Back in the Big Time

Hello and welcome to Oh My Word, the podcast about Watford in the 1990s. I'm here with the David Holdsworth to my Keith Dublin, my friend and co-host, Michael. How you doing, Michael?

Yeah, I'm good, thanks, Matt. It's good to be back.

Good to be back. And we're towards the end of our— towards the end of the '90s now, aren't we?

We are, yes. The decade, the end of the decade looms over us now, and the new millennium and all the optimism or dread that brings, depending on how concerned you were about the Y2K computer bug. But yes, this was back in the big time. I think where we, where we left last time was we'd spent about 3 hours going over the highs and the triumphs of the '98-'99 playoff season, the unexpected promotion back to the top flight. But not just back to the top flight, our first appearance in what was now the Premier League. And our first appearance in the top flight since 1988. So it'd been some tough times as we've covered over this decade.

Some, you know, dropping down to the third tier, the club in quite a lot of peril for several seasons, you know, ownership that were at best passive at worst bleeding the club and leaving it in a very sorry state. So from there to have our golden, our golden hero Graham Taylor back in charge, with Elton John back involved, with Luther and Kenny, and to be back in the top flight— absolute fairy tale. But the reality was we were back in a top division that had changed. It changed a lot in the time that we've been away. We're still going through some change. It wasn't the sort of— it wasn't quite the sort of, you know, the insane money-making beast that the Premier League is now. But it was already a very much richer, more lucrative league than we've seen before with that sort of higher influx of foreign players, bigger stadiums, star quality.

It was, it was going to be a steep learning curve for Watford. I think when you think about the current situation with the club and their, and their recruitment and the different views that fans have at the moment of whether or not the Pozzos are investing enough or whether they're getting recruitment right and giving us the best opportunity and giving Rob Edwards the best opportunity to succeed, it's interesting to think about the recruitment for this season going into Top Flight with all that context I just said. And Graham Taylor's position was basically, we'll just see how we go. It was like, the way we've— I've taken this team from the third tier to the Premier League in consecutive seasons with almost no investment, and I think I want to give it another go. It was— that was his perspective. Was basically, I'm gonna— these guys work their asses off to get here, they deserve a crack at it. That's, that's basically where he was coming from, right?

Yeah, for the second season in a row, basically, wasn't it? It's like with each successive promotion, it's been, right lads, well, here's a, here's a harder challenge for you. Yeah, and we'll, we'll kind of recruit around the edges, and I guess we'll, we'll come to that imminently. But yeah, but yeah, he's like, well done, lads, now here's your next task.

And I think, I think it wasn't the difference between now and then. I think now there's a sort of concern that, you know, the coaching team would like a couple of extra players and they're not being backed whether or not that's fair or not. But this was Taylor's, you know, I don't think the club was saying you can't buy any players. It was. He didn't want to spend a load of money on new players just because we got promoted that were going to disrupt his team and would be, you know, disrupt that team spirit. And also, he was— I just wouldn't necessarily seen it as fair.

I think that's right. Yeah, I don't think he wanted to destabilise the dressing room with you know, what I thought was going to come in was going to be you know, £3-5 million signings or whatever. Yeah, you know, like, I was obviously in another world. But yeah, I think he's he was looking to make sort of sustainable incremental improvements.

Yeah, there was, there were some interesting rumors around that time. I remembered one that I particularly caught my eye at the time was Hristo Stoichkov was linked with a move to Watford. And there was a couple of other old legends as well. Giuseppe Bergomi, the Italian hard man stopper. I don't know how old he would have been at the time, but pretty sluggish, I imagine. And even Lothar Matthäus, who was definitely at the end of his career, was apparently— apparently representatives were— we did make contact with representatives, Lothar Matthäus. So there were some rumours of some fairly glamorous names coming to Vicarage Road.

The reality was quite different. Des Lyttle on a free from Forest, Mark Williams on a free from Chesterfield, Dominic Foley's loan from Wolves was made permanent. We also made Alex Bonnot's loan permanent, who joined sort of midway through last season. And we signed Herwig Walker, an Austrian goalkeeper, to be third choice keeper. So that was the sum total of the transfers in before the season started. No fees, just a lot of free transfers from the lower divisions mostly.

I mean, Mark Williams, a free signing from Chesterfield, it's not— that's, that's quite different from bringing in Giuseppe Bergomi to shore up your defence. But we will discuss, we'll discuss Mark as the season goes on. But yeah, very limited investment. Did you, did you, what did you think about that at the time, Matt? Were you, were you satisfied with that business? Did you think it was slightly undercooked?

I think perhaps only Graham Taylor was satisfied with that business for the reasons we've just been through. Yeah, I'd hoped for more. I'd say I didn't, I kind of shared. I kind of shared the feeling that we didn't need to come on someone, a really big name to come in and break up what was a squad that had really good spirit in it. They demonstrated that over the last couple of years, and the danger was that you break that up and you lose so much more than the sum of its parts.

But still, it still would have been nice just seeing Hristo Stoichkov with Michel Ngonge up front. That would have been just for a couple of games. And what about players out?

Yeah, well, I think, I think the one that raised the most that raised eyebrows the most was Darren Bazeley. Yeah. Had kind of shared right-back duties with Nigel Gibbs over the past few seasons but it kind of developed into a good attacking full-back, particularly in the, in the second tier. Could play wing-back and on occasion could and did play further forward. He went to Wolves on a free. I think, I think that was mostly due to contract negotiations not quite working out. But we lose him.

We replace him with Des Lyttle. We'll see how that one goes. The other players that we, that we let go, again again, not receiving a fee. We didn't pay a fee for anyone, and we didn't receive a fee for anyone. Tony Daley goes to Walsall, which you can understand. Stuart Slater goes to Carlton in Australia, which you can definitely understand. And Alon Hazan returns to Israel.

And he'd had— I think we had said in the previous episode that he was a sort of unsung hero, if you like, given his standing and reputation amongst most fans at the time. I think in retrospect, we can see how much he brought to that team. But yeah, perhaps the Premier League was a step too far for Alon, and he went back to Israel. So 4 out, 5 in. And the crux of the team out on the pitch, you know, our first choice 11, it doesn't really change very much, does it?

No. Although the main, the main, it would have changed a lot less if we hadn't had a fairly horrendous injury crisis going into the start of the season. Alec Chamberlain got injured on a preseason tour of the Isle of Man. It seems like a Watford season wouldn't be, you know, in the '90s, wouldn't be complete without a random preseason tour somewhere where they weren't really going to play any proper football, but would be a good excuse for our friend Pete Fincham and his friends to go on a nice little away day. So by all accounts, a good time had on that particular trip. Don't know too much of the details from that, so maybe Pete will share some more with us another time, but I'm sure there's some tales to tell on that one. But it did mean that Chris Day, who hadn't really featured at all the previous season, he was going to have to start the season in net.

Chamberlain being such an instrumental figure, wasn't he, for that promotion-winning team? Such a calming presence. So you've immediately thrown a defence in a much tougher league into a bit of disarray there by having to bring in the rookie goalkeeper Chris Day. Paul Robinson was also injured. Dean Yates, I think we'd spoken about previous season, you didn't expect to get too many games out of him. But Hyde wasn't fully fit, and probably the most disappointing one was Nick Wright and Alan Smart were both injured.

And Nick Wright, we would barely see this season after his heroics in the playoff final. Gifton Noel-Williams was still recovering from the injury that he'd sustained midway through last season as well. So that is not a great way to prepare and made a difficult job even harder. We also had a new home kit, Le Coq Sportif again. It was a bit more of a simple affair than the previous one, just sort of yellow shirts, red shorts, bit of red piping. And the away kit is white with black shorts. I always quite like Watford in a white away kit.

I think it looks quite smart. I like the old Herald and Post one from back in the day. I think that was that's quite a snazzy kit, the Umbro one. And very '90s, very sort of turn of the millennium, phone sponsor in Phones 4 U, the high street mobile phone retailer. So they were the new sponsor replacing CTX, and the deal was said to be approaching a million pounds, which was the largest in the club's history by some distance, I think. So again, a sign of just being at that top table, this Open, even for a small club, a small fish. The money that was available to Watford was just a kind of, those kind of deals were never available previously.

And you know, that kind of money would never have been on the table. So just a sign of the times, I guess, of the, you know, the economics that they were now operating in. It was the first time we'd had squad numbers. So, you know, the novelty there of having squad numbers and names on the back of shirts, we hadn't had that before. And probably the most significant for the fans, the Rookery stand was now our home end. We mentioned a previous episode that they'd started to use the Rookery a bit more, and actually that last game of the season against Grimsby in the regular season where we needed to win to get through, they had both ends were Watford ends that day. And so a lot of fans had experienced the Rookery stand, but that was moved to the Rookery stand.

It was a bigger stand by about, I think it was about 1,000 or so more seats in the Rookery stand. It's just a sort of, it is bigger, more spacious, stand. But perhaps we can come on and talk about that later in the season, that in terms of experience of being in the Rookery instead of the Vicarage Road end? For me, it took a bit of getting used to, I have to say, because I loved the Vicarage Road stand as the home end. I had a lot of good memories from that, so I was a bit unsure about that one going into the start of the season. How about you, Matt?

Yeah, I'd spent pretty much all of the '90s in the Vicarage Road end, so yeah, it was a change. This was the season I didn't go to very many games. It was my first year at university. The bit of the season I remember the most is the early part of the season, which, as we'll find out, is probably the best bit to be familiar with. But that said, I did keep tabs on the club from afar, from Bath. And the team, we probably started off with one of the better home games that we could imagine. It's a game at home and it's against Wimbledon, who weren't necessarily expected to really be doing anything much this season. They'd not been great the previous couple of seasons.

