember we started this great league unbeaten run in 6th place.

We're well into it, you know, we're a couple of months in, but we've dropped down 3 positions. Brilliant stuff. The next match is a good home win though. It's against Rotherham, who admittedly were bottom And actually, the win is a bit kind of workmanlike and functional, but it's notable for the Stuart Slater goal, which I think probably ended up winning Goal of the Season. Really great control, the ball comes, he's on the run, the ball kind of comes over his shoulder, excellent bit of control to just take it out of the air, and this kind of like lob over the keeper, kind of a fairly flat lob, but over the keeper and into the back of the net from sort of 20 yards or so. That was, when I think of Stuart Slater as a Watford player, I don't think of many things because he wasn't around for very long, but I always remember that. Wonderful goal, wonderful goal.

Yeah, one of the, one of the goals of the decade, I think.

Yeah, I think it might have been. Yeah. Our reward for beating Oxford in the cup was to draw Man City away. They had Georgi Kinkladze playing for them at the time and Steve Palmer is kind of well established in our central midfield playing alongside Richard Johnson at this point, and he does an excellent, excellent man marking job on Kinkladze, who just does not get a touch of the ball really, which is, you know, obviously he's their best player at the time, everyone's trying to give him the ball, and Palmer's like a shadow, can't get rid of him. But there's this kind of odd situation where there was a kind of coming together, and I can't remember who the Man City player is.

It might be like, I think it was Lomas. Was it Lomas?

There's a kind of— something happens, but Palmer essentially gets sent off for punching Steve Lomas, but I don't really think he connects properly, and it's probably not a closed fist punch, but he has some complaints at the time. But, you know, you're going to get sent off today for doing that, so I can't imagine it was too different in 1997. But we lose the match 3-1. Gifton Noel-Williams scores our goal, That means that our 22-match unbeaten run in all competitions is over, which is a club record. It keeps going in the league for a little while longer. Stuart Slater plays really well in that match again and gets injured. And so this is at the beginning of February, and he doesn't come back until kind of fairly late in the run-in.

So that's a player that we've, you know, we'll really miss. You know, he's brought some creativity to the team, some unpredictability, some pace, and some dribbling skill, the qualities possessed by very few of the rest of the Watford team at the time. So we do miss him. We bring someone else in on loan though. It's not a like-for-like replacement. We're bringing Keith Scott, the striker from Norwich. He scores on his debut.

We play Brentford away and he scores his kind of. I don't know if it's a fluke or not, but it looks like he means it. He kind of hooks the ball over his shoulder and across the goal and into the, into the far corner. Craig Ramage by this point has not featured in the team very much. He has been offered a new contract, but he's turned it down. Whether that's due to money or length of contract, possibly even a desire for him to move closer to the club, I'm not sure. I don't remember what the reason was, but he turned it down and he goes to Peterborough on loan for a month.

With a view to them signing him permanently. At this early season, we're just not missing him, you know. He hasn't— no, he hasn't been in form for more than a year and a half now. I think it's fair to say he had a poor season last season, again kind of rescued slightly by that goal-scoring run at the end, but really was not turning up and hasn't done anything of any note this season. So he's out the door for a month at least. And also this time the big football story in the news was that Kevin Keegan had resigned fairly suddenly, as I remember, as Newcastle manager. So he says he's taken them as far as he could, and indeed he brought them up and delivered huge success for them.

They were obviously. I think it's fair to say they were unfortunate not to win the league on that occasion where United overhauled them, you know, had a couple of results gone the other way, they would have been fine. And Dalglish takes over. So Dalglish has obviously worked previously at Liverpool and at Blackburn, and now he's in charge of another decently sized northern club. Kevin Phillips comes back from injury, so he's had leg and foot injuries that have kept him out all season, and indeed they would affect him to a certain degree throughout his career, but it was really this season that saw the worst of it. He is halfway through February before he gets his first game of the season. This is in the— his introduction gives him a taste of the auto windscreen shield as well.

We beat Bristol City 2-1 at home with Wayne Andrews scoring and Darren Bazeley scoring a penalty. So it was his turn by this time. This wasn't a season where we missed lots of penalties like some others, but certainly some different players had taken them throughout the course of the season. Mooney's taken them, Connolly's taken one, and Bazeley here as well. Our rewards for getting through that is to play another windscreen shield just a week later. We lose at home to Peterborough, not a great performance. One notable thing about, about this cup match, and indeed cup matches in general this season, is in the league matches Kenny Jackett generally was fine with putting 3 outfield players on the, on the bench, but in the cup matches he was very safety first and would always have a sub keeper.

