Blind, Stupid and Desperate

Hello and welcome to Oh My Word, the podcast about Watford in the 1990s. I'm here with Michael. How you doing, Michael?

Yeah, I'm very well, thanks, Matt. How are you?

Yeah, I'm suffering a little bit with a cold, but I'm sure we can get through this together and with the help of our special guests who we've got on the line today.

Yes, I think last week, Matt, you described me as David Holdsworth to your Keith Dublin. So I think this week we can say we're joined by Paul Wilkinson and Gary Penrice of Watford Blogging. I don't know if they'll appreciate that analogy at all. They may dispute it, but we've got Ian Grant and Matt Rowson with us. Hello, Ian and Matt.

Hello.

Thanks very much for joining us. We've invited Ian and Matt to come on to talk to us a bit about how they started the internet age of Watford fan culture, really, in the '90s with Blind, Stupid and Desperate site. And also a bit about sort of fanzine culture more generally, you know, how that happened, how that's evolved through the '90s. So hoping to talk to Matt and Ian a bit about that because that's very much linked to our experiences of fans in the '90s. Matt, you were a keen reader as I was, I think, of Ian and Matt's work.

Yeah, absolutely. I read it a lot of the time, and it's been an incredibly useful resource for us over the past few months putting this podcast together, hasn't it? So it's been nice to take Matt and Ian's thoughts and pass them off as our own.

I think maybe I could just ask you both a bit about sort of how and why and when you started following Watford. Ian, do you want to— do you want to go first?

Sure. So I mean, I grew up in Watford. I moved to Watford when I was 4 and I lived on the— on the Cassiobury Estate until I was 18. And my dad took me to Vicarage Road when I was 7, so that would have been 1977. He said ageing himself instantly. I honestly can't remember which game. I'm not much of a one for those sort of things.

But yeah, that would've been in 1977. So I went, fairly regularly from then on. And yeah, I was there kind of through the, through I suppose quite a lot of the glory years, on and off a bit. It was a sort of weird time, I suppose. If you started going in '77, then you had just no sense of failure, really, of the kind of failure that football could bring you. On a weekly basis.

So it was a sort of— it was very easy to take it for granted. So yeah, that was— that was— those were my kind of beginnings. And then I left for— I left Watford to go to university in Brighton when I was 18 in 1988. And kind of lost touch with it all for a while. And kind of, I sort of got sucked back in, I think, just because I was bored at university. And I worked out that if I kind of waggled my radio aerial around enough, so to speak, then I could just about get a signal from Capital Gold. And that kind of instantly put some flesh on the bones.

So, you know, obviously information was quite hard to come by. Back then of live scores and what was actually happening. So yeah, I discovered that I could get score updates and halftime reports and stuff, Simon Michaelson on Capital Gold. And so that kind of really sucked me back in.

And Matt, how about you?

In some ways similar to Ian, I didn't live in Watford until much later, but my dad was from Watford and had grown up on Cassiobury. Mum was from St Albans and dad had always been a Watford supporter, so when I was 7, which is only a few years later than Ian was 7, I started going to games, and the stats really are my sort of thing. So yeah, Watford against Burnley, 3rd of May, 1980, was the first one. Nigel Callaghan's debut, Steve Terry's debut, Kenny Jackett's own debut. And Rotherham, a week or so ago, was game number 1,261. Uncancelled. In the meantime, yeah, went to games increasingly frequently, moved to Germany just in time for Watford to draw Kaiserslautern in the UEFA Cup, which was just down the road.

Wow. So that was my first away game, Kaiserslautern in the UEFA Cup. And then, yeah, back, went to university in Leeds, so spent 3 years in the— at the start of your podcast here, in the early '90s. Trips around the north of England with a guy called Felix, who you and I still sit with, who had this battered old Yugo. Took us to some extraordinary places and would frequently break down. And Felix would have a large plank of wood in the boot of his car, and you'd see the car creep to a halt on the hard shoulder. Felix would get out, lift the bonnet, and you just see this wood rise above the bonnet and then go bang!

Which everything would somehow work again. And then as soon as I was earning money, it was possible to go to lots of games. And as Ian's already intimated, that period at the end of the '90s, those— you know, like Ian, I was there for much of the glory years, and I've always felt that's a bit cruel because you do kind of think that's how it's going to carry on. And not until you're well and truly sucked in and there's no turning back do you realise you're not going to Yes, it's not going to be Graham Taylor every week. No, but the little run at the end of the '90s was amazing because we were— I was now earning enough money to go to every game. I remember certainly that run in the end of the '98-'99 season was extraordinary. I do remember picking Ian up from Bedford station and having to inform him that the Port Vale away game was postponed and sent you back.

I think we went for a quick pint and then you got back on the train to Brighton, as I remember.

I got on that, yeah.

But yeah, and so I've mostly lived in the southeast of England and within striking distance. I've been a season ticket holder since I graduated, so since the mid-'90s.

And the thing that— so something that's come up in our discussions when we've been doing this podcast, and you may have heard Pete Fincham talking about this as well, was one of the things that we both get quite nostalgic about is how you would actually follow Watford when you weren't at a game, and the difficulties of doing that in the '90s when there was very sparse media coverage, particularly if you're outside the Watford area where there wasn't— you couldn't get the local radio or the Watford Observer. Therefore, actually just finding out basic information about what was going on at the club was not always that easy. And, well, you know, Ian, with your sort of holding your aerial up, you know, standing on the roof waving it around trying to get a Capital Gold update, but that is we talked about Club Call and things like that as well. Was that part of that behind your interest in being able to sort of develop your own ways of following the club? Or how did you, how did you follow Watford when you, for example, Matt, when you're in Leeds? And Ian in Brighton, what sources of information were available to you?

There was teletext, I had a little telly in my room with teletext fixed on the appropriate score page, and listen to Radio 5 or Radio 2, whichever it was at the time, as well. And then I'm sure my granddad sent up the Watford Observer sports pages, as he certainly sent them to Germany when we were living in Germany. Wow. And I'm sure that they were sent to Leeds as well, if not every week, then certainly on a frequent basis. So yeah, the radio, teletext, and my granddad's dutiful dispatch of the Watford Observer.

Yes, I think likewise. I've got a very distinct memory of— I bought my first season ticket for the '93-'94 season, so that was Glenn Roeder's first season. And so obviously there was a point where they were announcing the manager. And I thought, well, this is quite important news, you know, this is going to shape my experience of my first adult season ticket holding season. So I thought, well, I better, you know, better find out who the hell it is. And that's obviously would be easy now, it wasn't so easy then. And I remember phoning Club Call in a pay phone, shovelling money into this pay phone and getting all these this kind of preamble, you know, adverts, da da da.