The match starts reasonably well because Wimbledon have a player, Dean Blackwell, sent off after 15 minutes. He brings down Ngonge and he's gone. So yeah, three-quarters, more than three-quarters of the game still to play and they've only got 10 men. As you said, we're playing with this makeshift team with so many players out injured. We've got Richard Johnson's partnered by Alex Bonnot in central midfield and they do well. They look like a strong combination in this match, but the sort of fragility, pretty bad defending and uncertainty from Chris Day in goal doesn't help us. Kennedy scores a penalty, Michel Ngonge scores a neat goal, a flick from a sort of good flighted through ball from Johnson, but we lose 3-2.

Marcus Gayle scores a really good free kick as one of their three. You were there, but does that broadly sum up how you saw the game?

Yeah, it was just all of Wimbledon's goals you felt were frustrating in that they just— the defence you could see was struggling. They weren't as organised as they had previously looked. And I think without wanting to single out Chris Day, I think just the difference in having Chamberlain's presence— the third goal in particular, one that was the winner, was just an awful mix-up between him and Richard Johnson. It was an absolute calamitous goal. We're still watching it again and again. You can't work out how they've contrived to end up with the ball in the net from a very safe-looking situation. But yes, in some ways it was encouraging that, you know, we'd done enough to— probably should have taken more from the game, but also quite worrying that we'd ended up losing it against what were expected to be one of the other sort of weaker teams in the league.

They had Egil Olsen as their new coach, Drillo Wimbledon, and I think he was still— his ideas were still bedding in. So but it was— I think it was just— it was still just fun. Like, we were on Match of the Day. I remember buzzing even though we'd lost. I was like looking forward to seeing us on Match— looking forward to seeing Ngonge's goal and the fact that we would then— they'd talk about our game. And, you know, these are— I'd never seen Watford on Match of the Day, so that was that in itself. Was, and we were quite high up the running order as one of the sort of, you know, newly promoted teams, so they put us on fairly high up.

That in itself was just quite exciting. And yeah, and the stadium was quite full, you know. I was used to, we talked about how crap the attendances were a lot of the time, so just having a relatively full Vicarage Road, and there's a bit of buzz about it. And yeah, I wasn't too— I was— it was frustrating more than anything. I wasn't too defeated after that. I was just frustrated that we'd.

Messed up.

Yeah, particularly because a match like that where there are some individual errors, you like to think, okay, well, let's do a bit of work, let's try and iron those out, let's try and understand what the problems are that are resulting in those individual errors, sort that out and we'll be fine. So we followed that up with a trip up to the Stadium of Light. Sunderland had won the league at a canter with us following, following in the playoffs behind Bradford as well. But Kevin kind of get the feeling that Kevin Phillips has almost scored more goals against Watford than he did for us. And he gets 2 in this match and, you know, one of them's a really good, one of them's a really good finish from the edge of the box. We lose 2-0. I think that's our, is that our first trip up to the Stadium of Light, or maybe the previous season, I forget. But still, not a stadium that we were used to anyway.

But Sunderland were kind of busy putting down roots in the Premiership, as it was called then, I think. They'd come up and they had a decent, a decent squad. They'd obviously done very well to fly out of the division below and look like they had the mettle and the firepower to not only survive but thrive.

Definitely had the firepower. It was kind of— yeah, this hurts a little bit every time Phillips scores a goal against us, and particularly that second one was such a good goal. But anyway, he was going to have a great season that season. As were Sunderland. So fair play to him.

But we followed that up with a pretty awesome result and again, I think lingers long in the memories of all Watford fans, particularly in the context of the season as a whole.

Not for Matt Rowson, though.

Not for Matt Rowson, no, indeed not. No, poor Matt.

Poor Matt. It's just the only away game he missed, he says, so.

It's our first victory at Anfield. Matt was not there to share in the celebrations. Hyde and Robinson come back from injury into the team. And the kind of general feeling I get from, the reports of the match at the time, what I saw of it, I was at work, annoyingly, I was at work while the match was on. Although the good thing was I was working with a bunch of Liverpool fans. So getting to rub their noses in it as it was happening was great. It just would've been even better if we could see it or have been there.

But we kind of make Liverpool look, you know, ponderous, lack of ideas. They're still clicking, I think, because they've signed a lot of players. They've signed some players for big money in the summer. Houllier's in charge and they've splashed the cash a bit. But we just did— we just defend really well. Mooney scores a goal, kind of swept in at the far post eventually after a, after a set piece that isn't cleared. Richard Johnson gets injured and I was watching this back thinking, oh, is this the match where Richard Johnson gets injured injured?

And it's not, but it looks like he gets, he gets injured by 12-year-old Steven Gerrard. Yeah, he's kind of, kind of weird to look at.

Yeah, it's a very baby-faced Steven Gerrard, isn't it? It looks like he's just finished school.

But 1-0 and we spent fuck all goes the chant, and I think everybody's, everybody's really happy with that. But the headline writers, they do their best, don't they, tying it into recent events. Michael, can you remind us of that?

Yeah, so we had the solar eclipse, a huge, a huge cultural moment of the, of the late '90s, this year in particular. So I, it was just weird, like, how much, like. Attention this took up for people. But I was working at Dixon's headquarters in Hemel, which is on the sort of business industrial estate on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. And so you could get— lots of people have got these like special glass, essentially just cheap sort of visors to look through so you can actually look at the eclipse safely, because there's a lot of health warnings from the government and in the newspapers, like, don't stare at it without anything on, because you had to have this And it was, you know, Tesco and stuff was selling them so that you could— because they were just worried everyone was going to go blind trying to stare at it and stuff. And yeah, I think the fact that it was happening so close to the millennium as well, and all of the sort of superstition about the millennium and how significant that was it all, it all sort of tied into this great sense of sort of something, something was brewing, something sort of really big was happening.

And yeah, it's kind of veering from astronomy to astrology really, wasn't it? Yeah.

Definitely, definitely. It's like the sort of— there's a lot of that. It was, you know, it was a time of, you know, where Mystic Meg had her column and stuff like that. It was very much like that people just thinking there was some attaching greater significance to these things. And but they became great cultural events as well, and. It was just quite— looking back, like, we all sort of marched out into— there was sort of like, right, everyone just sort of started getting up and going out into the car park. And then we're all sort of just stood in a car park out on a sort of industrial estate on the outskirts of Hemel with our weird visor things on, just sort of.

And then it just— they did start to sort of get darker and darker, and it was quite spooky because it was the middle of the day. They just started to get darker and darker. And then you're in this sort of like weird twilight for, you know, a number of minutes. And that's where you could sort of look up and you could just see that tiny bit of the sun. But it was generally, it was almost completely, yeah, completely blocked out by the moon. And. And then it started to get lighter again and everyone was sort of like, "Oh, well, that was interesting," and just went back inside again.

Just back to work. Yeah, back to people making, you know, doing Austin Powers soundbites at work to try and be— People saying, "Yeah, baby," as if that was like the height of banter. And then, yeah, all the Budweiser— commercials, the Wassup one, that was getting quite a lot of use in the office at the time as well. So these were the moments of cultural significance that I can really pick out from that time of working in the office. So that happened. And then maybe the significance of that was that Watford striker with Moon in his surname was the man to net the first ever winner at Anfield, which as you're right, the newspaper men were not, were not slow to pick up on and have great fun with the puns.

Liverpool eclipsed by Mooney and various variations on that theme.

What a time to be alive.

What a time to be alive. Yeah.

Well, we quickly followed that 1-0 win with another 1-0 win at home to Bradford City, who I said came up with us. And it's Mooney scores again. He kind of crashes his header in. But 2 wins from our first 4 matches is a pretty good return, especially considering one of those was against Liverpool. We might have expected to get a better result against Wimbledon that we would have expected to have lost against Liverpool. So yeah, 6 points from 4 matches, not too bad. The first match of the season that I went to was Villa at home, which was, which was the next one.

I— so this is my first, the first. Time attending a Premiership match, and I was struck by the larger number of people that were there. The season before, the car parks were fuller earlier, there were many more people milling around, and it just almost felt like a cup game with that sort of audience. And it was a good goal that won it. We lost the match 1-0, but Mark Delaney scores a kind of one of those volleys from the corner of the penalty area where you kind of swivel and almost hit down on the ball, and it fizzes into the far corner. We play really well. My memory is that we were more than a match, to Villa, and we had Page and Williams at the back and Palmer as well.

They're looking like a really solid defensive unit, looking really organized. Not much was getting past them. They knew what they were doing. We looked tight. We just— it was just that one goal. You know, it was— we were braving defeat, and we all looked around and thought, we, you know, we should have drawn that, and we might have won it, but we didn't. And it's maybe a sort of familiar refrain as the season goes on.

The only other thing to note, that elsewhere, this was the— this was the time where Gullit leaves Newcastle. And I remember this being kind of a— kind of a big football event because he just had so many arguments with so many senior players at Newcastle, obviously one of the bigger teams in the country, and Alan Shearer, England captain, was left on the bench for a game against their local rival Sunderland. Which they lost. Which they lost, exactly. So if you can leave him out, I think, you know, yeah, if you leave out Shearer, you leave out the likes of Rob Lee, you piss off the rest of your better players, you're gonna be in trouble. So he was out the door and Bobby Robson came in. So at the time he would've been probably the oldest top flight manager at the time, and good to have a local hero back.

