Falling Out Of Love With The Game/watford

Discussion in 'The Hornets' Nest - Watford Chat' started by JimOrn, Nov 6, 2021.

  1. leighton buzzard horn

    leighton buzzard horn Squad Player

    I know a lot of people feeling the same way, and each is a regular match goer of a variety of teams. Armchair fans seemingly are unmoved.

    Modern day top level football is utterly boring compared to a few years back. It’s also saturated with thousands of meaningless stats that are vomited online by the FIFA generation who can never be wrong. Football becoming a none contact sport takes away so much of what made football good, and that lack of physicality has also heightened the gap between the top teams end everyone else.

    When I was growing up, Scotland was scoffed at as a two team league with ridiculous score lines that made it a farmers league. Now the premier league is a three team league with ridiculous score lines and that makes it the best league in the world…

    I hate the premier league and everything that goes with it. When I’ve mentioned that in the past some people seem to be upset about the “lack of ambition, why wouldn’t you want to be in the top league?” but those same fans are then the ones moaning about what a miserable existence it is when you are one of the 14 puppets in the Premier League. Give me mid table championship any day of the week.

    Football should be about entertainment and enjoyment, currently it’s neither,
     
  2. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    I experienced exactly the same feelings as the original poster during the Boothroyd-Simpson-Ashton seasons, when the club seemed to sell its soul for a pound of Premier League flesh. Blocks of flats attached themselves to the corners of the stadium for private profit. Some of the stuff that went on behind the scenes – dear me. I held my nose and watched the matches but it was pretty awful. Compared to that, this is all fine.

    I do get the sentiment that being in the Championship and going to Barnsley and not expecting anything – and so not running the risk of being disappointed – is appealing. The problem with modern football is that the journey is more enjoyable than the destination but I do think that after a couple of months of Barnsley, Reading and the rest – especially not winning – the novelty wears off.

    At times, the Premier League absolutely honks as a spectacle. A pointless, overblown, dreary fart of a competition, played by, watched by (including me) and talked about by absolute whoppers. As a friend of mine says, "We sit there just screaming into the void 'WIN! JUST PLEASE WIN!'" And when we do, all is right with the world.

    And yet, you get a weekend like last weekend when City and Liverpool dropped points, and this weekend when Chelsea did and it offers a glimmer of hope. That could be us tomorrow.

    But the problems remain. Post-match analysis splits into two categories – jaded ex-pros saying: "He's got to do better in them situations," and extremely middle-class media graduates talking about xG. The actual *soul* of the game – the comedy, the pathos, the sense of the ridiculous, the extreme joy of the unexpected away win and the crushing despair of a mundane defeat, doesn't seem to come into it so much. So many games at this level are tedious chess matches where one team has all the possession and the other is no more than a ghostly participant. Chances are few and far between. It is not, any longer, a game to excite the man (or woman) on the terraces, as GT described.

    That's not an old fogey wishing it was 1984 again, it's just a sense that all we have left is a clinical, business-like game where the stakes are actually too high and the storylines are incredibly repetitive, it's just the teams and individuals at the centre of those storylines rotate round.

    Instead of going to the Emirates tomorrow, I'll be at St Albans City's FA Cup first round tie against Forest Green Rovers simply because I care less about the outcome, it's cheaper, it's not as far to travel, and there'll be a proper sense of occasion. Of course, if we win at Arsenal I'll kick myself for missing it but I've reconciled myself with the thought that the three points are not worth any less if I'm not there. I suppose that sums it up, really. If you create a high-stakes but sterile 'product' don't be surprised if people zone out. The anger and outrage on social media and in the phone-ins is an illusion anyway. I sat through 90 minutes of our tame defeat against Southampton and wondered what I was doing. What was in it? The football wasn't any good. We didn't 'have a go'. It was just one of the many football matches on that day, to quote the amusing Mitchell and Webb sketch.
     
  3. Jumbolina

    Jumbolina First Team

    This is a good point. The non contact aspect really reduces the excitement. You think it would make it better but in reality it results in fussy refs constantly stopping the game and giving yellow cards all over. And of course that means that top teams are protected from teams getting stuck in.
     
  4. LondonOrn

    LondonOrn Squad Player

    You write well. Are you a journalist or do you write for a fanzine as your user name and depth of knowledge and insight suggests?
     