And then they kind of, and now we're gonna hear from our new manager. And they had this lengthy interview with somebody with a sort of London accent. And then that was the end of it. And so by the end of it, I was none the wiser because I had no idea what Glenn Roeder sounded like on a dodgy phone. So I basically wasted a huge amount of money shovelling money into a phone to find out nothing.

Yeah, he didn't have the most engaging tone of voice either, Glenn Roeder. No. Must have been really electrifying content to hear down a crackly phone line.

Absolutely brilliant, yeah.

I think, Matt, you spent about £20 finding out that Watford signed Danny Hill on loan.

Yeah, I don't think my family would have ever let me get away with that one. Yeah, still paying them back now.

So I'm interested in, because obviously fanzines were around at that time in the '90s, particularly for the sort of match-going public. Did either of you, were you, did you read any of those before you, did you contribute to them, any sort of early dabblings in the fanzine culture?

Yeah, I did. Not very frequently. I wrote a few things for Clap Your Hands, at least two of which were terrible, one of which was about Dominic Ludden, which would go on to be a favourite subject, was particularly raw at the time. He'd been in the year below me at school. And a complete pain in the backside, and anti-Watford, very anti-Watford, very sort of mean-spirited about Watford in the way that only Essex teenagers can be. You know, the number of phone calls I got when he signed for Watford, just being mean, it was extraordinary.

So yeah, I wrote something quite unpleasant about— I remember that when, after I'd left school, he was in the year below me, my brother, who's also a big Watford fan, had just joined the, you know, the age of 11, had joined the bottom end of the school as Dom Ludden was leaving it. And he was captain of England Schoolboys that year, and that was announced in assembly. And in mock adulation my brother and his mate Luke got him to sign their hymn books. So, oh, please, please don't sign our hymn book, sort of thing. And Luke was a Preston fan, and he'd written PNE for promotion 1994, or whatever it was, 1991, in his hymn book. And Ludden wrote, no fucking chance, Dom Ludden.

So when he signed for Preston and that page appeared in the Preston Pro, that fanzine, Revenge is a dish best served cold. Fantastic.

Oh, fantastic. That is your worst nightmare at school, is that someone who's a right pain in the ass and winds you up, who's pretty good at football, ends up playing for your team though. That is I can, I can totally empathise with some sour grapes against Peter Shelton.

I think our friend Kieran who had the same experience of Ludden as I had, but also had to catch the bus with him to and from Billericay. Was particularly bitter about that point. What am I doing, doing what I'm doing while Dom Ludden's scoring against Peter Shulman?

Ian, did you write for any of the fanzines?

No, I didn't, no. No? I never, I don't know, I was never much of a writer, to be honest, at that point. If I went to games, I would buy them and read them, mainly Clap Your Hands. I was an avid, and still am an avid reader of "When Saturday Comes." And I think that probably shaped. We ended up doing as much as Anything did really, just that sort of sense of intelligent football writing, but with a sense of humor, that kind of thing, with a sense of its own ridiculousness as well, sort of thing. So I think that was the main kind of fanzine, and it's sort of a magazine these days, but it started as a fanzine.

That was a massive influence. I've read every word of When Saturday Comes for just decades.

It's great that it's still going, and I think it's because it's, you know, it's for fans by fans, isn't it? So you get, like you say, you get that sense of humour and all the articles that are written by people who know something about their club, but they do it in a way that is, you get that they're real fans and that they're not afraid to sort of poke fun at their own clubs a bit as well, or call out the ridiculousness, like you say. So Ian, you then went on to start your own publication, as we were just alluding to there, Blind, Stupid and Desperate. Why don't you give us a sort of story of how that happened? What inspired you to do that, to hurl Watford into the cyber age in the mid-'90s? And how did you and Matt get involved in that?

There wasn't a lot of inspiration involved, it's fair to say. But basically the story is I was working for a multimedia company in Brighton at the time, and our boss was very keen to have his finger on the pulse of anything he could find. And so there was one day when he sort of came in and said that everybody needed to create their own web page, in inverted commas. And I imagine we all rolled our eyes because that's what we used to do most of the time when Pete was banging on about something.

And what year was this in?

Sorry, this was in— so that would have been in early, very early 1995.

Okay.

So the first, the first thing I put up was a match report, again, and probably in inverted commas, about the 2-0 win over Portsmouth on Boxing Day 1994. Right. And that, yeah, so that was me just kind of fulfilling my brief from my boss really, as much as anything. That very much wasn't the first internet presence in that there was already the Watford mailing list at that point, which was run by, started by Gary Smith in South Africa and then taken on by Tim Brennan in Norway. So that kind of, meant that I kind of had an audience for it instantly and that you could kind of go, "I've done this." And it kind of grew quite quickly from there in that, you know, people were obviously quite enthusiastic about that. There was so little information you could get about games, what had happened and so on at that point.

So few people online and so little information that obviously some sort of coverage was something that people were gonna leap at. So I mean, those early reports, which no longer exist, I think I'm probably quite grateful they no longer exist because I imagine they were very sketchy. But it very quickly grew from there and we very quickly got into the routine of basically just having a match report on every game. To which, you know, I have to give great credit to Kate Holmes, who was going home and away. She'd go to anything with the Watford badge on it basically. And she used to do all the, you know, mad northern trips on a Tuesday night and fax her reports through to me, handwritten reports, through to our office. And I'd grab the fax and type them up.

And so we'd have like a proper— we'd play Preston on a Tuesday night or something, we'd have a full report on it on Wednesday morning. It's like a proper news desk. Yeah. Which was kind of unheard of at the time, particularly as, you know, obviously the Watford Observer coverage was incredibly thorough at the time, but you'd have to wait until the Friday. So we were kind of, we got that established the rhythm of it, of kind of going, right, this is going to be, we're going to cover every game properly. And that kind of got it, I suppose, got the ball rolling.

What were the sort of as you said you had an audience for it at the time, but what, when you describe audience, what sort of. Can we put sort of rough figures on that?

Because not everyone— I've got no idea, to be honest. I don't know what the, what the kind of, what the size of the Watford mailing list would have been at that time. It can't have been that many. It must have been, you know, 40 or 50 maybe at most, I would have thought. I might be wrong. I might be doing it a disservice.

I work in a research lab and I remember, which is where I was working as Ian was starting BSaD. And I remember some awkward-looking bloke standing up in front of us and explaining the internet to us, that it was a thing, that it was already there, but it wasn't really. And there was going to be a PC in the library, in the research lab, which anybody could use to search this internet thing. So of course, the first thing I searched for was Watford, and I can't have been the only one. And of course, the thing that comes top of your search list, even in I mean, this must have been certainly 1995 and probably quite early 1995. The first thing that pops up is Blind, Stupid and Desperate. So as the world and particularly Hertfordshire was discovering the internet, and I suspect that your readership grew quite quickly for that reason.

That's Ian's early search engine optimization efforts coming off. 100% Of a small audience is still a— yeah, still a good audience.