Our two senior keepers were Kevin Miller and Alec Chamberlain. The youth keeper was, I can't remember his first name, someone, maybe David Rogers or something like that, but he wasn't seen as someone that was ready to come in and even warm the bench or even start a match for the first team. So Jackett would sign these keepers on loan from local non-league clubs or they join on a non-contract basis. So for this Peterborough match in the Windscreens Shield, Kevin Mitchell was named on the bench, the only time he was ever named on the bench. But yeah, he did it a couple of other times during the season as well. John Sheffield was with us, Paul O'Reilly, so other players that presumably lived locally and/or were playing for local non-league clubs. And so that defeat signals the end of our Auto Windscreens Shield adventure.

We'd made it through to Round 4 but didn't manage to crack on into the latter stages of the tournament, and there would be no Wembley appearance this season anyway.

But we were still going into— we're now sort of getting into late February— we're still unbeaten in the league since October, aren't we? I mean, we're still proving to be incredibly stubborn in the league but not particularly effective. We had our first trip to Adams Park away at Wycombe Wanderers which was another draw, and that was 9 consecutive away draws, a league record. So a different kind of record to the one that the current team has just managed to claim in terms of record number of home defeats. But yeah, 9 consecutive away draws and another really boring game that finished nil-nil. But some good news at the end of the month home game against Shrewsbury. Kevin Phillips on the scoresheet, he scores his first goal of the season on the 25th of February.

Welcome back, Kevin, we have missed you. We have missed you a great deal. We end February in 8th, a point off the playoffs with a couple of games in hand, and then follow that up with a home game against Bristol City, and Phillips, making up for lost time, bags a hat-trick. Much better performance and just sort of classic Kevin Phillips, really. Just 3 proper Phillips goals where he's just, he's just on the end of things in the box, you know. Whenever the ball falls to him, there's some sort of shots that are parried that he then smashes in the rebound, or balls that drop and ricochet around and he's there to lash it in.

Like, he just— that's what he was. He just knew how to do it, didn't he? Like, there's just, you know, they're not, they're not special goals, but he was so incredibly good at that kind of, that kind of chance, that kind of— it's just knowing where to be, which I know is that— yeah, knowing where to be and just so instinctive. And I know that's such a massive cliché to talk about strikers, but he did, he knew how to do that and, you know, he went on to do it very successfully throughout his career. But the run, the long run of unbeaten games then comes to a shuddering halt away at Peterborough United on the 4th of March with a 2-1 defeat. It's a wet pitch, heavy fog, and it's the ghosts of Watford's past and future that are our undoing. Ken Charlery scores the first for Peterborough and then.

A really unexpected one, Aidy Boothroyd scoring the winner for Peterborough from the penalty spot. So a painful defeat for Watford, although you see Boothroyd had absolutely zero connection with the club at this stage and probably was not a player that anyone would have remembered. I certainly had no recollection of Aidy Boothroyd ever playing or scoring against Watford. I know that you did, Matt, so you get your stato spotters badge for that one. Thank you. Well done, hard-earned. They lost again at Gillingham, a fairly brutal encounter at Gillingham, really sort of outsmarted, I think, a bit by Gillingham, featuring Andy Hessenthaler, Steve Butler, both scored.

So Watford Old Boys again getting on it. A bit of a— there's a bit of a celebration from Hessen. So sort of like, again, the muted— there were no muted celebrations. Again, he sort of wheels away and does some sort of half-assed acrobatics celebrating that goal, but clearly delighted to get on the scoresheet. Ian Grant says this is the game where Richard Johnson turned into the midfield general that we love, and he suspects that he learned it all from watching Hesse in this game, which certainly going up against Hessenthaler, I think, in his pomp, for a younger midfielder you would have learned a few things about, you know, how to play the game for sure. And I imagine it certainly toughened you up a bit as a player having to go up against someone like that. So it was, it was a tough one.