  5. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    Ha! Thanks, not entirely sure if you’re being serious or pulling my leg but I’ll answer in good faith. I wrote a book called Enjoy the Game a decade or so ago now, founded the (now defunct) series Tales from the Vicarage and ghost-wrote Graham Taylor’s autobiography. I’ve never written about football in the sense of covering the game week-in, week-out though.
     
  6. LondonOrn

    LondonOrn Squad Player

    No, I was being genuine - I thought you'd be familiar enough with my posts by now to know that I'm not one to make sarcastic or mocking comments. You remind me of one of the writers on BSaD, like Dave Messenger, who used to post on Glory Horns (sadly, as far as I know, he didn't migrate here, which would have been a far better use of his time but that was his prerogative).
     
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  7. SkylaRose

    SkylaRose Administrator Staff Member

    With that experience behind you, it would almost certainly be something to consider. You already write more confidently than half the idiots who work for the Watford Observer in the Sports section. Not sure if you actually need a journalist degree, but even in a non-official role it could be something to consider.
     
  8. wfcSinatra

    wfcSinatra Predictor Choker 14/15

    If football employed an NBA model when it comes to squads, things would be far, far more exciting.
     
  9. Johnny Todd Sings

    Johnny Todd Sings First Year Pro

    I grew up in Croxley and left in the late 70s. I left the UK nearly thirty years ago and Watford FC is now the only connection I have with SW Herts. To not follow the team would be like cutting off my past so I don't see it happening. It probably helps that I can watch all the games online, live or for a week afterwards, for about £10 a month. When I lived in London I would only go to games occasionally. Going to a match took out too much of a chunk of the weekend. Now I can choose when I watch. I would be surprised if I ever get to the Vic again, a thought that fills me with a certain sadness as I type it, but with no more sadness than the thought that I probably won't see many places that have been meaningful to me in the past.

    As for being disillusioned with football, I think that much depends on life stage combined with the quality of the football. When I was about 16 I vowed never to watch Watford again after witnessing a turgid game against Torquay, I think. The games in the late 80s and early 90s were awful. The last game I saw before I left the country was a 0-0 draw with Luton. I knew I wouldn't miss 'entertainment' like that. However watching the Play-off final against Leeds in a lodge in South Africa beside a roaring fire whilst it snowed outside was very special. The broadcast was from Mozambique, in Portuguese, and I watched with a Leeds fan.

    To answer the original question. If Watford ceased to exist I would never watch British football. When Watford are not in the EPL I do not watch the EPL. So I suspect that it is not really the football but the connexion with my past that keeps me interested. Then there is this forum. The humour on here is so very British. It is nice to experience that.
     
  10. BigRossLittleRoss

    BigRossLittleRoss First Team

    That’s the winner for most depressing thread of the year sealed already .
     
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  11. Gladiator

    Gladiator Academy Graduate

    I’ve literally just had the same conversation about this today but about rugby. I went to see my local (low level) team and although England v Tonga was on in the clubhouse, we agreed that we got more enjoyment swerving the Twickenham borefest. Is it because we’re getting older? Maybe. I think it’s more that the elite level of sport is so far removed from what we know and understand and its link to the game we played ourselves and watched voraciously when younger is broken.

    Top flight sport used to kind of resemble the game we played ourselves. Now it doesn’t. Footballers exist in a different stratosphere and any kind of loyalty (both ways) has pretty much gone. Rugby players look like alien species compared to players I played with. In both cases the link has gone.

    This might me fine for someone logging in to watch game from Vietnam, but it doesn’t for the fan who lives round the corner and has grown up with the game. Maybe it’s moved on and we haven’t.

    At the moment I’m hanging on in there.
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2021
  12. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    I started my career on the Watford Observer sports desk almost 30 years ago, before moving on to national newspapers and magazines in 1998, and have a lot of fond memories of the paper that gave me my break as a teenager straight out of school. Back then it was a broadsheet with one of the best sports sections of any local paper in the country. The local media landscape is very different now and the (mostly young) people who work for them have far fewer resources than we had back then - not that we were rich, but there were experienced staff around us, a reasonable budget and a strong print product that people bought. On top of that, the football media has changed beyond recognition too, making the job of local papers that cover football clubs that much harder.

    Quite happy popping in here to read the debate about favourite cheeses and so on and contribute now and again. Actually covering football for a living has never particularly appealed, for a whole host of reasons, but a few side projects on subjects of specific interest, particularly working with GT, have been among my highlights.
     
  13. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    What’s the NBA model? I follow NFL so know all about the salary cap and player franchising (plus draft, but that couldn’t work in football) but don’t follow NBA at all, is it similar?
     