I think it— I was— I think my sort of probably like '96 and '97 was when I started to actually— again, similar, like whether it was at school or college, there was a couple of PCs that had the internet. Quotes and did the same thing as Matt in terms of just typing in Watford to see what I find. And I'm pretty sure that Blind, Stupid and Desperate was the first site that I stumbled across, even though I think the club had launched its own site by that time. So I think, I think definitely it probably took a while to get to bump you down the rankings of what pops up in whatever.

So yeah, I think there would have been a good maybe couple of years when it would have been the only the only site of any consequence. I mean, it took a good long— a good while before it was kind of— it had a name or a design or a, you know, the badge that we ended up with. All that sort of thing came along once it had established itself and had some sort of purpose. I think it's fair to say that my boss would have taken his suggestion back had he known the amount of skiving I would do on company time over the years. It became a part-time job pretty much.

Was it running on company server as well?

It was initially, yeah. It was initially, its initial address was display.co.uk/watford. And that was so, yeah, Desktop Display was the company. So yeah, it was on their website. Brilliant. So yeah, I'm indebted to them for putting up with me basically skiving continuously.

Wonderful.

So you've talked there about the site becoming more established. You presumably already knew Matt very well, but Matt, how did you come to be involved in terms of writing previews and writing other content for the site?

Well, I don't think we did know each other, did we? I was, and again, it's a coincidence of timing really, I was living, working abroad in 1997. So I spent 6 months in Austria. At which point Ian, I think, finally decided this was all becoming a bit much for him to handle on his own, probably not before time, and appealed on the Watford mailing list, which I was signed up to, for a bit of help. And I think it was specifically for someone to write match previews. I've got my timing all wrong because in my head, now I know for a fact that the first preview was Millwall away, in early in the '97-'98 season. I remember writing the preview, 'cause I was living in a hotel, so I wasn't doing anything in the evenings really.

I mean, Vienna is a fantastic city to be in, but not on your own and not if you've got a limited budget, certainly not every night. So I would stay at work and research the match previews using the browser on the office PC and send the previews to Ian, who would put them up on the website. But we met actually for the first time at Kenilworth Road on the 4th of October 1997, which is earlier than the Millwall game. So he must have had some kind of relationship before I started writing for BSaD, unless I've got my dates completely wrong, which is good, which is possible.

You're definitely right about the Luton game.

Yeah, I'm, I'm 100% certain that Millwall was the first preview, which was a week or two later.

It might have been, might have been, that might have been our introduction into, and then whether, whether you were going to be a reliable source or just some Madman. Have you decided yet? Yeah, I'm still— jury's still out on that.

So I just remember giving you and Nick Grundy my seat number, and you tracked me down in the beautiful surroundings of Kenilworth Road on a very memorable afternoon, just before the goal glut started. I think it was just before kick-off. And he came and said hello and then disappeared again. And I, yeah, so I wrote match previews and occasionally match reports, but more often the previews from that point onward, really.

Going back through the site in the course of researching the season recaps that Michael and I have been doing, plenty of other names involved as well. When did your rotating cast of contributors start to come online?

Well, yeah, I've already mentioned Kate, who was kind of the early main contributor, I guess. And I mean, I think it just gradually broadened out at that point where you kind of can't write it all and where also your readership is growing. You get people offering things and adding things. I quite quickly got to the point where I think we kind of wanted something new on there every day if we could. So whenever you went, there would be something new to read, even if it was something quite small or something entirely irrelevant. And so that obviously involves much more manpower, man, person power. And so my role in it gradually became much more editorial.

I'd kind of sit and attempt to turn people's contributions into slightly better English on occasion. And yeah, it just gradually became much more of a group effort, which oddly, as I say, increased the workload because there was much more editing and formatting and retyping and stuff to do. But it made it much more of a fanzine and much less of a of the two-man, one-man or two-man band. No, I think it kind of, it got its life as a fanzine at that point where it had a kind of, had a sense of people writing for it who knew what it was and people reading it who knew what it was as well. Had a kind of identity.

I think there was some real variety in the contributions as well. I've many a time stumbled across some result that has proven to be incredibly insignificant over the course of that season or the decade, yet you'd have 2 or 3 match reports for it, and one would be essentially a blow-by-blow account of what happened, and another one would be just pure vibes, just probably didn't really mention the match at all. So it's been nice to look back over some of these contributions, 20, 30 years, getting on for 30 years ago, to seeing how different some of them are. And you can get a much better sense of what it was like to actually be at one of those matches as well, with the different viewpoints. So I definitely enjoyed that of late.

I think some of my favourite bits of the site were bits that had almost nothing to do with football at all. I think my favourite bit of the site was that we used to have a section about exiled supporters. Which doesn't really seem like it's much of a thing now because everybody, you know, the whole internet is full of Exiled supporters. But at the time, the idea that, you know, there were Watford supporters in Australia seemed extraordinary. And so we, you know, we had all these accounts of how people ended up where they were and what they were doing there, and 2 or 3 people who would write regularly these kind of travelogues, I suppose, from wherever they were, which had very little to do with football. But they were, you know, some of it was really good writing and very entertaining and just had this sense of Watford spreading around the world is, you know, the idea of a football club reaching out into lots of places in small, small but wonderful ways.

It was an extraordinary time. I remember coming back from Austria in that November and arranging to meet up with Fincham certainly, and a few others who were active on the mailing list. And I'd never lived in Watford. I mean, I, you know, the Watford supporters that I knew were my dad and my granddad and, you know, the odd family member and Mr. Allen, my English teacher, by chance. And that was it, really. So suddenly to have a lot of mates who supported Watford was really odd. And to have things arranged on the internet, I think there was a period of a few years where the folk who were on the internet identified with the internet.

I certainly had an umbrella with Internet 'Orns written on it, which seems a peculiar anachronism now because the internet is all pervasive and it's just part of normal life. But living through that was really amazing, I think, or amazing, very interesting.

It seems like a significant number of that cohort kind of still, kind of still pally now, you know, like through, through your writings, through other avenues, the mailing list, things like that. Kind of feels like it's a decent amount of time now, isn't it? And for that sort of sense of community to have developed and persist for this long I don't know how unique that is to Watford or indeed to football really, but it feels to me like people banding together at the beginning of kind of internet culture. And yeah, you know, they were set on that journey and you kind of decided you had to deliberately leave almost if you wanted to carry on supporting Watford then.

I think there's two strokes to that. One is what you're talking about, the timing thing, and the people who got together at that time. Staying in touch, but there's— when Watford moved the home end from the Vicarage Road end to the Rookery in 1999, Miles Jacobson coordinated a significant administrative effort to take a block of us and put us in, you know, there's only about 60 of us, a third of the way up the Rookery behind the goal. Now many have moved on, but most were there for a good number of years thereafter. I'm still in the same seat as I was in '99, and plenty of others are as well. And those that have moved on still obviously were there for long enough for those friendships.