As we had with Graham Taylor. Good for Bobby Robson to be in charge at Newcastle. So we move on from that 1-0 defeat and obtain another 1-0 defeat away at Leicester. This was a match live on Sky, so I saw this one. I remember Williams being really good and thinking, yeah, he was great in the match before and he's good in this match. But again, it's a kind of familiar story with no cutting edge. And Muzzy Izzet, who'd scored, essentially scored the goal that sent us down a few seasons back, scores again just before halftime again, and we lose 2-1.

Lose that 1-0 and rounding off August in 15th place. That's again, that's okay. We might have lost a couple on spin, but you know, you'd want to be in 15th, wouldn't you? That's a nice place to be for a greater team. We go to West Ham, a match that I know that you were at, and we saw some players come back from injury. Do you think that made much of a difference?

It was very much following the theme of performances that you've just described, in that we gave it a good go, got stuck in, made it difficult for West Ham. And lost 1-0. So it was it was good to get Chamberlain back in the team in particular and Alan Smart as well. We just don't have much up front. It was, it was really like just lacked the ability to really land a punch, and I think that was as you described in the last few games. But what I would say was about this game. Di Canio and Wanchope up front for West Ham, that is just one of the most absurd front twos I think I will ever see.

I mean, to have one of them is sort of like a bit, you know, and then you— they're both unorthodox players, shall we say, in terms of their approach to the game. But to put them together was either absolute madness or genius. They were, they were good fun. They're just like, they're just all over the place and you didn't know what— I don't know, they seem to know what each other were doing. I'm not sure they always but it was, yeah, it was, it was a difficult, difficult afternoon for our back four, who did well overall but we came away with another 1-0 defeat. That was my second visit to Upton Park. I think this time I was.

In one of the new stands behind the goal, and they had the West Ham sort of family enclosure was above the away end. I say family enclosure, but I do remember some of the younger members of the West Ham family enclosure treating us to a shower of phlegm coming down from the top tier. So that was lovely as well, a lovely experience all round.

Lovely indeed. Absolutely. Won't say too much about our Worthington Cup adventures this season, but just to say that we got past third tier Wigan, a decent team in the third tier this season. We won the first leg and lost the away leg, but went through on away goals. Couple of good goals from Easton and Hyde in that first one, and that saw us play Middlesbrough in the third round, up to Middlesbrough, and we lose 1-0. Juninho scores, and Peter Kennedy misses a penalty in that match, as he had done in the away leg against Wigan. But in between all of those games,

Was a fun match at home to Chelsea, which is, I think, another one that, like the Liverpool match, another famous victory. And good that many more people could see this. Obviously many more Watford fans could see this. And until that point, Chelsea, who were managed by Gianluca Vialli at the time, were unbeaten in the league. They were busy in the Champions League. They'd just played a game against AC Milan. When they came to the Vic and they chopped their team around a little bit, made some rotation, probably one of the pioneers of the rotation Chelsea in this sort of era.

But still, you know, Graeme Le Saux is playing for England at the time, Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly, Zola comes off the bench. Sutton, who we probably know now more of a kind of, you know, tedious pundit, but at the time he was a big money, big money striker, wasn't he? They spent a lot of money on him, somewhere in the region of kind of £6 million, I think.

I think it was more like £10 million. Yeah, wow. Yeah, it was a big signing.

Big signing. Yeah, but we signed Nordin Wooter from Real Zaragoza for £950 grand, which was, which, you know, pretty much smashed the record fee that we've paid for a player. And he did really good. And I think it's, you know, two of the players that we'd released in the summer, Stuart Slater and Tony Daley, we've mentioned in previous season reviews, they brought a bit of unpredictability and dribbling ability to the team, a team which really had very little of that. And all of a sudden, Wooter in, and that's kind of the one thing that he does do. He's very good on the ball, very direct, had a, affinity of kind of running down blind channels now and again, but, and perhaps his end product wasn't as good as it could be, but wow, really kind of lit the game up on his debut. Very sort of, lots of flair, lots of unpredictability.

And Chelsea just didn't know what to do with him. And indeed the rest of our team played incredibly well as well. We were strong, determined, committed, but also clever and stylish in some of our play. I particularly enjoyed remembering when I watched the highlights video, that surging run from Steve Palmer, kind of, going through their midfield completely and then smashing our kind of 20, 22-yard drive just a little bit wide of the, wide of the post. But a good match. You were there. Do you— what memories of the goal?

Oh yeah, it was such a great game, this one. It was one of my favourite matches I think that I've been to for any period of time as a Watford fan. I think because it was a classic, you know, you went there with the expectation of we're probably going to lose this because of the, you know, the calibre of the players. It would just say, but you really wanted us to just sort of get stuck in and give it a good go. You always felt, I think, at this time with Chelsea though, like there was a chance against them because. They had a lot of quality, but they had a sort of brittle— I've had a bit of a soft side as well.

You felt like you could get at them. And it was one of those classic games where it just— we just grew as the game went on, and you started to sense that we could actually get something from this because Chelsea were just not able to stamp their authority on the game. And the longer it went on the harder they were finding it against Watford. And Watford were getting more and more confident and more aggressive. And just some of the, you know, seeing like Mooney sort of throwing, throwing off Marcel Desailly. And like, I mean, it's just sights that, you know, you did not expect to see. I remembered seeing the goal that Marcel Desailly scored for AC Milan in the Champions League final, European Cup final.

There was a way he. He— I think it's when they beat Barcelona 4-0 in the final and he scores a brilliant goal. He runs forward, yeah, and just sort of side foot lifts it around the goalkeeper into the corner. And he just was imperious. And you're like, blimmin' heck, he's a bit good. And then Tommy Mooney's sort of battering him. It was just one of those days.

And Chelsea just weren't— I know it's cliché, but they weren't up for it. They weren't up for it in the same way Sutton was not— just didn't get a kick, really. He was really struggling, and he struggled all season and then they sold him to Celtic. So I mean, you know, that move did not go well for him. I think he only scored one league goal all season. It was an absolute disastrous season for him. But yeah, they brought on Zola towards the end— well, not towards the end, but with, you know, about 25 minutes to go.

But even he, a player of his talent, couldn't couldn't really wrestle control of it for Chelsea despite looking quite dangerous. And Watford's— Watford had the one telling moment of the game, the deciding moment of the game. You mentioned Wooter, he had several good runs from midfield. One of them resulted in the goal where he sort of burst forward towards the Chelsea box. The ball gets laid off to Smart, and it's another of those Alan Smart goals that we've talked about, you know, how technically good he could be at times in terms of really— so now the first-time finish outside of the boot, which he sends sort of curling back around the goalkeeper, around Ed de Goey's despairing grasp, into the bottom corner. Such a, such a difficult strike, I think, to hit it that cleanly.

The kind of strike that you would see a lot of players mess up, and he makes it look absolutely effortless. And the Vicarage Road absolutely erupts. It was tremendous atmosphere, tremendous victory. And we sent Chelsea packing with all their star, you know, with Didier Deschamps and co, World Cup winners.

'On your bikes.' Yeah, go home and polish your championship medals.

Yeah, well, they were— I mean, we're talking about players who the previous season had won the World Cup, so for France. So it was that sort of pedigree that Watford had just sent on their way. So tremendous fun, tremendous fun. And that went 3 wins from the first 8 league games. So although we like lost some that we probably should have got something from. We'd also had a couple of unexpected victories in the results against Liverpool and Chelsea.

Yeah, more than a point a game. So I don't think anybody was disappointed with that. We finished, so we round out September with a defeat at Highbury. Again, solid, but you know, just a frustrating loss. And you wonder if we'd raised our game a little bit more, whether they would've raised theirs in turn or not. We'll never know that, but we did look, defensively strong, and Kanu scores, scores a late winner actually, kind of side-footed from an angle, sort of typical Kanu goal, getting amongst it and then just kind of being slightly clinical with the inside of his foot. We round out the month finishing 14th.

Graham Taylor opens a chequebook again. He signs Charlie Miller from Rangers, central midfielder, for better part of half a million pounds. Miller's kind of come through the Rangers system as the next big hope for both Rangers and Scottish football, to a degree, and. Taylor alludes to this in some of his interviews around the time, around the signing. Miller's lost his way, and some of that can be ascribed to his sort of what's euphemistically referred to as a kind of like challenging, hard upbringing and kind of the people that he still hangs around with. And there's a sense that there are some bad influences around and he's not taking care of himself as a professional in the way that he ought to.

And getting him out of Glasgow might be the way to unlock that potential. And there is a lot of potential there. And if Watford can make this transfer work, then he'd be an absolute bargain, half a million pounds, you know, potentially good international level player. So we'll see how that one works out. That we finish September and go in and play young and exciting Leeds team as our first match in October.

Yes, and we've, we've just talked about that sort of unexpected victory at Chelsea. What we're now looking at, without wishing to, you know, spoiler alert the next couple of months, next 3 months are long. We're in for a long slog basically from this point onwards. The narrative of the season takes a bit of a different turn now, and the realities of being in the Premier League start to hit home. We lose at home to Leeds United. As you said, they had a very, you know, young and exciting team on the up. Lost 2-1.

Mark Williams scored a brilliant goal, a sort of goal that a lot of strikers would be proud of, where he sort of takes the ball on the turn, flicks it up and smashes it into the corner. But it disguises the fact that Leeds are a much better side than us, and they win 2-1 and probably should have won more comfortably than that. They were much the better side that day. And results did not improve. No surprises that we lost up at Old Trafford. I went to that one. It was, you know, bearing in mind this was the European champions Manchester United.