It was a chastening experience for Watford, that one. Keith Scott, the lone man, gets on the scoresheet for Watford. But that's— so that's, that's a fairly grim a couple of games which have seen them slip further away from promotion after that ridiculous unbeaten run. And they're now looking quite a long way off. They need an upturn in form, and they get it with 3 1-0s on the bounce and 3 goals from Tommy Mooney. He was playing more as a forward in some of these games. Mooney's been deployed in midfield a lot through this season.

He's been playing, okay, sometimes on the left-hand side of midfield and certainly had been rarely used as a striker, I think. But he had weighed in you know, with quite a few goals over the, over the course of the season despite, you know, coming from midfield. And here he is playing, playing further forward. He's had to because Keith Scott's returned to Norwich from his loan, Devon White has been sold to Notts County. He'd asked to be transfer listed after losing his place to Noel-Williams. So striking options are low. Ramage has returned from his Peterborough loan, but I don't think we're, you know, at this stage anyone's expecting much from Craig Ramage.

I think everyone has accepted that his time at Watford is pretty much done. So Mooney weighing in with some goals and the defence doing their bit gives us 3 wins on the bounce, and suddenly we're back up to joint second. And you Surely, like, from there the playoffs have got to be a nailed-on cert, haven't they, Matt?

You would hope so. You would, you would expect so.

On the 22nd of March, second, you would— you've got to be making the playoffs from there.

You have, yeah. And the momentum behind us, you know, after having— you know, we've won 5 of our last 6 league matches, something like that, 5 of our last 7. I mean, that's good, that's good going. That's what's brought us up. We've, we've managed to arrest the unending run of draws. And turn some of them into wins. Like you say, Mooney coming to the fore, Phillips doing a job as well.

So the run-in should be a good story. Unfortunately, we lose our 16-match unbeaten home run. In the next match, we lose to Bournemouth at home. Stuart Slater comes back from injury, but we don't score in 4 matches. Ramage makes an appearance away at Plymouth. We lose at home to Crewe, and we draw at home to Chesterfield as well. And that was a much-changed Chesterfield side, league side, because they were in the middle of their their famous FA Cup run, so they put out the reserves against us and we could still only draw against them away.

So yeah, 4 games, 2 draws and 2 losses, but no goals at all. And then out of nowhere, a 4-0 win at home against York, a Stuart Slater masterclass I think is the received wisdom about this. Ramage is, you know, he has got himself back involved again, he scores twice, Mooney and Clint Easton with his first Watford goal as well. So in that bad run, we dropped down to 6th and then down to 8th, I think, as well. And then we're back up to 6th again. We've got 5 matches to go, we've just won 4-0. Unfortunately, we lose 4 of those matches and draw the other one, so it's only 1 further point.

Ramage scores again in a loss away at Wrexham. Kevin Phillips is sent off, a really, really horrible challenge in that match, is two-footed over the top of the ball, you know, seems slightly confused that he was getting sent off, but I thought it was absolutely deserving of a red. That was the last time Kevin Miller would play for Watford as well. He gets injured and Alec Chamberlain steps in for the last 3 matches of the season, the first of which is against Chesterfield at home, a dreadful home loss to Chesterfield. Craig Ramage gets sent off and we're down to 8th, so you know, it's slid down from 2nd down to 6th and now 8th again. And there's the murmurings of 'Jackett out' as well, so the fans. The team have lost the fans' faith, I think, by this point.

Such a terrible end, given that we'd had such a boring season, you know, you need some excitement at the end of it, and this has gone from boring to being terrible, which is even worse, obviously. So, well, we draw at home against Bury, and Bury are the surprise league leaders, and indeed the point they get in this match confirms their promotion. The match is also obviously very notable in Watford folklore I remember being there as well. I remember Graham Taylor coming out onto the pitch before the match, microphone in hand, tells the crowd that Elton's coming home. Elton John is heading up a consortium and has agreed to buy the club back from Jack Petchey. So that was kind of received like a last-minute winner. That was one of those, just like Taylor's return in the Ipswich game in the previous season, but this is Okay, Taylor's back, Jackett's back, Blissett's back, and now Elton's back as well.

So kind of the sense that, you know, good things are going to happen. And the crowd did need that because it was dreadful on the pitch. So we draw, we do draw against Bury, and that means that the playoffs are officially out of reach for us. So we really have just plummeted down in the last couple of months. And, you know, big contrast in the fans' emotions at full time. That's what I remember very clearly about that match is the Bury fans going absolutely berserk that they've been promoted. Yeah, possibly their second promotion in a row.