To be cemented, I think.

I think part of this is also that this sort of flowering of an internet culture and all those connections and stuff was happening at a time when the club was kind of shrinking as well. Yes. You know, it wasn't going well. And so there's a kind of bonding through failure, I suppose, but also just the sheer numbers of people. There were far fewer fans in the ground than there were 10 years previously, so it meant that you could create a kind of nucleus of people much more easily in a way. Than you might have been able to had it been a time of great success.

What was the club's relationship— I'm talking broader than Blind, Stupid and Desperate— but with you both being, I guess you could say, key members of the Internet 'Orns, do you feel like the club kind of embraced that part of its fan base, or did it just not really see that as any anything different to any other group of fans?

I think it took a while. I do remember when the official site came out and it was— and they were publicising it, they made quite a big deal about it being official. It was like the announcement over the Tannoy at the ground was like, you know, WatfordFC.com, it's the club website, it's official. And then they carried on. Maybe I was oversensitive to that, but I felt that you know, there was a little bit of, not hostility, but mistrust there, which I don't think we did anything to earn in particular. I don't remember having much of a relationship with the club until much later, but positive or negative, really.

I think from my point of view, I was always quite keen to keep the club at arm's length, to be honest, just because it makes it easier to write what you want and do what you want. Part of the joy of doing it online is that there's next to no cost to it, so it's not like you're trying to fund anything, it's not like you really need to ask anybody's permission. So it kind of just seemed easier not to try and kind of seek out those relationships, really. There was just no kind of need for it. And I don't think I— neither of us are, I think, particularly the sort of people who need recognition from the official sources or, you know, players or managers or whatever. So it just seemed easier to stay independent. I'm pretty sure I did have a meeting.

At some point before the official site was launched, I think me and Leo Mindell, who was also involved in the Watford mailing list, went and met with the club in the very early days with sort of, you know, vague suggestions of getting involved in an official site. I remember that whoever was in charge of marketing at the time used the phrase which was what people always used to use to show how much they recognised how important the internet was going to be, And he said, it's going to be as important as the fax machine. That's what people used to say to show that they got it.

So yeah, I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting. I can just imagine. Can you tell us how to make a website? It would probably be the first question. They were so proud of their site, Watford, at that shit, because I got given a new scarf around that time, and after the website launched, and it actually had the web address, the HTML addresses knitted into the scarf that I got at the time as well, just to really promote that as far and wide as possible. That's how— that was the pride that they took in having the official website launched. I don't have that scarf anymore, unfortunately.

I mean, I think it was probably actually quite good for us, to be honest, because at the point where we were no longer the sole source of information, it meant, you know, we could get on and be a fanzine rather than trying to deliver news to people or ticket advice or whatever. Yeah, it meant we could specialise in what we were doing and they could take care of the dull stuff.

To Ian's point about wanting to keep the club at arm's length, there was an incident a few years later, in your focus, so in the early 2000s, I think, when BSaD was suddenly taken off the airwaves to both of our surprise when the Football League, I think, objected to us sticking the fixtures up there. And that was— they'd been— they hadn't been employed a company to chase down unlicensed use of the fixtures on the internet, I think. And they'd been a bit lazy and gone straight to the, to BSaD's internet provider instead of trying to contact us, or had contacted us through sort of a fairly random email address that they put out of the air somewhere and hadn't reached us. So they bullied the internet provider into taking. This must be after desktop display, Ian. But then, but whoever it was, took us off the air. And the, yeah, to cut a long story short, there was a lot of, we tried, we decided consciously to make as much noise about it as possible without ever expecting to change anyone's minds about anything.

I remember the name DataCo. Is that? That's it, yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And boo hiss, yeah, and so forth. But the argument they made at the time was that they had— they claimed that the football authorities had agreed this scheme whereby the club could nominate one approved fanzine or something to list the fixtures. Quite apart from the impossibility of asking the club to pick a favourite fanzine, it's exactly what you don't want, isn't it? As per Ian's point, you don't want to be recognised in any sense as the club's fanzine, because that restricts what you're able to write. And not that you want to be kicking the club all the time, but you want to be able to kick the club if you want to kick the club.

It's not the point of a fanzine, is it? The whole point of it is that it's written by the fans, and the fans aren't controlled by the club. That's not how it works. It's not how the relationship's supposed to work. So no, I completely get that.

To some extent, when we were starting out, the joy of it was that we could write whatever we wanted and nobody would read it any way in terms of anyone at the club. You know, there were no players kicking around online with, you know, Instagram accounts or whatever.

No. Although I hear that some players did start to pick up on, you know, Eventually, yeah, it took a while. Eventually. Any particular examples of reaction that you got from the playing staff?

Was Mickey Quinn? Mickey Quinn, yeah, that was one. There was a section called Hall of Arse, which was about—.

Know that well.

I'm a much nicer person than I was, I think, in my 20s. I would not be that harsh about anybody now, but I was very harsh about Mick Quinn. And yes, he got in touch and actually reproduced it in its entirety in his autobiography. Which I think is kind of tremendous.

I think that's really, really great. I remember the line, something along the lines of, you know, a striker who'd always made— based his career on being in the right place at the right time was now so overweight that by the time he arrived in the right place, the ground was— you know, the lights were off and everyone had gone home. You know, it was a wonderful bit of writing. Jason Drysdale wasn't as amused about his slightly harsh entry, seems to remember. And I eventually, I ended up writing, doing bits for the program. Which involved interviewing ex-players. I can't remember what we called it, but the club would give me, you know, would agree with, you know, John McClelland or Tony Coton or whoever, or Nigel Gibbs, that I would interview them and they'd give me the number and I'd ring them up and get up the interview.

And Craig Ramage was very upset about his— and it wasn't an assassination by any means, it was sort of It was the bit that you wrote in as he left, which was just sort of saying, it was kind of, you know, in a more poetic way saying, "That was a bit of a waste, wasn't it? You know, he was a much better player than we ever saw him realize." And having that as a reminder is probably a bit too close to the bone, was the impression that I got. You know, "Can't you take it down?" was the gist of the conversation.

There's one of the great myths of my childhood, I think, and something that's been shattered doing these things with Michael is that In my memory, Craig Ramage had, you know, 3 glorious, magnificent seasons at the peak of the best midfielder in the division by a country mile. And it was quite a shock, I think, for me to see quite how that tailed off in sort of '95, '96-ish. I think Michael and I spoke a little bit about that during the time. But did you— so they obviously knew who you were. When you got in touch to do these bits for the program. So Rammies have been, the likes of Rammies have been carrying this around in their head for a while. Presumably you didn't ring them up and say, "I'm Matt, and by the way, I wrote this about you 10 years ago." No, I think he, I can't remember how it came up that I was who I was.

I think he probably asked if I wrote for the club, and I said, "No, I help them out, I co-write a fanzine." And it went from there.