We were playing them in October of '99, the season after they had that famous triumph in Barcelona. So it was Manchester United in their pomp. It was all of that sort of glory team, Beckham, Scholes, Giggs. Keane, Cole, and Yorke up front. They absolutely cut Watford to pieces seemingly at will. It was a tremendous display from them. We also have a player sent off, and Mark Williams gets sent off for a sort of comical foul.

Maybe a little bit harsh actually, because I don't think he was actually trying to clear the person out, but he does.

And it just looks so funny, doesn't it? I mean, Taylor's absolutely incensed by it, but I mean, I look at it and think, if he does that today, he's a definite red card. Yeah, I mean, it's an act of— he's lost control. Yeah, he's out of control. He's out of control. But it doesn't result in any particular danger. And I suppose technically he wins the ball, which is something that people say a lot in the late 1990s.

But yeah, I think, I think it was a deserved red card. But I can, I can understand Taylor being incensed about it given the rules and the sort of football culture at the time.

Apparently this was beamed to 4,000 fans at the Vic, this game. So That can't have been a particularly fun watch for them, to be honest, because Watford barely had a kick until Richard Johnson does score a really nice consolation goal running onto a cross and. Sort of half-volleying it in first time, a classic Johnson, just leathering it into the goal. But other than that, Watford were completely outclassed. I missed the first couple of goals because I was taking the TransPennine Express from Leeds to Manchester, which I hadn't— I hadn't really factored in the fact that express was used very sort of liberally in the description of that train service, which seems to take about 3 hours to cross the Pennines to Manchester. By the time I got to Old Trafford, we were already 2-0 down.

Well, you missed a good— there, there's some good goals in that game.

Yeah, no, I saw that overhead kick one that Andy Cole scored, which was a very nice goal. But anyway, I don't want to— I don't want to spend any more time praising that Manchester United team. They were— yes, they were good and they beat us. Well done. More defeats followed defeats at home to Middlesbrough 3-1. Tommy Smith scored a really good goal, but again, a bad defeat away at Coventry, 4-0 at Coventry.

And Coventry were not good. That is, that was a stinker, an absolute stinker. But with all the defenders injured, I mean, we were playing the back three of Gibbs, Steve Palmer, and James Panayi. I mean, that's what we're dealing with now in terms of threadbare squad and up against it in the Premier League. So, needless to say, it doesn't work. We get absolutely humped at Coventry. Significant moments in the background here, Lee Cook signs from Aylesbury, boo.

But, you know, a player who there would be quite a lot of excitement about in years to come. An excellent spot from the Scouts there playing at non-league Aylesbury. And we saw Neil Cox on a free from Bolton, so at least had an extra body to bring into that creaking defence.

And yeah, I think it's kind of seen— it's accepted by probably by staff and fans at the time that the Des Lyttle signing really hasn't worked out at all.

We haven't mentioned him, have we? The fact that we haven't mentioned him, the fact that we haven't mentioned him is probably a sign that it hasn't worked out. He's not in the team now, is he? And he's— he's— he was— when he was in the team, it was not working. He just wasn't fitting into the team and did not look up to it. So yeah, it hadn't worked out. Neil Cox, a bit more versatile, isn't he?

Because he can play right back, but he can also play centre-back as well. So he's someone who, given our injury struggles at the back. You know, you can throw him in pretty much anywhere to do a job. We then we get a draw. This was another slightly cringe moment of the season. We got a draw at Hillsborough. I went to this one as well.

2-2 draw at Sheffield Wednesday. But that's why this is one where we walked away pretty frustrated that we hadn't won because we've been in front and let Wednesday back into it. Robert Page scored. I mean, if Page scores, you have to win, right? Yeah. He doesn't score. So if Robert Page scores, it's got to be a winner.

So immense frustration. And then Graham Taylor, on his sort of post-match interviews, started singing a little "We've Got a Point" ditty to the interviewer. Do you remember this? They were asking if he was sort of disappointed, you know, that they'd given the lead away, and then he sort of burst into song. Do you remember that?

I do remember that. I remember that was one of several slightly cringeworthy Graham Taylor match of the day interviews. When there's another one where he talks a lot about the plot of Coronation Street, and I just Yeah, I mean, for all the love, and I have all the love in the world for Graham Taylor, he was he could be a bit funny sometimes in there in the aftermath of a match, but I could forgive him that, I think.

I think it was, 'E-I-E-I-O, we have got a point.' Yes, I didn't want to do it, but I knew that's what it was. I had to just, you know, for the record, that's what it was. And I will never utter those words again.

It's like, it's just screaming at the telly, 'Dad, stop doing that!

Oh my God, Dad!' where did we go next? We drew at home to Newcastle. I remember, I remember this one because we were giving Alan Shearer loads because this was when Shearer was having a bit of a bad time of it with England, and England were having a bad time of it. It was Kevin Keegan was in charge, but England were a bit miserable to watch at the moment. They weren't playing great stuff, and Shearer was not really seemed to be doing very much up front. So the Watford fans were giving him a bit of stick. Which then really pissed off Bobby Robson, who in his post-match was sort of calling out the Watford fans for like, oh, why do we do this to our sort of England heroes and attack them and blah.

And it's sort of like, have you seen Alan Shearer play? Like, he's not particularly friendly. Like, let's put it this way, it's like, it's one thing to support him playing for England, but when he's playing against your team, he is a bastard. Like, he will, you know, do whatever it takes to get the job done. So sorry that we didn't roll out the red carpet for him, Bobby. I love Bobby Robson, by the way, but I disagreed with him on that one. Anyway, we've got a draw.

Michel Ngonge scored, but it's not enough. We needed to win. We were going through the months. We're now— that was the 20th of November. We lose at home to Sunderland at the end of the month, 3-2. We're losing these games narrowly, but we're just not having enough class a cutting edge and resilience to get us through it. They're trying, but they're just not getting their results.

So difficult. We end November in 19th. I think Ian Grant wrote at the time that our attacks rely too much on individual improvisation, and Sunderland had a distinct method and game plan. And I think that is, that is where we are. We sort of felt like. The team had lost their way a little bit in terms of their, just their overall sense of purpose and how they were set up to play. And it just wasn't getting them what they needed in games.

They were trying, but it wasn't coming off overall. They weren't— they were rarely getting absolutely hammered. But I say that in the next game away at Wimbledon on the 4th of December. This is probably the low point of the season. Several people have remarked that this was like the worst game that they've ever been to as a Watford fan. We lost 5-0 at Selhurst Park, no redeeming features, terrible all over the pitch. This was a relegation rival we were playing. You lose 5-0 to a team that you're competing with to, you know, stay out of the bottom 3, and you kind of start to think the game is up a bit.

Wimbledon were just completely dominating us, and they were not a good side. They just. Just went— everything went wrong. Marcus Gayle scored another good goal against us. You know, it's not like Wimbledon didn't have some players of some merit in their team, but we've just— they've been fighting really hard, Watford, in so many of the other games, and, you know, coming up maybe short or getting draws here and there. To lose 5-0 at Wimbledon, it was unacceptable really, and I think that really, really knocked the stuffing out of us. So a very grim day at Selhurst in early December, and there was no relief to be had in the FA Cup with a third-round tie against Birmingham, who were obviously in a lower division to us, but we were at home.

They beat us 1-0. It was another very poor display. Individual form, I think, by this stage is. No one's in form, I think it's fair to say. We don't have anyone who's sort of really leading the team at the— from the front. The defence has obviously lost confidence because they've not kept any clean sheets for God knows how long. Charlie Miller's flopped.

Nordin Wooter, I think it would be harsh to describe him as a flop, but he's not producing what we need from, you know, his role. We need more creative spark, we need more purpose, and it's not coming. So it looks pretty tough, doesn't it, Matt?

Yeah, it doesn't— it's still very nice position to be in. And I mean, you know, the defeats don't end there.

No, we go into the next game at home to Everton. I remember this one, I was at this game, and this was— this really summed it up for me because it felt like we've really they— I felt like they thought like, right, we've had a shit couple of months, we need to stop it, we need to get stuck in. Everton were not one of the best teams in the league, so they were a team that you know, you would think if we really turn up for this, we've got a chance against them. And they did really, really put a shift in, but they conceded 2 goals. So find themselves, you know, up against it straight away. And Ngonge scored another good goal to get us back to 2-1. And then they're really like having a battering Everton, and you really felt like the second goal was coming.

But then Unsworth scored a late penalty for Everton to take it out of sight, and Cox is sent off for dissent. He obviously disagreed with the decision, and he was so angry about it, he gets sent off. I remember in the aftermath, the anger of this one. Richard Johnson was complaining to the referee, and I felt— I thought he was going to get sent off after the game as well because he sort of picked the ball up. The referee was about to pick the ball up to leave the pitch, and Johnson picked it up before him and just left it into the stand. He was so out right in front of the ref. That's why he's going to get a red for that.

But he the ref showed some leniency, thankfully, because other refs would have sent him off, I think, for dissent as well. So it was, it was so frustrating because you just thought they really, they really tried. They just didn't, they just weren't good enough. And that's hard to watch as a fan because you're like seeing that every week. You really felt for them because you felt like they couldn't have really put much more effort in, but they just weren't, they just weren't quite good enough. And again, that's difficult to watch as a fan. And then yeah, it doesn't get any better because they then go to White Hart Lane and lose 4-0 against Spurs with David Ginola again tormenting us.