Incredible achievement for them. It's a club. Yeah, they were always a small club. They were a small club, yeah. And they had such an amazing home record this year, which is the reason why they're up there, really. But yeah, contrast the wild celebrations in their end with just the drab acceptance that we're gonna have to do another, at least another year at this level. And we round out the season with our heaviest defeat.

We lose 4-1 up at Burnley with Keith Millen getting our one. Yeah, so our heaviest defeat of the season. And so that makes it one win in our final or 10 matches, that bright, bright spot against York was the only thing to be proud about. I mean, seen us fall from 2nd to 13th, which is catastrophic, really.

I know, I know that we've talked about this in previous seasons in terms of the way that seasons pan out when it— when there is a lot of— when there's not very much to separate between the teams, when you don't have like a couple of clear front runners, like, you know, teams sort of pulling away from the pack, which there wasn't in this season. Then that's when you do get these scenarios where you sort of just shoot up and down the league places, don't you? And within sort of week to week, you can go get a couple of wins, you can go up 8 places, and you can fall 8 places as well with a few defeats. And that's, that's ultimately, I think, the story of this season for Watford was they never ever looked like they were good enough to stay up at the top for any length of time because they could never hold their form for long enough to do that. And they were never— even when they were winning, they were never really winning convincingly. It was very small margins, wasn't it, a lot of the time? They, yeah, they struggled for goals.

They struggled to find any sort of consistency, any consistent style of play and consistent lineups with injuries. And they just struggled like throughout because of that, I think, to really impose themselves on this division. And you could look at it the other way and say, actually. You know, having dropped down to go on such a long unbeaten run and to be, you know, up there until late in the season was. It wasn't a disaster. But as fans, it was just— yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was hard. It was hard to watch, I think, this season.

And it was— I said to you before we recorded it that I had struggled with revisiting this one just because it was— it just felt so flat a lot of the time. There's just a lot of, like, uninspiring stuff. And you looked at the teams and the team that Watford were putting out, a lot of the time you just thought, God, this is, this is hard work. Like, there's not much to get excited about in that lineup. Like, a lot of the time it was— they were, they were putting the effort in, but there wasn't, there wasn't much to get your bum out of your seat, was there?

It was— no, not at all.

It was, it was, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty hard work. And you kind of look back at it and go, yeah, I mean They were never, they were never going to be promoted, this team. I think if you look at it as. It's easy with hindsight, isn't it? But there was a lot of shifting on that needed to be done with this season, and I think that's probably the way that most fans look at it now with, you know, hindsight was like there needed to be this sort of big reset. And actually, you know, we came down with a squad that had, you know, had failed in its objective the season before. And whenever you've got a load of players who've just been relegated, and a lot of like senior players as well, then there's inevitably going to be change needed.

But it's not easy to do all of that at once, as we see with Watford at the moment and the current, you know, the problems that they had last time they were relegated from the Premier League. And we'll probably have some similar problems this time, you know. You have a squad of players you have a lot of senior pros, and not all of them are going to want to be there. Not all of them are going to be completely committed. Some of them you're not going to want as a club, or the manager's not going to want anymore. And then you have to go through the process of trying to move them on and gradually bring new players in and start to change the team and bring a bit more life into it. I think, I think if you look at the sort of positives of this season, then there were some— there were definitely some actually quite significant positives.

I think, you know, we talked about them at the start of the season, but Robert Page's emergence, I think, you know, as a, as an actual leader, as a, as a captain and injecting a bit more something a bit new into that back line and a very, you know, establishing himself as a real popular figure. I mean, it's always great when you have a player coming through from your youth team who actually is then putting on the captain's armband and you feel like they've got a connection with the club. He was always 100% committed from the first time he ever put on a Watford shirt, and he seemed to sort of grow into the role, became a full Welsh international during the season as well. And I think that's, that's something. That, you know, Watford would clearly benefit from over the next few years as Page becomes one of their most important players. Gifton Noel-Williams, obviously we talked about, but I mean, to have— it's exciting to have teenagers come through who can make an impact in the team when they're strikers and when they score goals. Then that is what really sort of gets you excited when you're going to a game.