  14. NemoNemo

    NemoNemo Reservist

    I've supported Watford since the late 90s and I'm definitely at a stage where I enjoy it much less than I used to, which I also think is down to the PL and partly down to the Pozzos. In equal measure, the promotions have been great, as can be said for our FA cup run to the final but their methods are running thin with me regarding recruitment of players.
    The championship is the best league in the world, not the PL. And the reason for this is pure entertainment. Bottom can beat top, anyone can get promoted. Some seasons follow a predicted outcome but the next year it could be back to back promotions from league 1. The quality has improved over the years and my favorite Watford memories and matchday experiences came during our time in the league.
    To be completely honest, my favourite era of all was the Malky season followed by Sean Dyche taking over. Take out Bassini as the owner, were picking up steam as a team and playing some decent football with youth players coming in, especially Sean Murray. I just loved being a bit of an underdog and outperforming and outrunning a better, technical team. I remember we played a champions league Tottenham off the park, but for a Scott Loach error to give them the win.
    I miss the workrate and team work of that era. Our squad now would get turned over by that team and we didn't have a pit to pee in. Its not all about money, it's about putting a TEAM together. This is something the Pozzos are very bad at doing.
     
  15. WillisWasTheWorst

    WillisWasTheWorst Its making less grammar mistake's thats important

    Of course we’ve worked out who you are now. I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of your stuff over the years, so thanks for that. I didn’t know you had been at the WO - a paper that gave great coverage of our club back in the pre-internet days. It’s also good to read a balanced and considered post on here now and again; this thread has been interesting and revealing.

    Some have been debating whether getting older contributes to our weariness with certain aspects of football. I think it does for most of us and some years ago I came to the conclusion that I had seen every possible eventuality played out on the pitch, from Watford throwing away big leads to winning from impossible positions and everything in between. I wondered if there was much point in continuing to follow it, with all the expense and emotional investment required. Then the Deeney goal happened and I realised football can always surprise and delight and I remembered why I loved it in the first place.
     
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  16. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    That is becoming less true about the championship, it’s starting to resemble the PL now due to FFP and Covid. Look at us and Norwich last season, and now this season Fulham and Bournemouth are steam rollering everything in sight.

    Whether that will change again with Covid moving into the rear view mirror I’m not sure, but the main driver is really FFP, Covid just accelerated the situation, with championship clubs on their arse financially and clubs with parachute payments better able to keep players who wouldn’t normally drop down to championship level. TV money in the championship is £5m per club, and with FFP you no longer get half the league trying to buy their way to the prem like you did a decade or so back. Nobody but the clubs in receipt of parachute payments spend any meaningful money on players anymore.

    This of course in theory is good for us if it continues, as it should make bouncing back to the PL easier each time, but the clamour for parachute payments to be scrapped will grow and grow of it carries on so it wouldn’t surprise me if something gives eventually.
     
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  17. BudaHorn

    BudaHorn Academy Graduate

    For me living abroad the club has given me the opportunity for my son to have a connection with my past. Up until COVID we were doing a number of games each year based on cheap flights rather than the game. A mix of home and easily accessible away grounds. The gamble was that the game would not be moved for TV. Many of these were day trips from Budapest, one thing to thank Luton for. My first game was Workington in 1967. Having lived in the North East and North West I have been to over 60 grounds.
     
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  18. Maninblack

    Maninblack Reservist

    I think I'm all rinsed out! The last few weeks encapsulate the life of a fan of most clubs outside the top of the Premier league. Uninspiring fare most matches (Wolves, Leeds, Newcastle) punctuated by increasingly numerous and expected pummellings (Liverpool) and the rare unexpected 'I was there' highlight (Everton) that convinces us that its worth carrying on, but then down to Earth with a bump straight afterwards (Southampton) that starts the cycle again. Actually today's match with Arsenal is the first Highbury/Emirates match I've not attended since the early 80s - I missed the ticket sales window but I really wasn't bothered when I realised!

    I have never and will never subscribe to Sky etc and when I move away from the area upon retirement in a few years it'll only be the occasional Watford game close to where I end up living but I'll check out the local non-league club for more regular football fare. Watford will still always be in the blood though but it won't be emptying my wallet or draining me emotionally!
     