Yeah, we did have some— there was a period when Espen Baardsen's parents used to get in touch. They used to send emails. They were very lovely about, you know, basically why he wasn't in the team at the time and stuff, but really quite long emails. I think because they saw us as being, you know, a sort of genuine voice of what was going on at the club, so they kind of valued it. There was, there was a, there was an email from somebody who may or may not have been Richard Johnson's mum. Saying that she'd been moved to tears by what we'd written about him.

Almost certainly what you'd written about him, because you tend to get carried away.

I did write quite a lot about Richard Johnson, yes.

One of our favourites as well. Absolutely. We can empathise with you.

Yeah, I feel like you identified his rapid improvement probably before a lot of what the fans— you were certainly writing about it a lot at the time.

I think we did, yeah. I mean, I definitely wasn't me alone. There was a kind of little group of us who were definitely right on board. And yeah, there was just that point where it was a really remarkable transformation in a player who kind of struggled to establish himself and really, you know, yeah, find his feet. And yeah, it was kind of quite difficult to see what he was until then, apart from somebody with a massive shot.

Well, that's it. I think that was an easy sell for me. I don't think I had your insight to see what he was becoming, but there's nothing not to like about someone who can. I remember a game against Sunderland, and he didn't actually score on this occasion, but he hit the ball from outside the area, he hit the crossbar and rebounded to the halfway line.

He can violate the laws of conservation of momentum, this boy.

But there was definitely a period where he was a bit of a whipping boy, you know, because he was struggling a little. And he hadn't really found his range and nobody quite knew what to do with him. And yeah, there was just that extraordinary moment really at the end of that Kenny Jackett season when he just seemed to completely grasp what the club required at that point, which was somebody to just take the game by the scruff of its neck and try and drag it in the right direction. And he did it repeatedly. And yeah, so I think we did, we actually wrote to him at the end of that season. 'Cause he had been just completely outstanding really in a series of pretty awful games. And it hadn't been recognized, you know, it wasn't really getting recognised by Oliver Phillips and so on.

But it was an instant, perhaps a year or two later when, was it around the Birmingham playoffs? I can't remember much, you can, Ian, where Graham Taylor had stuck your match report on the dressing room wall or something. Which one was that?

It was, the report was that Birmingham away game on Easter Monday. Yeah. Which everybody slightly skips over just because it's so soon after the Tranmere game and Tranmere is like this big mountain of a thing. But that game at Birmingham on Easter Monday, we were fantastic having, you know, just been wretched for quite a lot of that Tranmere game. It was suddenly transformed. A Tony Daley masterclass in that game, wasn't it? Yeah, it was.

Yeah. And yeah, it was just a brilliant team performance. And so that was the report. It was Tony Daley's last game for Watford.

It was, yeah. Yeah. Signed off with a goal and an assist.

So that was the report. And I later got word that Graham Taylor had sort of pinned it on the team notice board for everybody to read, which was nice thing to hear.

Well, that's not the worst sort of legacy of your writing, Ian, is it?

You know, so basically I'm the cornerstone of modern Watford. It all started there.

You were the inspiration. The pink shirt man gets all the credit, but yeah, one of the things that struck me when looking back at some of your writing and just looking back at the content that you've got through the seasons in the '90s, because obviously we did a lot of research. We obviously watched the videos, looked at all the official content, there's various news reports available, but what you get from Blind, Stupid and Desperate is more the sort of, I suppose, the murmurings of discontent and what fans were pissed off about and how they were starting to take that out on some of the players. And I feel like that's always— because sometimes I look at the internet culture now, and obviously that can very quickly get quite toxic and unpleasant, but there's always been an element of some of the fans would be a bit more vocal in targeting some players than others. And it's always been a case of, like, I feel looking back on it was interesting For example, Micah Hyde, the season that we got promoted through the playoffs, there was a period where he wasn't playing well at all, and he got singled out as being sort of not really trying, and fans starting to get on his back because it looked like he wasn't trying, and starting to get quite a lot of flak from some of the fans. And it's really interesting to see that on your side.

Do you feel that's always— yeah, is that fair, that's just to a certain extent that's always been there, that there's always been players who some fans will give them a bit of flak and other fans will be a bit more, well, we need to actually get behind them a bit more and try and lift them up a bit.

I think no question that's always been the case. I think whether we succeeded or not, I think we tried to rise above that slightly, and there were occasions when we were incredibly sanctimonious about rising above that. But yeah, I think we always tried to— springs to mind, there's one Dominic Foley.

Yeah, he got pelters, didn't he? Dominic Foley, he really did. I mean, he didn't have too many brilliant performances either, to be fair. But I think the difference in your writing on the site and the other people who contributed was it wasn't but you would try to disguise a bad performance because you can't— everyone's seen it, everyone knows when a player's not playing well. It was more sort of like you say, trying to still remember what Watford as a club is about and where we've come from.

And I think you've got to save your brickbats for when they're really needed. Yeah, if you go in on players all the time, then people just stop listening, you know, because it's just the same thing every report, you know, you've got to. You've got to try and call it as you've seen it and hope that's how other people have seen it too. But yeah, try and— because otherwise, yeah, if you're just saying the same thing every week, then it doesn't— it's of no interest to anybody, is it really?

Oh, I mean, Hyde was inspirational in the run-in that ended up taking us into the playoffs and probably had some of his best form of his career in that last sort of 10 games of the season. I don't think Watford would have got the results that they got without him in that sort of form. There's a couple of games where I think he was, he was absolutely everywhere and superb. And I think the difference that it can make when you see a player, a player's confidence building, and the difference that makes to their performances. It is tempting to get on players' backs, but I think that is a classic example of needing to give a player time to rediscover their form. You know what they can do.

It's also a classic example of a player whose style is slightly languid or whatever. It maybe doesn't look like they're putting it all in when they're having a bad game, even though they are. You know, Nick Wright had some absolute stinkers, but you never— he always looked like he was just giving it everything that he had. And sometimes that's just appearance, you know, it's just the style of a player makes them very easily targeted. Alan Smart had the same thing where he's, you know, he looked languid, which just invites criticism.

Yeah, I think Michael, it was either, either you or I kind of noted that players like that, when they're at their best, we use the word, we use the phrase effortless, you know, as a positive, whereas it kind of, you know, he's not trying essentially means the same thing. But yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. Some of those players could make it look very easy and a lot of the fans I think were too quick to jump on their back. And yeah, I agree with Michael's thoughts about playing himself back into form. And I think we were really, really lucky that Taylor was able to let him do that.

Because that midfield, you know, those two were the beating heart of that team for two years, weren't they? I mean, both promotions, just— and of course, the season that you've just covered in the Premier League was always going to be challenging for all sorts of reasons, including those that you highlighted. Brave, some might say foolish, decision not to strengthen the squad particularly, I know you concentrated on, but you know, the fact that everybody got injured and Johnno in particular, you know, was out for much of the season, from memory.