I think that's the kind of player that you want to see coming through the team, and everyone knew there was something about Gifton I think from quite an early age. The coaches certainly did, and he had that sort of personality as well. I mean, even just seeing him interviewed in the video for this season, and he's, he's interviewed at the end, and he's got that sort of enthusiasm and smile. And yeah, he's got the beaming smile. You can tell he's absolutely buzzing, and he's all— but he's also really like focused and wanting to— he wants it. He's really hungry to do more and to, yeah, to be a success.

And that was, you know, exciting. You were excited for what was going to come from him because you thought, well, this guy isn't just one who's going to come in and out. You could tell that he was going to be in and around the first team now. Like, he got his— he's got a taste of it and he wants more.

And of course, he featured, you know, played alongside Wayne Andrews, who wasn't that much older than him. No. So, no, Williams and Andrews had this kind of distinction of playing up front together for the first team, but also, you know, they played together in the youth team. This is the season that had that great youth team run and a big win against a decent Man United youth team. So, you know, again, you know, the two of them up front, you know, Wayne Andrews didn't have a stellar career in the same way that, Gifton almost did, but at the time, you know, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of hope, and a lot of excitement, I think, with those two. Andrews kind of fizzed around a lot at the beginning of the season and then kind of, I think, he obviously tired, whereas Gifton had the opposite effect.

You know, he was kind of introduced fairly slowly, you know, had some sub appearances, and then he got his goal. But then, yeah, he just essentially replaced Devon White, didn't he? And yeah, was a fixture in the 14 from that point onwards.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think of the sort of players who already had first-team experience. The positives were probably, as I mentioned, Tommy Mooney. I think he was starting to add more goals to his game, certainly contributed quite a few this season, which is probably a hint of, you know, what was to come from him. And the fact that he hadn't, you know, he hadn't lost his eye for goal, I think, because he'd been almost— I think players like Mooney could be a bit of a victim of their, you know, you know, enthusiasm and versatility sometimes, certainly in their early years at Watford, because coaches would just put him in any sort of position to sort of do a job because, yeah, because you knew that he could. Yeah, you could trust him.

He was, you know he had a good sort of footballing brain, I guess. Mooney was quite versatile. He could do a job in midfield if you needed him to, or, you know, out wide, or, you know, but he likes scoring goals clearly, and he liked getting into the box and getting his shots away, and he knew how to do it. So he hadn't lost any of his enthusiasm as well, and there was always a sense of Moon, he was, you know, happy to be at Watford, I think, despite the fact that they dropped down. You kind of, you know, knew that he was still committed. I think the other two that jumped out at me from this season were Steve Palmer absolute sort of— when we talk about commitment, you don't really, don't really need to look much further than Steve Palmer, do you?

I mean, he was solid as a rock. I know he's playing a lot in midfield in this season, and that sort of defensive midfield role but you knew what you were getting with him. Absolutely dependable. And another, I suppose, just, you need players like that. You need players like that to build around. And, you know, having those sort of trusted lieutenants on the pitch that, you know, are going to go out and just do the, do the hard yards for the team. And he was absolutely that guy and clearly demonstrated that this season.

And I think what, he was, you know, invaluable to Watford and proved his worth for future seasons, which obviously didn't go unnoticed. And then lastly, I just wanted to pull out Richard Johnson. It's, you know, I think it was Ian Grant mentioned him as sort of like coming of age bit this season, which it wasn't as spectacular a season from him in some ways, but he had become by now the sort of the midfield general for Watford, I think, in terms of just being the— yeah, and by the end of the season, definitely. Yeah, he was a sort of all-action box-to-box type player, wasn't he, who could pick the ball up, you know, win tackles, spray passes around, but could also absolutely leather one in. Scored a beauty against Burnley this season, was probably the pick of the bunch, where he just sort of runs onto the ball and the first time places it into the top corner. Yeah but yeah, we knew by now we had. Very useful player in central midfield who had come through our youth team again.

So and had really— yeah, it was an absolute, you know, star. First name, one of the first names on the team sheet now, I think. Johnson, you know, you know, really established himself.