And there's not much to say about that one, another sort of drab performance. 11 Matches without a win, drawn 2, lost 9. The good times of the early months of the season are a distant memory and we're well down there now. Relegation is, it's not a certainty yet, but most people are starting to accept that is All roads lead to the Endsleigh, I think, at this point. But there is a brief moment of reprieve on the 28th of December, a bit of Christmas cheer. Thank God I went to this one, so I did actually get to see a win before I went back to university in Leeds. Played Southampton at home.

A win! We go 2-0 up. The main talking point of this game was the performance of Xavier Gravelaine, a sort of enigmatic journeyman French striker who ticked all the boxes of what you want from a sort of an enigmatic French striker. Basically, it was— he was incredibly temperamental. Very grumpy, looks like he was a second away from just sort of kicking someone in the head and getting sent off, but was also a second away from doing something amazing and scoring a goal out of nothing. You know, he felt he had that touch of flair, an insane amount of arrogance. He played for like about 74 clubs by the time Watford had signed him, and he wasn't at the end even finished in his career.

I think he played for—.

We signed him from PSG.

Yeah, and he played for PSG on 4 separate occasions.

It's crazy. I mean, PSG are a new, newly formed club in the grand scheme of things and they're not at this point, they're not the giant that they are now. But even so, we're signing a player from PSG, and yeah. I, my memory of Zavgráv is the same as yours. It kind of looks like a suspicious character from a horror film or something like that, and it's, it's all in the eyes, isn't it? It's just an excess of temperament. Yeah, supremely interesting character.

Supremely interesting character.

And he did this. We signed him, so we signed him from PSG a few, a few, a few matches earlier. I think it was at the beginning of November, and he'd sort of been in and out of the team. He gets sent off in one of the matches as well, so he misses, misses 3 matches. So he's not involved regularly week in, week out. But yeah, he does, he does what we want him to do. He hasn't scored until this point, but.

He contributes that unpredictability that you just talked about and grabs 2 goals in this game. And obviously, obviously, second goal proves to be the winner as we beat Southampton 3-2.

Also featuring a goal from sort of budget David Beckham, David Perpetuini, as well, who had a wonderful set of blonde curtains on his head at this time. We didn't see too much of Perps after that, but a nice moment of contribution from him to the season. And we end the year in 19th, 3 points from safety. So I don't know if that is better or worse than expected. The fact that we're not bottom is something and 3 points from safety doesn't sound like that much.

So being 3 points from safety doesn't sound great, but the next match is against the team immediately above us, Derby. And assuming the Millennium Bug didn't take down all of our systems and hardware, then that will be our first match of the new millennium. Derby are in absolutely terrible home form. They're losing like 10 out of their last 13 home matches, something silly like that, I remember reading. But they do, they win easily enough against us. They win 2-0. Taylor then signs Heidar Helguson from Norwegian side Lillestrøm, again breaking our transfer records, so signing him for, 1.5 million, a kind of unheard of amount of money for Watford to be signing, but.

Taylor sees that a bit more firepower is what's, what's needed. So rather than plugging holes in the defence or strengthening midfield, we have an excess of strikers already. We have lots of them. None of them in particular are doing the business in terms of getting goals. The likes of Smart, when he's fit the very rare occasions we see Gifton Noel-Williams, they can do a job of kind of knitting an attack together and being a presence and a focal point for our attack, for the other players to kind of play off them. But when they're not there, Mooney again is injured a lot.

When those players aren't there, we look kind of powder puff up front. Helguson isn't the tallest, but even upon signing him, the stories were that he's brilliant in the air and he's all action. So seems like the sort of player that would settle into our team quickly. And indeed he does. The next match is against Liverpool, which was a fun match. We do lose it 3-2. I mean, you know, story of the season.

It's a fun match and we take a good team a decent amount of the way there. Liverpool do go 2-0 up. Richie Johnson scores a kind of one of those long-range passed into the bottom corner goals with the inside of his foot. And Helguson, that was just before halftime, and Helguson scores immediately after halftime, kind of getting in front of the keeper from set piece and flicking over him. And then are we gonna hold on for a draw perhaps? You know, unlikely that we're gonna push for a winner, but to have won at Liverpool and to draw at home would be brilliant. But Vladimir Smicer, one of their summer signings, scores.

And we do get a bunch more half chances as well, but can't put any of them away. And it's another brave defeat, which is a sentence you kind of get very quickly bored of saying.

I think the thing about that game, that even though it was a brave defeat, was the fact that you could see. And it would define Helguson's time with Watford, like the raw, like, energy and enthusiasm that he brought to that team. Like, when he scored those goals, like, his immediate bond with the Watford fans, like, he was like fists pumping and sort of roaring at the crowd.

And it was just day one, wasn't it? It was like day one. It was like part of that, got the vibe.

Yeah, he's like, I am up for this, I'm gonna like stick my head on the end of things and I don't care if it's, you know, I get booted in the face at the same time. It was like that sort of all-action forward play that we've always loved and he epitomised that in that game. And although like, yeah, there's obviously like. He wasn't perfect. There was, you know, it wasn't the sort of complete centre forward and can do everything, but there was enough there immediately for you to think like, oh, I think we're going to like him. He's going to do something for us that we're going to enjoy. And there was an immediate rapport there, I think, that we hadn't had with any of our other signings that are coming this season.

So that meant that was something you kind of thought, this one I think we've got right.

Yeah, and he scores in the next match as well, which is again a really disappointing 3-2 defeat this time away at Bradford. I know you'd made the trip to Bradford, and, you know, another disappointing defeat to a relegation rival. That's just, it's just not good enough, is it, in those, to be losing those matches. You can lose against Liverpool 3-2, and you can, you can have a nice story about how well you played, but if you're losing 3-2 to Bradford, that's, that's bad news.

Yeah, and we just didn't look like we were again competitive in these games that you never thought we were going to win them. And that just kept happening. And that was another game like that where, you know, we took Bradford the distance, but they won and we didn't. And we never really, you never really felt like we were going to win it. And. So it was starting to feel inevitable when the other team got the sort of third and decisive goal.

Yeah, I mean, that's the match that puts us bottom. We've been in 18th and 19th for the past couple of months, but that puts us bottom. We're 9 points from safety with 15 games to go. So, you know, that's 45 points to play for there, but you know, that's never how it works out, is it? Gravelaine's brief Watford career comes to an end. Having signed on a free from PSG, we sell him back to France to Le Havre for £300 grand.

So a nice, a nice profit there. He hasn't been even been at the club 100 days. He's we sold him for a £300 grand profit. He's, he played 7 times and scored twice. And he's probably his— the memory of Xavier Gravelaine is probably outsized compared to his contribution. But we'll always have that Southampton match, won't we?

We'll always have that Southampton match. You'll always have a place in Watford folklore, I think. Xavier Gravelaine, it's sort of name that will be whispered on the winds until you remember Xavier, it was a bit of a legendary character, I think. So I'm glad I got to witness his finest moment in a Watford shirt in his brief stay. That to me is partly what being a small club in the Premier League is always about, is this sort of like slightly left-field random signings. And a lot of them don't come off, but occasionally you pick someone out who. Does something amazing and then moves on and you forget all about them.

But such is life. Yeah, such is life. Yeah.

So yeah, we do move on from some of these things and some of them stay in memory. One of the things that we'd all like to forget, I think, is a 4-0 defeat up at Villa. Again, we didn't get tanked very often in this season, but losing 4-0 up at Villa— That was a tanking. It's not good. That was a tanking. Around this time, we are conceding lots of goals. That's 29 goals shipped in 9 matches.

If it's around 3 a match, you're never even gonna draw a match, are you? Let alone win. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar. Exactly, I mean, it sounds very familiar, doesn't it? I mean, that isn't the story of the entire season, but during this period, it's not good. We face Leicester at home and we draw 1-1.

So this is the 12th of February, almost Valentine's Day, and it's the first point gained this year, this calendar year, this millennium. Him which is, which is terrible really. It is a match that's, that's. It's kind of full of blood and thunder and stuff like that, but not an awful amount of quality. But we probably should have won it again, you know, have the chances to do that. Smart comes back from another one of his injuries, and there are some presentable chances that he sees and can't put any of them away. Wooter scores our goal, but yeah, 1-1, not really good enough.

Need to start winning your home matches. If you're going to lose all your away matches, then you still need to win your home matches. One of the home matches we did win was against Chelsea, but then when we go away, we lose. And I get bored of saying it, we lose 2-1. It's a tight match, we have lots of chances. You know, their goal comes from, their winning goal comes from a break from our corner. You know, we are in their box, we are doing things, we're not doing enough of them.

Smart scores again, as he did in the home match. And again, yeah, this match after coming back from injury, but it's just not good enough. Defeat, we're still bottom obviously, and but you know, the gap from— the gap to safety is now 10 points. You would expect to lose away at Chelsea, but. So they're just, they're demoralising defeats. And then they continue, home to West Ham, Helguson scores again. So he's got what, 3 goals in his first 5 or 6 matches, but we lose 2-1.

Another early goal, the pattern of these matches is we're demonstrating a fighting spirit, but too often it's when we're 1 or 2 goals down. You know, too often it's confined to the second half. You know, and we're in fight back mode. So you would, we would expect to be trying hard, but Yeah, it's not good. We lose 2-1. Couple of outgoings. The Des Lyttle experiment, which is not the name, not the name of a prog band that ends.

He joins West Brom on loan and would join them permanently in the summer. And Michel Ngonge, who's obviously started the season in the first team, was in and out, but, you know, had been in the team and had scored goals. He drops down a division and joins Huddersfield on loan as well. So we're in March now and they will be with their respective clubs to the end of the season. A trip up to Newcastle and we play fairly well and we go behind, but this time we don't really look like getting anything from it, I don't think. I think we probably deserve to lose that one, never really looked like troubling them. We lose 1-0.