Tommy Mooney was out for most of the season. Yeah, that was critical.

Yeah, no, it was, it was disastrous in terms of injuries that season and it was a slog. I think we noted that from your commentary throughout that season, and by the end of it, I think everyone was a bit— you could— it put the scenes from the fans into context of sort of celebrating the relegation, but I think everyone was done with that season by the end of it in terms of what they'd had to endure. It wasn't a huge amount of fun. I think from Watford as well, it sort of felt like— I'd always wanted to see Watford in the Premier League. They got there and it didn't feel like Watford really belonged there. And it wasn't actually— after a while, it was fun at the start, and then after a while it wasn't that much fun and became something quite unpleasant. And I think you know, I just reflect on where Watford are now, and obviously there's so much has changed since that time in terms of the fan culture and all of the different mediums that we have now.

I think it— because Watford had a run in the Premier League recently and the expectations were sort of raised so high, there's always a danger of being the old man who says, oh well, back in the day it was like this. And Watford are never going to be a club that's like a mainstay fixture in the Premier League. I think that might sound sort of unambitious, but I think you have to enjoy those moments. You have to enjoy that time when it comes as best you can. But if you expect Watford to be a sort of top 10 Premier League club season after season, then you're probably always heading for a bit of disappointment. That would be my perspective on it anyway. I don't know if you agree.

Yeah, you're right. I think the other thing is it's easy to be the grumpy old man and to criticize, but at the same time, you know, the Pozzos have been here for 10 years, in which time, what, we spent 6 years in the Premier League, albeit 2 of them getting relegated. 2 Years getting promoted, one fail, one last-minute defeat in the playoff final, and one mid-season, one mid-table finish in the Championship under under Sami, or eventually under Sannino. So if you were, you know, 10 at the start of that, you're 20 now, and what are your expectations? What are your expectations supposed to be? You know, it's difficult to criticise someone who doesn't remember Chesterfield away.

Absolutely.

It's not, it's not reasonable. Yeah, folk can be too negative, and I get wound up by it more as much as anybody, but at the same time, not everyone's had the same experience, have they?

I think that's completely fair, and I do try not to be the sort of— I don't— it's not relevant. What happened in the '90s is not relevant to what's happening now because the club is different, it's different ownership, it's a different model. But as an overall challenge, I suppose, for a club of what— it's still not a big club, and it's still up against, you know, a monumental challenge to get established at that top table. And it's always— that's That's what's always going to be a challenge, I guess. I wouldn't dispute that the last decade has been a period of relatively great success for Watford. I've enjoyed a lot of it, and it's, you know, I didn't think that we'd have a run of 5 straight seasons in the Premier League ever in my lifetime. So I wouldn't criticise that at all.

It's more that I think the challenge— it was a challenge for Watford in '99-2000 to get established in the Premier League. Still going to be a challenge if they're able to get back there next season. But you know, at least maybe we'd go into the next season with an upgrade on Des Lyttle at right back.

I think I always keep thinking back to the Kenny Jackett season in the middle of the '90s. Yeah, it's sort of as bad as it got, I think, really. Well, certainly in terms of league position, it's bad as it got.

It's very boring as well.

Yeah, very dull. And it was that thing where you've just got relegated and, you know, you expect that you're going to be a big fish in a small pond. And we were just a fish in a pond, you know, there was nothing special about us at that level at all. Our attendance, our attendances weren't exceptional, our ground wasn't exceptional, our team wasn't exceptional, our budgets weren't exceptional. We were just a third-tier football club. We looked completely at home. If there hadn't been a Graham Taylor to come along and get the investment going, you know, and rebuild the team.

There's every chance we would still be there now. Certainly, you know, there's no reason to believe that we wouldn't. So yeah, that's the one that I always come back to, is just think— there was a game, I get, Wycombe away, which was some god-awful nil-nil draw where you just thought, this is us, this is it now, you know, this is what we are. I never thought that.

I mean, your take on it might have been the more realistic one. I still have this romantic view of looking at Kevin Miller in goal not letting in goals ever, because we did go on this stupid run of not conceding goals that season, didn't we? And, you know, okay, Kevin Phillips was injured all season, but he was still Kevin Phillips. And even though he hadn't been Kevin Phillips for Sunderland yet, everybody knew he was brilliant. And he was injured all season and never really played for us properly at the end of it. I still entertain fantasies of us being about to sweep, and we were sort of there-ish for most of the season without ever looking convincing, and then fell away at the end and finished mid-table.

See, those are the same fantasies that I have about our Premier League season in '99/2000, where I still think if Tommy Mooney hadn't got injured, Nick Wright hadn't got injured, Richard Johnson hadn't got injured, we would have stayed up.

The bigger tragedy there, joking aside, is that you know, two of those injuries— Nicky Wright— and that's more complicated than that. There were injuries following injuries and stuff, but Nicky Wright, Richard Johnson, and Gifton, who was, you know, previously. They weren't ever the same players again after those injuries, and they were all fabulous, and they were all, you know, in different ways lost to us. And that was heartbreaking. That was, you know, I think I could have taken— not taken the relegation, no one wants to get relegated. We just had consecutive promotions. You've got to be a little bit realistic.

But the fact that none of them looked like, you know, Gifton had a passable career, didn't he, as a second tier. But he was You know, he was in— he was what, 18, 19 and about, and called up to England Under-21s when he got injured. He was a monster. And never got a chance to live that, which is a real tragedy.

I wonder if their careers would— if those injuries happened now and with, you know, the way that the club is now, and you would— not to do a discredit to the care that they received at the time, but whether there would be, you know, the medical science might have improved to the point that they might have had—.

I suspect from reading interviews with Johnno that he would be more than happy to disrespect the care that he received at the time.

Yeah, it sounded pretty awful.

I think, I think Gifton did get some pretty high quality care though, didn't he? Was it funded by Elton? He went to see it.

He went to America or something.

Yeah, I think he saw it. Well, it was among the best, but yeah, I mean, absolutely take your overall point. Yeah, for sure.

Matt, in terms of the— so Blind, Stupid and Desperate, sort of— or Ian, actually, before we come on to that, when did Blind, Stupid and Desperate, when did that start to wind down in terms of the regularity of the contributions there?

Well, so I mean, it never really wound down. It kind of—.

I'm still there, but—.

Ploughing mercilessly onwards. I think there was a good while where I would've been very happy to stop and kind of kept going. There was a point where I got made redundant and I became self-employed. I forget exactly the year, but that kind of meant I was working from home on a computer, on a laptop. All day. So the joys of skiving seemed much less appealing at that point because I was basically just carrying on doing what I was doing for my day job. So I was just sat in my living room all the time staring at a monitor.

