Hello all! As I have more time on my hands at the moment than I will once I ship off to uni, I figured I would shoulder the burden of this week's match preview as my act of community service for the season. This is my first match preview on WFC Forums! Exciting! This Sunday our beloved Hornets travel south to soak up some sunshine on the Dorset coast and deploy their shiny new tiki-taka high-press counterattacking tactics inspired by new manager Marco Silva against a bunch of Premier League also-rans led by the Ken Doll of Buckinghamshire and Jermain Defoe, a man who has been playing senior-level football for nearly my entire life. Watford is feeling confident and hungry after a draw with Liverpool on the opening week of the season, one that saw goals flying in the 3-3 stalemate at Vicarage Road. So merciless were the Golden Boys in ripping apart the papier-maché scouse defence that our beloved goalkeeper Hurelho Gomes, ever the tender soul, gave away a penalty to save Jurgen Klopp's blushes at losing both Philippe Coutinho and the first game of the season in the space of one week. Injury questions loom over Roberto Pereyra, Daryl Janmaat, and Younes Kaboul, but luckily the Pozzo recruiting machine has provided us with able replacements for all three. Once the kintsugi expert we're flying in from Japan to fix Janmaat arrives, the trio should be well on their way to a speedy recovery. The Cherries, meanwhile, have managed to lose on opening day to West Bromwich Albion, who labour away under the soul-sucking eyes of anti-football expert Tony Pulis. Somehow, despite facing such offensively impotent opposition, they allowed the Baggies the lion's share of the chances until they were undone by a set piece, the Egyptian loanee Ahmed Hegazi heading home from a limply defended free kick. Howe's side demonstrated their commitment to free-flowing, attacking football by registering one shot on target in the whole game, from a defender in injury time. Besides the aforementioned Defoe, Bournemouth have strengthened this year by signing Chelsea castoffs Asmir Begovic and Nathan Aké. The latter became their record signing, with media reports estimating the fee at a staggering £20 million. It really makes you appreciate the Pozzo family's frugal business model- when we need a left back, we strongarm a Serie A side into selling us theirs on the cheap and then lock the player in the boot of a 1998 Renault Laguna with a contract and a pen. Call us penny pinchers but hey, it works. Opposition Profile Manager: Eddie Howe Bournemouth are managed by smug-faced f*ckwit Eddie "Traitor'' Howe, who is notable for always wearing a tracksuit like he's a Russian drug dealer. He is also the subject of frequent and embarrassing fawning by English football media, who think everything he does is brilliant and inspired because they are too busy being enamoured with him to compare his performance with that of other Premier League clubs in any substantive way. Unfortunately for Bournemouth, he is actually quite talented and they will sink like a stone once he is inevitably poached by Everton, because let's face it, he's taken that club and hit their ceiling. Stadium: Dean Court Dean Court, currently known as Vitality Stadium because Bournemouth are heartless sellouts, is the smallest ground in the Premier League by some distance. On television broadcasts the announcers politely call it "intimate'', which we all know is code for tinpot. The size makes up for itself somewhat because it presumably makes fans of ''big'' clubs like Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds United thoroughly angry at the fact a team with a stadium capacity almost 30,000 less than theirs is in the Premier League while they rot in the Championship. Local Architecture: As is tradition. Last Season: A pair of 2-2 draws meant the sides shared the spoils for 2 points each. Watford will be looking for better this season against a side that has been slow to get off the blocks. COYH!
Thanks for the preview. Little bit of niggle towards Eddie Howe who to be fair hasn't done anything against us, he used to watch us in his youth plus he is an Amersham boy like me so I find it hard to dislike him. You also mention the 20m for Ake, don't forget we have just signed Gray for 18m!!
Eddie Howe Mr went to the fa cup final as a local lad but came away supporting Everton. Says everything you need to know about the smug ****
That can't be Bournemouth pier. Bournemouth pier is polluted with tacky and over-priced didicoy-style fairground rides and crammed with gaudy rip-off gambling machines. A lamentable reflection on the shabby, run down, rock and kiss-me-quick town itself unfortunately.