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  19. Lloyd

    Lloyd Squad Player

    There's plenty not to like about modern football and lots of things about the current set-up at Watford that grate on me, so I completely get why anyone would lose interest. I've been going to Vicarage Road for yonks and at least once every season I vow that I'm never going back, cut up my season ticket (can't do that anymore) and/or chuck my scarf on the fire when I get home from a game, but a week later find myself back in my usual seat or on a train criss-crossing the country on my way to some bleak Channel 4 unemployment blackspot documentary town, full of optimism for an away win, so I'm afraid I'm a 'lifer'. My advice to anyone worried that the spark is going out of their relationship with football is avoid twitter, watch TV games with the sound off and only watch MotD on catch up so you can fast-forward through the inane babble of Jug Ears etc
     
  20. Jumbolina

    Jumbolina First Team

    What’s the NBA model Sinatra? Don’t watch basketball.
     
  21. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    It's similar to NFL and other US sports that have a draft system in that each club (franchise) gets a seeded pick of the best talent entering the league (usually from the college sports system). Those 'picks' can then also be traded for other players. It can get quite complicated but the general idea is to avoid a huge concentration of the most marketable talent in two or three teams – although that can still happen through a series of mechanisms that exist in the system. The basic principle, though, is that the poorest performing teams in the league have the first pick of the new talent. The thing is, the NBA is a self-contained league where all the franchisee owners have a stake in the overall business and so, to an extent, it is in their interests to have a competitive league. However, it's almost a controlled form of competition and teams tend to go in cycles as they attract 'marquee' players and enjoy periods of success before fading again. The biggest, more historically successful clubs – such as the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics – still tend to have a slight edge, but it does mean that there's always hope that it'll be your turn. Cleveland had been terrible until they got LeBron James, Golden State were poor for many years until they got Steph Curry as were Milwaukee until they got Giannis Antetokounmpo and built a team around him through a series of smart trades. All have won the NBA title in recent years. There's also a very complex salary cap (and a series of exceptions and penalties) which mean that it's not possible simply for the biggest clubs with the deepest pockets to spend their way to success. Of course, because the league is owned by one company and the clubs are all franchises of that league all TV deals are centralised as are many other commercial aspects such as sponsorship and even kit deals. In the NBA, all kits are made by the same company, and that has been the case for many years. So all revenue is centralised and the disparity between the top and bottom clubs is not as vast.

    The moment to adopt any sort of similar system, or revamp the transfer market at all, would have been in 1992 when the Premier League was created. As a legal and politically different entity they could have truly broken away from the Football League and implemented something new, altering the transfer market entirely so that players from outside the league (either in what is now the Championship, League 1 and 2, or from foreign leagues) entered a draft held each summer (and perhaps in January too). Regular transfers between Premier League clubs could still have gone ahead in the same way.

    But there's no will in this country to ensure a more level playing field and so anything as extreme as a draft system is a complete non-starter. There's absolutely no way the big clubs would go for a system where, say, Mo Salah or Kevin De Bruyne entered the draft one summer and the likes of Norwich or Watford had first pick.
     
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  22. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    The draft system wouldn’t work in football, it’s just not possible.

    Is he not talking more about something similar to what they have in the NFL, with the franchising of specific players and the salary cap?

    Im just guessing because I don’t watch NBA hence why I also asked the question.

    The makeup of football is just not in any way compatible with the draft system, but some other aspects of how player salaries are approached might be.
     
  23. wfcSinatra

    wfcSinatra Predictor Choker 14/15

    There are salary caps for starters, so essentially if we copied that over to football if you wanted to spend £100 million on Grealish to sit on your bench, you have to sell a Sterling or Mahrez for example. That way, Grealish stays at Villa or becomes a team's "franchise player" because they've made the sacrifices. City had Mahrez, Sterling & Grealish all on the bench yesterday, that's £200 million of talent, none of them even came on and they still won at a canter. That's boring/

    Teams in NBA are just very even meaning anyone can win any given night, it's not as straightforward as this but basically the lower you finish the higher your pick out the next year's draft.

    Academies in football are broken, young talent getting nabbed for peanuts. It would be literally impossible to do here but imagine scrapping academies, every young footballer has to go to university for at least a year, study alongside his football, and then enter a draft, so the best young talent is shared evenly. For the late bloomers, something similar to the G-League the NBA have would also work and make reserve football a tad more interesting.
     
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  24. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    The draft system would never work in football, the point of going to college is to learn and leave, the players graduate because that’s the point and then they’re picked up by the teams from one league.