And yeah, that seemed pretty unappealing. Yeah, the sort of general workload started to grate on me, I think it's fair to say. But it was more Matt that kind of, it was Matt coming on board the departing boat, I think, or the sinking ship that did it, which was the start of the Boothroyd Premiership season, wasn't it?

Yeah, there was a specific, there was a particular event, which was the arrival of my daughter. And Ian and I had several conversations along these lines, and, you know, and explained exactly what he's just explained. That this wasn't realistic anymore. And I'd committed to take on more. And I think I probably did for a little bit, more editing and stuff. I remember you teaching me the rudimentary HTML so I could edit stuff. So you didn't have to do all of it.

But then when I became a father, I realised immediately that there was no, I think I came home from somewhere, possibly from the game against Man United at home and tried to write a match report with this, How old was it?

I remember conversations going up to Everton.

Yeah. That might be early in that season. It's at some— Everton wasn't— Yes, it was. That was the first game of the season, wasn't it? Yeah. Anyway, that was it. It was like this, it wasn't a— It was suddenly, it wasn't a decision anymore.

There was no— Ian was already finding it hard and I knew I had to do more Pete's tale was gonna carry on going the way it was. And suddenly here's, suddenly your life's, you know, you're both parents. You know what it's like, the child comes along and suddenly here's your old life, that's gone, new set of rules. And it was no longer remotely realistic for me or for Ian.

So it was actually quite sudden. We kind of kept going and then stopped. I remember writing it as the last match report is just the most ridiculous self-indulgent load of twaddle you can imagine. I'm a sentimental fool at heart. Yeah, it's nonsense. But yeah, we stopped fairly suddenly and then we started BHaPPY not very long afterwards with this idea of radically cutting our workload by not having contributors, but also by writing, at the time we started off with one-word match reports, I think. But we can't, we basically can't help ourselves.

That's the bottom line. And so they kind of went from one word to sort of five thunks, I think, and then. They're up to 2,500, 3,000 words now because we can't help ourselves. But obviously that's mainly Matt these days.

I think realising that my daughter at the age of 16 no longer needs me quite in the same way that she did when she was 2 months old contributes as well. Both girls are season ticket holders, but she doesn't need nappies changing.

No. So yeah, so that's still, and that is still going and still going strong. How many years now then in terms of, I suppose if you can combine the two things together with—.

Oh God, don't do that.

This next month is 25 years of me writing. Wow. BSaD and BHaPPY. With the briefest of gaps in the middle for children. Changing nappies when it was one word a week or whatever. But sort of for Ian a bit longer than that.

I mean, that's a great legacy. I mean, particularly in terms of BSaD, it's brilliant that it's still around. One of the things that jumped out at me was you would be taught— you, and I say you, the collective authorship— would be referencing something that happened in the world. I've got no idea what that thing was because there's no reference to what that thing was. But I can— I see your reactions to it, and I'm trying to piece together what is that thing.

It's in its context, isn't it, Matt? It's like that game against Wycombe played in the wake of Diana's funeral. It sets things in the context of the wider world a little bit, in a clunky and not always explanatory, obviously, way.

And there's a kind of— we always used to get the reports up by Monday morning. And that's just a fantastic little window where you've still got the game really fresh in your mind and, you know, all the feelings and so on that you got, you felt at the game. And so you're kind of documenting, you're able to document that at that point rather than some sort of cold retrospective further down the line. It's a great moment to capture a game, I think, that sort of the next day. As much as I used to curse it quite often, sort of spending my Sunday, my entire Sunday, you know, writing a report about some god-awful nil-nil draw. But yeah, it's a wonderful moment to capture a game.

Anything particularly jump out to either of you as the favourite things that you've got up on there? Favourite things that you wrote for the site? That's a good question.

I mean, it was an absolute honour and a privilege to be able to write about that '99 promotion. To go back to what I just said about that moment where you've just come out of a game and you're kind of writing about it the next day and you know that you've got people wanting to read it and you're effectively the sort of first fan voice to write about it. To do that about those games in the run-up to the promotion was just fantastic. It was just an absolute honour to be able to do that. So those are probably the games that I look— the reports and so on that I look back on most fondly, really, because it was such an amazing time. And to be able to be a voice of that was just wonderful.

That was certainly the best period to be a part of. In terms of my writing, I think my writing's got a lot better over time. And I remember, you know, reading Ian's stuff and realising how he was able to combine partisanship with absolute objectivity, which I always struggled to do. You know, I was a Watford supporter and therefore the referee was a bastard, if and so forth. Whereas Ian was able to watch the game and convey his prejudice, if you like, without letting that distort his perception of the game. And it took me a while to move towards that. So I think my writing's a lot better, it's become a lot better.

I think a lot of my writing on BSaD sounds quite clunky, but I enjoyed the process of researching the opposing team. I enjoyed the process, which was a bit more challenging then than now, of finding voices of Barnsley online and piecing together what Barnsley thought of their team at the time, which, you know, is something that, as a Watford supporter, is far less interesting to reread. But at the time, I think it was something that wasn't available to Watford supporters in the same way without going to the same sort of effort. So I found that.

And it was absolutely invaluable to the site, all of that, because I can write, but my knowledge of football beyond the stuff I'm directly interested in is nil, really. Whereas Matt knows everything about everything. And so to have that kind of real solid underpinning of knowledge just gave it enormous credibility that it wouldn't have had otherwise, I think.

There's a sort of philosophical underpinning of those early days of the internet around permanence. And I think we can contrast that with, for example, modern social media is built a lot around ephemerality. Are you happy that the content that you've made, whether you like it, whether you don't, is still there? And do you expect that it will be up for a while, that you'll keep BSaD online? BHaPPY is obviously an ongoing project, but BSaD is finished. Are you gonna keep it up? Definitely, yeah.

I mean, you know, if we weren't happy to have it online, we would have removed it. You know, 15 years ago or whenever it— but it's way more than 15 years ago, isn't it? But, you know, whenever it stopped, yeah, we would have removed it then. But no, I think it's great. It completely avoids that sense of being self-conscious online because, you know, I've got my entire 20s documented on the website. Yeah. If anybody wants to go and dig through it.

Good luck to them. But yeah, it sort of means that you're no longer particularly bothered about what you've got online. Because yeah, there's sort of thousands and thousands and thousands of words on there of my 20s and 30s.

How would you say that internet fan culture has changed since the 1990s?

I don't know, because you write the reports more now, Matt, how would you contrast it? Because you're the one at the sharp end these days, really.

Yeah, I think because there's so much stuff and because there's so much, there are many ways for people to express their opinion and there are many opinions and different ways of looking at the game to be shared. It's like I've got an audience who know what they expect, a bit like BSaD did. And there'll be plenty of people, I guess, who don't read it because it's not their sort of thing, but I don't hear from them. So, you know, there is a loyal following. I know that match reports after we win, they're gonna get a lot more views than match reports after we lose, irrespective of how much time I put into the report. But I also know that only rarely am I gonna get. People will disagree, but normally in a constructive way, but I'm not going to get any stick because the people who would give me stick aren't going to read the site because they don't need to.