Eddie Howe, football genius. Why the FA have not given him the England job already I'll never know. While some may gasp at the 20m for Ake, it just prooves they are a much better team than us, competing in a transfer market we can only hope to one day reach. They paid someone 8m once just to have a fight with ibrahamovic ffs.
We went and looked at Bournemouth University too. Nobody liked it in the least. Firstly it followed the money-grasping commercialism of the town and local area. As soon as you entered it was Costa Coffee one side, Pret-a-Manger the other side, cash machine, shop, retail opportunities. Sponsored double decker busses driving around splashed with gaudy advertising and big flags plastered with adverts flying everywhere. The place seemed almost totally dedicated to cash and revenue maximisation with academia lagging far behind and almost forgotten. You will have read about segregation in our universities and that was the other problem with Bournemouth. Overwhelmingly and almost exclusively white and middle class. I mean they didn't discourage BEM applicants (they had the usual 'token' photo on their prospectus etc), but if you went there you'd find yourself like the fly in the milk. It was clearly a white university for white people. Disgusting really.
Dodgy ground, mixing your colour perceptions with that's of Bournemouth FC. Worth thinking about before you post this kind of stuff on a football forum. Join the fun on 'Atmosphere at VR' thread!
I'm a little shocked that Bournemouth haven't expanded their stadium yet. I understand the first year after promotion they probably didn't want their ground to be a building site nor take the risk if they got relegated straight away. However, now they are an established Premier League club they are missing out on potentially an entire generation of young supporters who are not able to get tickets to the home games who may look slightly further afield for football teams to support. Watford spent years harvesting young fans with plenty of free ticket giveaways in schools and local communities which has reaped its rewards massively. In our first Premier League match in 2006 away to Everton we took 1,800 fans. In the first Premier League match in 2015 away to Everton we took 3,300. It's also a shame that there are such a severe lack of tickets for away fans as it's a half decent away day. I reckon we've got a decent chance here anyway, stuck a tenner on 2-0 to us after the pub last night!
What part? The commercialism or the appalling lack of diversity? The former because education is supposed to be noble - a quest for knowledge - not a commercial product with a price ticket stuck on it that goes better with Coca Cola. The latter because any place that excludes minorities, whether by deliberate racist admissions policy or by not encouraging diversity (except through a few weasel words) cannot be healthy for young people to develop the right attitudes.
The White middle classes have always needed somewhere to send their hideous, overprotected, entitled offspring Clive when they aren't clever enough to get into Oxbridge. South coast universities such as Exeter and Muff fill this gap.
Exeter "probably the best University to send little Tamara or Roderick when they cant get into a proper Uni and need to spend 3 years after their gap year in the Fast East preparing for a job in PR"
More of the latter really. At the end of the day, it's clearly the choice of individuals regarding what university they go to. If a student doesn't want to go to a university based on there being too many white kids, then it is that individual who has a wrong attitude. If I didn't want my kids to go to a school that primarily had ethnic minority kids, then I would be frowned upon. And rightly so... but it still works both ways whatever the skin colour of students.
Are you suggesting that Bournemouth university has an actively racist admissions process Clive? If not, what should they be doing that they are not in terms of diversity that has resulted in your labelling them "disgusting"? Pretty sure you shouldn't be flinging these accusations around about a university without being able to justify it.
I don't know whether they're actively racist in their student selection, but evidently something is going on there. When 10 or 12% of the population are BEM and there are only a handful of brown faces in a student body of a couple of thousand, then there must be some underlying reason. It can't be an accident or coincidence. As for what they should be doing, they should be realising and acknowledging the problem they've got and using a number of different methods and techniques to actively encourage much increased diversity. These could include positive discrimination or even a BEM 'quota' for admissions for a couple of years to balance things up a little more. They should not just be doing what they're currently doing - i.e. Just sticking a photo of a smiling black girl on the front of their brochure and then ticking off the box that says 'Diversity'. There's rather more to it than that.