And when you think we're never going to win again for the rest of the season, finally a home match against Sheffield Wednesday. Alan Smart, he loves scoring home goals in our Premier League wins. He scores. So he turns in Tommy Smith's cross, because around this time Smith is playing more and more. He'd been— he'd broken into the side on occasion kind of several years ago, and he's still very young. It was when he was kind of. And he's 17 years old, I guess. So he's now sort of 19, 20, and he's showing that he can do it.

He can be the bright spark, and he can be, if not our best player, then definitely one of our best players in this run. He's playing out on the right, he's playing through the middle, and he's kind of got an ability. He's not the best dribbler in the world, but he can run with the ball and he can run off it. He was always very slight when he first started, and he's filled out a little bit and still looks very young. You know, this seems to be more about his play. He's got some technical ability and there's a lot to look forward to, I think, with Tommy Smith sort of coming through, you know, in terms of young attackers at Watford. We've had a few in the '90s and Smith is, you know, the latest one off the conveyor belt.

You're right, Smith is one of the actual— we haven't talked about him as much because there's just been a, you know, relentless churn of defeats. But Smith, there had been a bit more positivity about Smith's performances and, you know, we skirted over the Middlesbrough home defeat earlier, but Tommy Smith's He's got a really good individual goal in that one, and there was— he was someone who. Again, we were still relying on individuals more than team play, but he was someone who you felt might make something happen and was showing a bit of endeavour and no lack of skill either. So that was something that was giving some optimism for what might follow, I suppose. Obviously not for this season, but it was encouraging that we had a young player who'd come through our team who was now starting to establish himself in the first team in the toughest environment to do that in the Premier League.

So yeah, Smith had provided the assist for Smart, and Smart scores a goal in the next match. It's a home draw, 1-1 against Spurs. Smart scores late on to rescue a point. So this is one of those rare occasions where we're pushing forward trying to grab an equaliser or winner, and we get it. Wooter, I remember, plays quite well in this match. So that's the end of March. We're still bottom.

We're, you know, we're still 9 points adrift of safety. Yeah. Which I think everybody's, everyone's accepted now, I think, that we're definitely down.

The game is up, I think it's fair to say the game is up. It's just sort of, when and not if. So it really becomes a matter of playing for pride, I think, over the course of the remaining matches of the season and trying to get the most out of this that we can and not forgetting who we are as a club, I think, as we go into this final run of games. And I think the fans have still been— there's obviously been grumbles, there's been moans, it's not been a fun experience for a lot of the time, but. There reaches a point where I think the fans start to just unite around the team again. Yeah which, which we'll come on to shortly.

We kick off April with a well, the defeats away at Everton, a ground that until recently we'd never had any success on. So well done Claudio for ending that record. But we lost 4-2 in this game. Smart gets on the scoresheet again, and Hyde scored a good goal, but defensive blunders, and we lost 4-2. Drew home to the fairly awful Derby County side, should have won, didn't. Chamberlain saved a penalty in that one. Lost away at Southampton 2-0.

So, you know, the results aren't getting any better as we get towards the end of April. We play Arsenal at home. This was you know, a better performance. We went down 3-2, an entertaining game. It looked like we were dead and buried at halftime. Arsenal scored 3 first half goals. I'm not saying—.

Yeah, I mean, it was— they were— we were 3-0 down at halftime, but it probably— not too many eyebrows would have been raised if we'd gone into that 1-0 up, I think, at halftime. Yeah. So we played well. Yeah. And had some chances of our own, but I mean, those goals that they scored.

Yeah, Thierry Henry's first season at Arsenal, and one of his goals is an absolute beauty where he just sort of spins. It was the kind of goal that he started to make routine, but at the time was something remarkable where he, yeah, he spins his marker quite a way out. So I think it's about sort of 40-odd yards out, midway inside the Watford half, and then gets his stride going, motors towards goal, and brilliant sort of curling finish into the corner. The kind of goal that he made, you know, you start to see every week on Match of the Day at one point with Thierry Henry, didn't you? Not just like once, he'd do it sort of 2 or 3 times a game. It was it was remarkable.

It was just incredible how easy he made that kind of really difficult goal look because he did it so often. But he was still new to the Premier League and people hadn't quite appreciated, I think, how good he was going to be. So you're right, it was a tough half for Watford because they didn't deserve to be 3-0 down at halftime. Arsenal had showed their quality with their sort of outstanding players that they had, but Watford really were a bit hard done by to be 3-0 down. Pulled 2 goals back in 2 second half minutes, and it was, you know, there was a chance that they were going to get something, but they didn't. It just wasn't enough story of the season battling. Deserved something, didn't get it.

Results in other matches over the weekend mean that is it, we are relegated. So a difficult, a difficult day, a difficult way to go, but it kind of encapsulates the way that the season has gone for this team. And they followed it up the following week at home to Manchester United. So difficult sort of back-to-back fixtures. Again, they don't disgrace themselves. Manchester United are already champions, so they put out quite a changed team, as Ferguson used to do when he was sort of trying to rest players or give other players a chance when, you know, the job had been done. But they won 3-2, Helguson and Smith on the scoresheet.

It was, I think, at this stage, this is when the fans, the Watford fans in particular, had started to embrace, embrace what was coming and try to make sure that. We didn't lose sight of who we were as a club and where we'd come from, and that we were still going to be a club afterwards. And I think there's two ways of looking at that, isn't it? You could say it was sort of defeatist and, you know, that Watford was sort of embracing relegation. And I don't think it was that we were pleased to be relegated, but I think it was more that I felt like it was important to remind the players and the manager and ourselves that we, you know, had come up there together and we needed to stick together going down as well. Yeah, I think so.

I think we're kind of like trying to own the relegation a little bit, weren't we? It's like, this wasn't thrust upon us, we weren't good enough, but we'll be back. You know, we got up here once already, we still believe in the team and the, you know, the management. So, you know, why can't we come back as champions?

Yeah, the other point of note, and something of sadly of great significance for Watford at the end of this game, was it was quite late in the game as well, Richard Johnson suffers a bad injury that ended his season and would actually cause him significant injury troubles over the next two seasons. So he had. Not disgraced himself, I think it's fair to say, in Watford's season. I mean, that is doing him a disservice. He'd actually been definitely one of Watford's strongest performers in the league in what had been a really tough season. He'd shown quality, he'd shown that he could mix it at that level. I think he probably felt like he's, of all of the players that come up through the divisions with us, probably the one that he thought, well, potentially could, if he was to get a move to a Premier League club that was slightly more established, there's no reason why he couldn't be part of a Premier League team, I think.

Yeah, I remember, I remember when we got promoted, Taylor, I remember either reading or listening to an interview with him and him saying that, you know, some of these players that have got Watford promoted, they all remain Premier League players for the rest of their careers. And of course that did not work out at all, but the, but the likes of Johnson, specifically Johnson, you know, Robert Page had a good season compared to, compared to other players as well. He wins Player of the Season, but Johnson I think was probably best placed. You could imagine him. Having a decent Premier League career. He'd broken into the Australia side, and it's kind of weird how long they'd taken to happen. Yeah.

You'd think he would have been a shoo-in. I don't know what the reasons were for that. Not suggesting there's anything sinister. I just don't know why he didn't get that recognition. But, you know, on his day, he was, yeah, he was an above-average Premier League midfielder, I think.

I think so.

Got some great goals, was all over the place, you know, had just improved. Every season from sort of the mid-'90s onwards.

He was linked with Leeds. I think there was definite interest from Leeds before his injury. They had been reportedly quite keen on him, so that is a move that could well have happened in the summer. Yeah if he hadn't have picked up this injury. So that was a tremendous shame for him personally. It's a shame for Watford and a bit of a bitter end to what had been a good season for him. And it did cause him a significant setback in his in his career.

It took him best part of 2 seasons to really get back into first team football.

And also, and like Noel-Williams, never really got back to the level. It's not— there's not even really any doubt about it, he wasn't able to get back to the level that he was playing at before.

He wasn't, unfortunately, no. We lost away at Leeds at Elland Road. That means we're definitely finishing bottom. I went to that one just because I was at uni in Leeds, so that's my only trip to Elland Road. Not a particularly memorable day out. What wasn't a sour note was the display from the fans at Middlesbrough.

They went away to the Riverside, last away game of the season, and this was used by our travelling fans as a day of celebration. And they really made that a carnival. It was a real— they really went to town. There was, you know, champagne, fancy dress, a 'We're Out of Your League' banner, and Darren Ward scores Watford's goal in a 1-1 draw, a goal that was wildly celebrated by the travelling faithful. And that is our first away point of the year 2000, so you can understand why they were going so nuts. But some of the fans on Twitter have talked about being at that game, saying what an amazing away day that was, like one of the best that they've had certainly the best of that season, but even probably more enjoyable for some than well maybe not more enjoyable than Anfield, but after Anfield I think definitely the most fun that our away fans had game. And I know, I think it must have been— I wasn't at that one, but I think it was something different, something very Watford about it, that they would, like you say, own it and actually.

Make it fun and enjoyable and yeah, because it's not done in that kind of awfully self-deprecating manner where it's like, you know, when a team is obviously going down, say they go ahead and they're in fancy, you know, how shit must you be, we're winning away, or that sort of thing. We weren't— it didn't come from that place at all, did it? It was, it was kind of genuine, genuine pride.