Yeah, he kind of played, played a few games at fullback, hadn't he, in the years before this. Yeah, I think that relationship with Palmer was kind of a blessing and a curse over across the season because them playing together for a lot of the early part of the season just, I think, really contributed to this kind of like boring, stodgy, turgid football that we were playing. There's both of whom were predominantly defensive-minded and were able to shield the defence well and perhaps win the ball back, but they couldn't join the midfield to the attack. And it took that, not quite a reinvention, but just Johnson just seemed to get better at everything at the same time.

Yeah.

And it took that to happen to turn it from an industrious midfield into a properly functioning one. Yeah, so yeah, brilliant. Really pleased with that Jono kind of made his mark this year.

But I think you've touched on— well, you certainly touched on one of the negatives there, which was just some pretty awful football for large parts of the season, like uninspiring you know, pedestrian, just passive, like just nothing, nothing to really get you know, particularly excited. And part of that was just like, I think, I think you're right, Matt, it was the imbalance in the squad. I think there wasn't. To some, I mean, I guess some of that comes down to coaching. Like, you feel like a good coach can get any group of players to find ways to be a bit more expansive, to create patterns of play which will open up teams, etc. Kenny Jackett, like, had some good qualities, but that wasn't him. He was not going to coach a team to do that.

Like, he would coach a team to be resilient, to tough it out, and to hang in there. But he wasn't going to turn a bunch of sort of fairly defensive-minded players into, you know, an attacking force. I mean, he just— it was, it was not, it was not the job for him in that regard. He wasn't helped by the injuries that he had to first-team players and his inability to call on what would have been. Like some of the most talented attacking players in the division by far if they'd been fit. I mean, if you look at Phillips, Connolly, and Ramage, like, if we'd had those three fit and in form for the season, then you would have high hopes of us scoring a lot more goals, I think, than we managed, because they are clearly talented players and at that level, you'd expect them to deliver, but they either weren't fit or they were woefully out of form. I mean, I think Ramage, you already said, you sort of had to write him off.

He'd not, he'd not been right for a while. He'd had injuries as well. And the problem with Ramage when he got injured was that you never felt like he was probably. You had to, you had to lower your expectations of how quickly he was going to recover from that injury. It's fair to say he had a bit of reputation whether that's fair or not. With Phillips, you know, we knew at the start of the season that he was out for the foreseeable, which is a real shame because he would have done— I think Phillips would have done a bit of damage at that level, like, if he'd had a— if he'd had more time, if we'd had him in the team for longer. He would have scored goals.

I think there's—.

I mean, he came back and scored those 4 goals in 2 games, but that was it, you know. He didn't score any other goals, but, you know, didn't play much outside of that spell. So, but yeah, no, I absolutely agree. He was, you know, with the right foil, would have been absolutely tailor-made to be, you know, top scorer in that division, I would imagine.

Yeah. And they just struggled with those striking options again, you know. Keith Scott coming in made a bit of a difference, but then they couldn't sign him and he went back to his parent club, and, you know, it's the same old story a little bit, just sort of trying to search for a solution. The benefit of that is it gave Gifton his opportunity to start getting minutes in the first team, although he wasn't at 16 necessarily. You wouldn't have ideally planned to have a 16-year-old starting as your main centre forward towards the end of the season. And then David Connolly. David Connolly's final season at Watford.

He— I think I felt a bit disappointed by this season. I was expecting him to, you know, be getting like 20 goals at this level, given the sort of reputation that he had given himself to some extent. I just, I just expected more from him. I know he also had his injuries, but I just felt like this talented player in there, you'd hope that at this level he was gonna asked him some more questions than he did, but it always again just felt like he was. In a bit of a sulk like a few other players when he wasn't. He's sort of waiting for things to happen for him. And that, yeah, that whole 'I've got nothing to prove at this level' did nothing to help him, I think, in terms of the perception that fans had of him at that time, in terms of whether or not he was really committed to the, to the cause.

And ultimately, I think as a fan, that does matter. Like, it's— it might just be, you know, hot air and it might be nonsense, but you have to feel like the players want to be there and that they're really trying. And if you don't feel that, whether that's true or not, like, but it does, it does colour your impression of them. And it certainly coloured, I think, my impression of that season with David Connolly. I just, I expected more from him, and for whatever reason we didn't get it. And it was you know, that was it for him. His contract was running down and he was angling for his move, wasn't he?