They'll go to read stuff they want to read that's more attuned to what they're interested in. Yeah, I do take care. I try to avoid— I try to write the match report as soon as I can, and I take care to avoid opinion in as much as that's possible until I've done so. So I might read the official site report just to make sure I've got events in loosely the right order. I've long since stopped taking notes. Ian used to keep assiduous notes during games, and I always felt when I was writing notes, two things happened: A, I would miss things that were actually happening on the pitch, and B, I could never read my notes after the event anyway.

So I've long since stopped taking notes. But I will try, you know, I love From the Rookery End, I think it's magnificent, but I won't listen to it until I finish my report, even if they're out very quickly the next morning, because I don't want there's no point in reflecting their opinion, even whether I agree with it or disagree with it, and it's going to influence what I write if I listen to it first, one way or another. Likewise opinions on Twitter, likewise the Watford mailing list. So I don't read any of it until I've got what I think down on a Sunday morning, whatever it is.

That's a very determined approach, Matt. It's like the sort of putting the blinkers on and trying to avoid the scores before Match of the Day so you can watch it afresh. I do that as well. It's much harder. It's much harder to block out all other views on Watford, I think, given how easy it is to hear them these days compared to—.

I'm not doing— I'm not— it's however hard it is, as Ian described, to spend so much of your time writing weird articles. Yeah, it's, it's, it's completely without value to just spend the time reproducing someone else's opinions. Yeah, it's a bit like my wife always says, why do you leave so early to get to the game? You're going to, I don't know, Rotherham. Why do you need to leave at this hour in the morning? It doesn't take that long to drive to Rotherham. Well, however stupid it is to drive to Rotherham to watch a football match, it's far more stupid to drive to Rotherham not to watch a football match or to miss the start, I think, because you haven't.

It's the same sort of thing. If you're going to do it, do it properly.

Going back to the note-taking thing, I remember. There was a point, 'cause yeah, you're right, I used to scribble in this kind of shorthand that evolved over time, all the notes for the things that happen. So occasionally you'd miss stuff. And I remember Leo Mindell suggesting to me that I should get a Dictaphone, should just do it that way. Seemed like, you know, you kind of, okay. And I tried it for one match, and honestly, you've never felt so self-conscious as when the opposition score a goal and you're— the home end is completely silent and you're having to mutter into a Dictaphone, 'Cross from left wing, striker heads far post, 1-0.' It just never worked.

Was it that, or was it Fincham leaning over your shoulder shouting his helpful input? It could have been that too, yeah. I distinctly remember that.

Yeah, terrible. So yeah, back to the notebook it was.

There's something else we could mention, which is not really— I guess it is about the '90s inasmuch as it's about anything, but another project, yet another website that we've been working on, but we're about to release to the world. I don't know if you've— you're fans of Trevor Jones's Watford Archive. Yeah Trevor obviously passed away a few years ago and then wasn't very well before he did. The club spoke to him at the time about taking the website and maintaining, or at least maintaining it for posterity, keeping what he'd done going. But they also, the conversation developed and to cut a long story short, he gave his blessing to me taking it and keeping it up. Now that keeping up was involved keeping the content up to date offline, but also when I realised that I couldn't, begin to reproduce his PDFs looking anything like he produced them, trying to make a better job of the structuring of the website, which Ian's done.

So the long and short of it is that Trevor's archive, or a reinvention of it, is about to be relaunched upon an unsuspecting world, up to date as of the end of last season, but with far more functionality than it had before. So the ability to I think your example, Ian, was to look for examples of Bruce Dyer scored on a Tuesday night or games against Bradford on a Thursday or so on and so forth.

Well, I mean, how long has it taken you to bring that to fruition?

I've been involved for longer than Ian has 'cause I was struggling with it on my own in a futile way for some time. I could find out with certainty, but it's several years. It's 4, I would venture 4 or 5 years since I started just maintaining the content. I think it was already a year or two out of date. By the time I got hold of it so it needed to be updated in all sorts of ways at that point, but then keeping it up to date and finding ways to make the content look a bit more modern and a bit more accessible. And it's only when Ian got involved that really started to happen properly, because that's what Ian— one of the many things that Ian's good at.

I've got this lovely image now of when you started talking about the website that we were about to about to launch of Pete Fincham getting very excited at the possible return of BSaD and now deeply disappointed. We've disappointed him.

I'm sure Pete will be very excited regardless. No, well, that sounds like a great addition to the Watford worldwide web. When are you expecting to have that ready to launch then, that, to send it out into the world?

It's my collaborators' call, I think, really. We were going to do it before we went on holiday and then realised that launching this thing and the countless mistakes, no doubt, contained therein just as we went on holiday probably wasn't sensible. Okay. But we're not far off, are we?

I think possibly in the next couple of weeks. Okay. I would like to think. Yeah. And then we'll just run away and hide while everybody picks it apart.

Well, we will, we will watch this space then, and with anticipation. And I'm sure you'll let us know on Twitter when that is live and out in the world. Well, thank you both loads for coming on to talk to us. It's been great to hear. Yeah, no, it's been, it's been really great to hear from you both about, you know, how you got started in this. And I think as Matt's mentioned many times, but we just want to reiterate how much we've enjoyed we enjoyed it at the time, but I think it's been such a great resource to be able to go back and look at because it really does bring it to life a bit more, I suppose, in terms of how fans experience the '90s and other decades, you know, the noughties.

There's a lot of great noughties stuff on as well. I've been reading through some of that. I do enjoy the Hall of Arse, I have to say. However mean-spirited it may be, it is also funny, which is part of what, you know, going to football is about, is having a laugh, isn't it? I think it is funny. But also the Gone But Not Forgotten is tremendous as well in terms of the sort of Watford Encyclopedia or Who's Who of all sorts of random players that you'd forgotten about that, you know, made one substitute appearance at Rotherham away for 20 minutes or something.

But you imagine trying to do that now? Oh God, in a season with the turnover of—.

Just the first season is hard enough. I think the first Pozzo season there was— there were players who arrived on loan and were then loaned out elsewhere, so it's just impossible to keep up with now, I think.

Yeah, a paragraph on Jean-Alain Fanchone's—.

There's a challenge for you, Matt. There you go. Matt, any closing remarks from you?

Just to say I agree with all of that wonderful stuff, and I still look forward to reading something every time you publish it. You know, I do follow you both and I do read every new entry on BHaPPY, and I'm interested generally in your thoughts on what's going on at Watford. So thank you for continuing to do that, it's really interesting.

That's all from us, we'll be back soon. Still got a couple more things to do before we wrap up this podcast, so we will be back in touch with another episode soon. Thank you. Goodbye.

Oh my word! No wonder the smiles are there.