Yeah, and just sort of again, like, going back to it, so that is Watford. You can't expect to win that much, and particularly on the road, like, over the, over the, you know, the 100-odd years that we've been a football club. We very rarely, whatever level we're in, go away from home and sort of dominate teams. So you go there, you go, you follow them around because it's, you know, it's something that you want to do. You want to be part of something and get something out of it. And so actually making it's just a good way of reminding everyone, I think, of the connection that the fans should have with the club and the players and how that should all be part of the same thing. And so they made it fun.

And I think that was something sort of a nice way to make it sort of uniquely Watford at the end of that campaign. And when the actual season ends, I was delighted to go to this one, the last game of the season at home to Coventry. And we actually played brilliantly in this game. And I think it was a real— there was actually a tremendous atmosphere for this one. It was very strange how good the atmosphere was, but people were so up for it. And the team were really up for it. And they got a win and a clean sheet and a brilliant overhead kick from Heidar Helguson to decide the game.

Should have been more than that because he was absolutely cleaned out by the Coventry goalkeeper in the second half. It should have been a penalty. It was an absolute stonewaller where he knocks the ball around the keeper and he sort of with two arms just sort of takes his legs and sends him flying up into the air. And Uriah Rennie just does the sort of like dismissive, just waves it away with his arms, just like, no contact. I mean, and everyone was just screaming at him, just could not believe how a referee could deem that was no penalty. Mike Vince couldn't believe it either, I think. But it was an absolute disgrace.

But anyway, Thankfully it didn't matter because we won 1-0 and finished the season on a high. And I think there was, there was a sense after that it actually. It's been a real long painful season, but because they finished it playing like that, it did give you a bit of a lift and a bit of hope as well, because it felt like a very Watford performance at the end of the season. It was a real sort of gutsy up and at them, and with a bit of quality as well, and, you know, purpose. Just felt like they were getting at Coventry, and Coventry didn't really like it, and we found a way to keep ratcheting it up a bit as the game went on. And that is— that has always been when Watford have been at their best, particularly at Vicarage Road. So it was— there was something there just to end on.

It was. There was something there, but my God, it had been a slog, I think it's fair to say, Matt.

Absolutely, yeah. The high points were few and far between, and there was, there was too many not-quites which made it very difficult. So as I said, I've read most of the season from afar, the likes of Match of the Day and the likes of Matt and Ian's writings and various other kind of web places to go to learn about Watford. But yeah, it was nice to see them on Match of the Day, it was nice to read them about them in the national newspapers. It was a completely different experience of watching Watford than it had been for me for the rest of the decade, whereas I was going more often than I was not. And yeah, I kind of got a sense of what it's like to, you know, be an international fan or something like that. It's kind of really what it felt like.

But I mean, there were positives and there were negatives, and obviously there were more negatives overall, but the positives, I think, some of them belong at the beginning of the season, those kind of famous wins against Liverpool and Chelsea.

Yeah.

They were really good, really good moments, really good matches. For those people that were there, they won't forget them. Even for people like me who didn't attend either match, you know, they, I don't need to be reminded of what happened on those occasions because I've seen and read about them a lot. And even in the context of a, not just a relegation season, but finishing bottom with a record low points total at the time, you know, they were great moments. And yeah, that was— it's a shame that some— in a way, it's a shame that they were kind of concentrated in the first half of the season, the first quarter of the season, really, maybe even less than that, because it just made those autumn and winter months so long, didn't it? It was just defeat after defeat after defeat.

Yeah, I must admit, I kind of— I totally get where Graham Taylor was coming from, and I think it's, it's a different time. You wouldn't— no one would do that now. And, you know, his whole sort of loyalty to his squad and things like that, it's just football's just not like that now, and no one would accept that now. I think fans wouldn't accept it. Like, as much as revered as he is, like, it'd be very hard to imagine that fans would be completely comfortable with a coach saying, I'm just not gonna— I don't want to spend money for the sake—.

It would be seen as a complete lack of ambition. It'd be seen as a complete lack of ambition.

Yeah, it would. It'd be seen as like, oh, you're basically just condemning them to relegation from day one. And so it's hard to judge it in the context of what happens now because it is, it is different. But even then, it was like, it was a bit of a it kind of felt like a bit of a white flag from the start in terms of, you know, are we really gonna have a go at this? Or I think we just— I was. I think there were signs early on that they might be able to bring them some surprises because they still had that togetherness. So I could see where he was coming from and that he thought, like, maybe, you know, the win at Anfield.

But the fact they did then beat Bradford and then they beat Chelsea is when you saw maybe that maybe they have got a chance, right? Maybe they just— they can take teams by surprise a little bit because. They work like bastards and, you know, yeah, they've got a bit about them, they've got something that maybe might help, but there wasn't enough as the season went on. And I think then bringing in players during the season, that didn't really work. Like, apart from Helguson the rest of the signings— to an extent Wooter, but yeah, but he didn't really contribute that much.

No, I agree. Yeah.

You know, it was all quite reactive, wasn't it? And because I had so many injuries at the start, you just felt like even getting a player like Neil Cox in at the start of the season instead of halfway through, it might have just had— I was having an extra body there to put into the defence, so you weren't playing a back 3 of James, Panayi, and Knight. Keeps like— I mean, these are just the things that yes, they had some trouble with injuries, but they had a lot of injuries at the start of the season and they didn't do much about it.

So I think it wasn't an injury crisis that unfolded. No, it was there before the season started. Exactly. Plain, plain and obvious.

Yeah. So that is, that is where I think it's hard to sort of be completely uncritical to Graham and the board because it felt like they probably could have done a little bit more to give them just a bit more help.

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a story that the Helguson signing could have. The club wanted to make it earlier than it happened, which I think was right at the beginning of the year, wasn't it? The story goes something like Watford scouts and Coventry scouts were at a Lillestrøm match, and the Lillestrøm thought that Watford and Coventry were both looking at their midfielder, whose name escapes me, but Watford were looking at Helguson and Coventry were looking at the midfielder. So Lillestrøm jacked up the price for their midfielder, and eventually Coventry were persuaded to do the deal, make them pay the money. So Lillestrøm, suddenly flush with cash, had kind of no real great reason to sell Helguson anymore, like, unless the bid kept going from Watford, kept going up and up and up. And obviously with the likes of with Graham Taylor and the kind of attitude that we just described, he did put the bid up and up and up, but that was over a period of time, over a couple of months. So we could have had.

Could have had Helguson in kind of October, November. Now, I don't know that would really— that wouldn't have made a difference. The difference that made wouldn't have been enough to have kept us up but it would have been nice to have an extra couple of months of Heidar Helguson because, because he was just so much fun, and the spirit was there, the quality was there for the most part and he was so good in the air and so such a connection with the fans. And over that period of time that he was with the club, and then he returned, obviously, afterwards, kind of not quite club legend level, but certainly sort of, you know, icon or whatever, whatever another phrase like that would be. But yeah, I think very closely associated with the club, and it all started in the season. So he was good, Tommy Smith was good emerging throughout the course of the season, Page was good.

I mean, Page and Palmer and Williams were excellent at the beginning, and Williams with injuries and a loss, his loss of form was alarming because he was— there was such a strong unit, relatively speaking. Again, we're talking about Watford, the promoted side, but they were strong and organized, and after a couple of months, they really were not anymore. Yeah, and that was very disappointing. And I think, I think if you just look at the signings, so the preseason signings and the ones through the course of the season, they just were not good enough. Like you say, I mean, Helguson, he Helguson was the only good signing they made during the season, but he was the only good signing they really made, full stop. You know, none of the players that were brought in preseason did anything at all either, did they? So very disappointing considering the quality of the signings that Taylor had made over the previous couple of years, because they had proven their quality by going up, you know, by taking their game to a higher division.

But the ones that came in this year were, well. We were not well equipped. And the players that we either already had or were coming through the youth team, they were kind of on the edges of the squad, were plainly not good enough. No, you know, like we mentioned James Panayi, he barely played, but we were having to rely on Perpetuini at times, having to rely on Clint Easton at times. You know, these are not, these are not players that are gonna, gonna keep you in the Premier League, with the greatest respect to them. You know, they could have done a good job, I'm sure, in the division below. Some of them did that, but yeah, they weren't, they weren't going to be the difference between us going down and staying up, were they?

No, I think that's right. And I think you'd almost rather they— a bit like parallels with now, but you'd rather there was a bit more of a, like, a strategy to how they were going to use that extra investment, and maybe to sort of like buy sort of talented young players from, you know, Football League clubs that would then be— which is what they'd kind of done previously, is sort of picking off players from lower divisions that they thought had potential, and but you'd almost rather they'd done more of that and planned that as the sort of legacy of it than just— there didn't seem to be any. It all felt very scattergun in terms of what they were doing with the players that they brought in. And it—.

Yeah, you said it was reactive before, and I think that's exactly it. It was, it was a reactive strategy. Yeah, trying to, you know, plug holes as they were being spotted, but there were just too many holes. Yeah.

Yeah, and it happened too late for it to really make much of a difference, I think. I think the thing for me looking at this overall, the season, was you go into it with such excitement, don't you, about being at the big table. You're, you know, in the promised land of the Premier League and all of the sort of glitz and glamour, and it's sort of like this exclusive members club that you're allowed into all of a sudden, and that feels really exciting as a fan. But then you actually— it's the sort of like the facade starts to fade, doesn't it? And you realise that it's not— you're in this club, but. People don't actually really care about whether you're there or not, you know. Yeah, no one really— no one really wants to talk to you.

You're just sort of there, but you're a sort of a bit of a, you know, you have thought to have that imposter syndrome a little bit. And the media, yes, you get more media attention, but they're not really interested in you.