So, but a bit disappointing having broken in and scored all those goals the season before. Would you ever— were you. Under— as underwhelmed as me?

I think so, yeah. I mean, I can— I think more than, more than other Watford fans, I can kind of forgive some of the silly things that he said. Yeah, he's 18 looked about 15, not that makes any difference. You know, I think he was excited about what he thought he would— he could do in his career and didn't see that sticking around at Watford was going to be the quickest way to get to the top. Yeah, I think he said some foolish things and clearly. You know, didn't apply himself in the way that we hoped that he would. So the season ultimately wasn't a success, but yeah, he got that big move, didn't he?

So fair play to him. I don't hate David Connolly the way that some Watford fans do. I kind of don't really think much of anything about him.

No, he wasn't there long enough to really have— and, you know, he came through the youth team, you hoped that he would do great things he had a few good moments and then he was gone and that was, you know, that was it. I think I think with, you know, he got a move to Feyenoord, which was slightly out of left field. I think I got the impression that— I think I read, or I've been told, that Peter Reid was looking at him and was then persuaded to sign Phillips instead because I think Connolly was one that there was obviously a lot of fuss around, and, you know, lots of clubs were looking at Connolly. But and I think Sunderland had been looking at him and Peter Reid was persuaded to sign Phillips instead, and the rest is history. And Connolly went off to Feyenoord, and then he had a good career after that. I mean, he played for a lot of league clubs at a decent level after that. It didn't work— he did, yeah, didn't, didn't work out particularly well at Feyenoord, but it didn't hold him back too much in terms of his career after that.

Coming back to this season, Watford scored 45 goals in 46 matches which is the 5th worst in the league, and 2 of the relegated teams scored more. So it's Mooney. Mooney was top scorer with 13 as I said, he was deployed in midfield a lot, and then no one else got more than 7, so it was It's pretty miserly, but the defence did a good job, and that's why we, you know, ultimately finished in mid-table. And Kevin Miller, Player of the Season, with 25 clean sheets, which is remarkable. But you'd expect that given the amount of draws that we had. I mean, I think it's a tough one for Zak, wasn't it? It was a tough, tough gig, and I think he.

Ultimately got them through it to a point where there was then an opportunity to start to build again. And that's probably what this season was about. He didn't get to retain control of the first team for very much longer because Graham Taylor, having been set up in the stands as general manager and by all accounts getting thoroughly bored decided that now was the time for him to make his glorious return to first team management. Basically that was it for Zak. It was like, all right, thank you Kenneth, now you just kept this— you can sit down again and I'll take it from here. It was very like— I can't imagine— a bit of a stranger, wasn't it? Because Luther was in charge and then Kenny, and then and then Taylor being like, right now I'll just, I'll show you how it's done now.

You just let Dad do it for a bit and we'll see how that goes. So yeah, I think despite it being a season of beige and forgettable football. Obviously the return of Elton John at the end, and Taylor's announcing that Elton's coming home and Petchey's gone— a huge amount of excitement about that, then followed by Taylor giving it another crack of the whip in charge of the first team and announcing that he was going to be in charge for the, for the, for the next season. I think it was hard not to be enthused about what might be to come despite what we've just seen. Would you agree?

Yeah, I absolutely would agree. Yeah, whether it was my the enthusiasm of youth or not, but you know, I was, I was sure that the good things were ahead, you know. Elton John, Graham Taylor back in, you know, in proper control now, both the two of them. Yeah, you know and you know, as you said, you know, the team, the team changed quickly around this point. When teams get relegated, they either shed their squad at that point, or as you say, it takes a transfer window or two. But, you know, by the end of this season, we've, we've spoken about most of them, but there's a good kind of 6 to 8 kind of first-team players that are out the door, this kind of Glenn Roeder team has disappeared in the space of a season. If you think how long it took Glenn Roeder to put his— you know, it took him a good sort of season and a half, getting on for 2 seasons, for it to feel like his team and not one that he'd inherited from Perryman.

Well, you know, Roeder's team has been dismantled sort of in record time. And it was up to Taylor to build, not quite from zero, but, you know, he was going to have to make some canny signings, players that were going to have to go straight into the first team. Yeah, there were some sizable holes left from the players that were let go or, you know, released or sold.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think obviously the other— we've mentioned a few of those already. I think Phillips, we know, then departed this summer to Sunderland for not a huge amount of money. But I think it was a bit of a source of frustration at times. I think he immediately started scoring a lot of goals and people thought, oh, we should have got more money for him. But. The reality was he was a third-tier striker with a bad injury record at that time who hadn't really put a consistent run of form together.

So although the fact that we all sort of knew deep down that there was a pretty useful player in there, I don't think people knew exactly what Kevin Phillips would, would go on to achieve. And the fact that he would then form this incredible partnership with Niall Quinn at Sunderland, I suppose that was a bit for me that hurt the most because, you know, we always felt like if you could pair him with the right guy, he would score. And Niall Quinn became the ultimate foil for him, and boy did they do some damage together in the First Division and in the Premier League. So but, you know, a terrific signing for Watford, £10 grand from Baldock or whatever it was scored some, scored some good goals for us. Ultimately, we didn't get the best out of him because of injuries, and he went on to have a great career. So we're part of, part of his story, but he didn't have a, you know, in terms of the greater impact on Watford, I suppose it was fairly minimal. The last few things I think are worth pointing out about this season outside of Watford, this was A notable 4.

You already talked about Kevin Keegan's retirement. Man United win the title again ahead of Newcastle. Eric Cantona announces his surprise retirement at the age of 30. So that was a bit of a bolt from blue. Obviously had a very troubled career but had, you know, achieved his sort of peak years at Manchester United and then out of nowhere called it a day. And the other thing that really sticks in the mind about this season, Middlesbrough, they got relegated from the Premier League Despite reaching both cup finals, and this is the season where they would have stayed up but for a 3-point deduction, which they got from— basically, they just failed to complete a match against Blackburn, and they didn't get it postponed with enough notice, and so they were docked 3 points for it, and that's what got them relegated. So a real sickener for Boro.

Lastly, I think culturally, in terms of where we are now as we look ahead to the final stages of the final third of the decade, this is the summer that— the end of this season marked the end of the Conservatives' long period in charge, with Labour winning the general election in May with a landslide majority and Tony Blair becoming Prime Minister. Can you remember that, Matt?

I don't remember the specific moment of it happening. No, it's— that's— that's—.

Are you still a bit young? A bit young for that, or you just weren't interested at the time?

No, I was interested. I just don't have a strong memory of sort of the result being announced or anything. I think my memories of that area— of that era have. Have just become imprinted on my brain from watching television stuff. And, you know, they're false memories, not actually my memories, but I do remember the great kind of enthusiasm in the country for this political change. And it just interacted with and matched up with so many other things that were happening in sport and in culture and stuff like that. It just felt It felt unstoppable, I think, at the time.

It just felt like it was just something that was destined to happen.

Yeah, I remember it because I was kipped over at my mate's house. So it was the sort of end of— we're getting towards the end of our school years, A-levels, and I think our mates have been playing in their sort of end of season game, the local our mates playing for a local team. And so we've gone to watch that, and then everyone had gone around someone's house afterwards for some beers. And then I'd gone to get my mates. I remember him waking me up in the morning and telling me. That what had happened. And we're like, oh, does this mean like everything's gonna change?

Because just because— because it's all we'd known. Like, I'd been born— yeah, Margaret Thatcher was come to power I think when I— the year I was born. And then just all I'd known was Conservatives being in charge. So it was a big deal. It was a big deal, just the fact that someone else was going to be in charge. And it felt like a real, like, seismic moment at the end of that season. Obviously, we're towards the end of the decade, but yeah, it was something I think at the end of that season as we're sort of looking forward and.

Feeling, you know, that change was afoot.

Change was afoot indeed, yes. I think that kind of brings us to the end of our look back at '96-'97, a season probably best forgotten in the most part, but hopefully we've brought to life there some of the more interesting storylines on the pitch and off it that made it an important season in Watford's '90s. So I think that's it from me, so thank you very much for listening. Thank you to you, Michael. Thank you. We'll have another episode coming up very soon. If you have any memories of any of the seasons yet to come, or indeed any thoughts about Watford in the '90s more generally, then please keep them coming to us.

We're on Twitter @OhMyWordPod, and we love to get involved with that sort of thing and hear some of your memories and your stories and your Watford '90s. So thank you very much and we'll see you next time.

On the left foot and in, oh my word! And an old boy comes home to haunt.