They don't make much of an effort to really suddenly realise that it's very shallow, don't you? That it's very shallow.

It's very shallow. They don't really make any effort to know very much about the club, and so they just rely on sort of clichés and just the most basic of knowledge. You start to realise that it's all about, it's all about the big clubs, and you are just there to make up the numbers. And after a while, it loses its allure and its appeal, and Obviously getting beat every week doesn't help, but I think that it's the sort of the difficulty in getting established in that league, coupled with the fact that no one seems to really care if you're there or not. It starts to— I still feel that to this day, actually, with the Premier League. I think like, although Watford did make a good fist of it recently and had, you know, 5 consecutive seasons there. You kind of know that you're always replaceable and that someone else can come in and just fill your slot just as easily, and everyone will forget about you quite quickly.

And I think it's it's just, it's just how it is. And. It's so— not that you sort of don't want to be ambitious and you don't want to— you want— you obviously want the club to take those opportunities to be at that level because it's just— it's good for the club to be at that level, but it's not always brilliant for the fans. And yeah, actually it can be— it can become a bit negative and it's hard to sustain much sort of enthusiasm when it's like that. And I think I think that was a challenge with this season, was you just start to give up after a while. What I would, the flip side of that, I would say, is in terms of our fans and how they were able to flip it around again at the end and actually be like, you know, they did seem to decide that enough was enough and that actually, yes, we've had a fucking shit season, but we're gonna make something of it at the end and reclaim the season for ourselves. And celebrate where we've come from.

As I said at the start, like, you know, we talked about this club in the '90s, where they've been to, how bad things have got for them. You know, there was a lot of pretty dark times and low points in terms of where the, you know, the future of the club was by no means in secure hands. And I think to go from that to them being in the Premier League, it's like, you can forget that, can't you? You can forget where you come from. And whilst it was frustrating for the reason we just said, it was frustrating that we didn't do more with that opportunity. It was frustrating that it felt like we made some fairly obvious mistakes in terms of how we set out about that season and were quite naive in terms of what we did. But overall, you still had to be like, we're in a much better place than we were, you know, 3 years ago.

Yeah, we've been on an— we've been on an amazing ride. So, you know we can't be too— can't be too sour.

No, exactly. You have to see that through to its conclusion, whatever that conclusion is. And, you know, I suppose the— we were relegated without massively overspending. You know, we've talked about the way that can be perceived as a lack of ambition. And I suppose, I suppose recent candidates, someone like Norwich, I guess, maybe. Yeah. You know, Fulham on one of the seasons that they came up did not spend a lot of money.

So there's a kind of inherent conservatism there. I think that You know, if you're not spending wildly, then you aren't gonna massively need to cut your cloth when you are relegated and you can go again. I mean, Watford did cut their cloth slightly. The likes of Williams, some others whose names I can't immediately remember there, Lyttle was obviously one of them. Their contracts were either cut short or they were able to leave on free transfers to get the wages off the books. And still retain, I guess, a bunch of the core squad that had got us promoted, you know, the season before this one. So yeah, there is a sense that, you know, perhaps they could do that again.

It's that balance of risk and reward, isn't it? And it's kind of stating the obvious because it's discussed now every season, every time someone goes up, you know, are they spending enough? Are they doing what Forest are doing this year or what Fulham did that year where they spent lots of money versus the year Fulham didn't spend all the money? And then what did Norwich do? How do Bournemouth approach it, you know, that is forensically analysed now, was at the time it was, okay, Taylor's taking that choice, so we'll go with that. And the benefit of that is we might be able to do it again the next season. Yeah, we may be able to bounce back.

So I can't see many other ways of looking at it than that, really.

No, I think that's a— I think that is a fair way to wrap up our summary of that season.

I wouldn't say that I was dreading looking at this season, but I surprised myself watching it back, how much of it I remembered, given that I wasn't watching these matches in their entirety week in, week out. And, you know, the high points were nice, and they're good enough high points that I still fondly remember them. You know, 20 years later. So overall, yeah, I wouldn't say I have overly fond memories of the season, but there are some moments in the season which I can, I can, I can remember fondly. And I think just going back to the idea of it, this being the natural conclusion to that journey that the team and the club, the management had been on, it is intrinsically part of that whether you like it or not. So I think it's difficult to celebrate the successive promotions without also owning and absorbing this relegation season as well.

Yeah, I feel the same. I mean, I guess I went to a lot of games this season. Despite being at uni, I didn't go to as many as I had done the previous season, but I still managed to see enough of the team to feel some connection with them. I knew that it wasn't going to be the best one to review, but it was important for us to do it because of everything that we've covered so far in this decade, and we needed to sort of bring this decade to a conclusion in terms of our season reviews. And it is quite fitting, I think, that we finished the season as a Premier League club, even if we only survived for one season, just, you know, in terms of the journey that the club had been on. So it was enjoyable.

It was enjoyable to look back at it and to not just for Watford and see where they were at this time, but also this particular season in the, you know, Premier League and football more generally. Like I've mentioned, Man United winning the season, winning the European Cup the previous season, and what we're getting to play them this season. And was that sort of setting up an era, I suppose, of that sort of Man United-Arsenal rivalry was starting to build momentum? And, you know, both of those clubs building incredibly talented sides that would lock horns over the next sort of 3 or 4 years in a, you know, really dominate the Premier League which is. Yeah, very entertaining. I have to say, I loved watching those games. I loved watching that Arsenal team in particular.

I absolutely loved watching that Arsenal team. Yeah, they were tremendously exciting. It's worth just commenting on a couple of things really quickly. Man United this wasn't a close title race. They won the title by 18 points. It was also the season they withdrew from the FA Cup to play in the Club World Cup. An issue which I remember there was a Sun front page which had absolutely brilliant— yeah, all the sort of different celebrities and people that know soap stars and stuff who were sort of like united in their shame and condemnation of Manchester United.

They should be permanently banned from the FA Cup, says Barry from EastEnders.

It was so— it was— I mean, that was big. That was big. Super Kev, Super Kevin Phillips, top scorer with 30 goals in the Premier League. Remarkable. What a return. Yeah, incredible, incredible. So, you know, although it hurt to see him scoring those goals against us, I felt a little bit— I was pleased for him.

I was pleased for him that he'd made such a go of his career because there was always a good player in there.

He didn't leave Watford in an acrimonious manner. No, it was it was obviously hard to be anything other than respectful about that.

I think just annoyed that we never really saw the best of him because of injury, but we always knew there was a player there. Wimbledon and Sheffield Weds are relegated with us, so they would be dropping down with us. Neither of them have been back since. We obviously have, but Wimbledon then moved to Milton Keynes a few years later and essentially became a different club to AFC Wimbledon, who now exist. And Sheffield Wednesday have had all sorts of struggles, as we well know, and have struggled to be a second-tier club, let alone a first-tier club. So a difficult time for them.

And then Euro 2000 that summer as well, held in a joint bid of Belgium and Netherlands. England failed to get out of the group stage. They beat Germany but lost to Portugal and Romania. Romania won, they lost 3-2. That was horrible. I mean, it was a god-awful performance from England in that tournament in general. A fairly terrible display all round.

I mean, they beat Germany of all teams, but that was a crap Germany team and a fairly crap England team, and that was a rubbish game as well. France won, they beat Italy 2-1 in the final with a golden goal. That the era of golden goals in extra time. I was pretty gutted about that. Yeah Italy had that amazing semi-final against Holland where they had a player sent off and then just did a classic Italian back to the wall. They conceded 2 penalties during the game, which Holland missed both of them. And then the match went to penalties, it was nil-nil after extra time, and Holland missed, I think, their first 3 penalties in that one.

And so they've missed 5 by that point before they scored one, and by that point it was too late. That's right, Totti did. He did a panenka oh yeah, on Van der Sar.

I sometimes get the moments from these, from the tournaments between '98 and say 2004. Yeah, I think any of the World Cups and European Championships in that short period of time, they're all completely interchangeable in my mind, some of the moments in them. Obviously I remember the finals and I remember what England did or didn't do. Yeah, but yeah, there was this kind of period of dominance from France, wasn't there? And there was Italy were always involved and Brazil were generally involved in the World Cup as well. And it was it was probably just— if anything, it probably reflects the fact that those were my peak drinking years. So maybe that's why I don't remember it so well.

Yeah, it was probably Totti's best tournament as an Italy player, I'd say. It was, it was kind of at his peak and before he'd had too many injuries. So he was fantastic in that tournament. And that penalty shootout also, Jaap Stam sends one. He takes one and it just— he blasts it over the bar by about 10 metres over the bar. He just absolutely smashes it so hard.

I do remember that.

It's so funny. I mean, let's talk about a team losing. They made it— they make England look composed at penalties. The Dutch, they really do. Anyway. That is where 2000 ends. That is where our summary of Watford's seasons in this decade end, but it's not quite the end for us.

We do have a few more things coming up, so we will be back soon with a few more features to reflect on a few more things from this decade and chew over a few more topics. Looking at Watford's time during this period and speaking to a few other people. Who were quite, you know, influential in terms of the, you know, the culture around Watford at the time, and particularly the fan culture. So looking forward to that, and we'll be back with more news on that over the next few weeks. But for now, we will say thank you very much for listening. Hope you've enjoyed that one. Thanks again for all your participation on social media and for sharing things with us.

We do always appreciate that. Helps us to you know, hear from you guys in terms of what your memories were and what you took from these seasons and add a bit of context around those as well and a bit of colour. So thanks very much for that, Matt. Thank you. Cheers, Michael. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you all again soon. Thank you.

Oh my word! No wonder the smiles are there.