    The point of a championship/L1/L2 team isn’t to develop teams for the PL, like it is for a college football/NBA team. Championship/L1 etc. Teams have ambitions to win things and gain promotion, why would they want to exist to hand over their best talent to another team?

    That’s also ignoring the fact that most of the players in the PL are actually foreign and don’t come from the football league, it’s all very well us turning football academies in the EFL into a draft style system, but how does that stop Man City buying a young Brazilian kid? For it to work you’d need it standardised across all leagues in the world, which would be completely impossible.

    That’s also ignoring the fact that unlike the US sports we have promotion and relegation, the draft works by giving the worst team in the NFL the first pick from the draft the following season, so how would that work with the PL? Relegated clubs get stuck in a void? Or they still get to pick so take players off of clubs they’ll be competing with the following season anyway?

    The player franchising system is something that could work alongside a salary cap though:

    https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....84232/nfl-franchise-tag-free-agency-explained

    If you franchise a player you can lock them into a contract and they can’t talk to other clubs, the flip side is you have to pay them the average of the top five earners in that position. That means you can only franchise so many players because you have to fit under the salary cap. Clubs couldn’t hoard talent and non franchised players are free to move around to other clubs.

    None of it will ever happen though, as it isn’t in the interests of the clubs at the top who gold the most power.
     
  25. Also relocated to the SW about 12 years ago

    I fell out of love with football in the noughties and didn't watch a game for about 5 years

    I'm getting a similar vibe again, the Abu Dhabi FCs have made success unreachable, every other week is a spanking, and forums/social media is just full of arguments and spite

    There is little to enjoy these days
     
  26. Arakel

    Arakel First Team

    We're fond of saying "it's the hope that kills you", but really it's the hope that makes it interesting. Before the Pozzo takeover the best we could expect for was a few good results, not going down, and and outside chance at stealing a playoff place. We had dreams that were distant but achievable, and the hope was there every season that this time, maybe it'd be different.

    Now we're able to get into/stay in the Premier League, but the experience while we're there is largely unpleasant, and the hope is gone. We basically have little to look forward to every year. As Rita Hayworth was noted to say "Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me." So it is with us and the Premier League: we wanted it for so long, and when it was a distant flight of fancy it seemed worth pursuing. But now we've had it, the mystery is gone and we're left with the reality.

    Massive spending. Hugely outgunned by the half dozen teams who dominate the league. No prospect of developing any home grown talent because it'll be stolen the moment we get anyone good. Inevitable relegation because we're not big enough to guarantee we can compete every year. And when we do go down, little to show for the time in the top flight because we had to spend every penny and a lot more besides in order to stay there. There's really nothing to hope for anymore and as a result you're left wondering what the point of it all is.

    We'll never be able to compete with the big clubs, no matter how many seasons we spend in the top flight. We're essentially cannon fodder, along with 12 or so other teams who'll all ultimately enjoy some variant of the same hopeless endeavor that we do every year, even if they manage to score a few more points along the way.

    It's not really a Watford thing, it's a modern football thing and the situation would be the same for any club of similar size. But the end result is the same so it's a bit of a moot point when it comes down to it.

    The game needs an enormous revolution from the ground up. It won't get it, though. UEFA and FIFA will see to that, even if political will in the country could be found to do it.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2021
  27. tonycotonstache

    tonycotonstache Squad Player

    When we had that great midfield of Capoue, Doucoure, Pereyra with Delefeou we had a team to believe in. A team that was going places.

    That we then wasted a tonne of money on turd forwards and stuck with Troy two seasons too many with no proper care for the defence just killed it for me personally.

    With that midfield plus proper sensible signings we could've really pushed on.
     
    Chumlax likes this.
  28. wfc4ever

    wfc4ever Administrator Staff Member

    Yes I agree squad and playing wise we have kind of gone backwards from a couple of years ago which is frustrating (whilst still spending good money) and there is that feeling we might just become a yo yo club.
     
  29. WillisWasTheWorst

    WillisWasTheWorst Its making less grammar mistake's thats important

    People have talked about the idea of yo-yo clubs ever since the 90s and Charlton Athletic (look at them now), but there is really no guarantee of bouncing back straight away after relegation. You can point to examples like Norwich and Fulham this season but there are many more teams who don’t make it: Sheffield United (a much bigger club than us) are currently 18th in the Championship.
     
  30. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    There will always be exceptions but it is definitely becoming easier to become a yo-yo club, Covid and FFP have ensured that. Still no guarantees of course, but clubs without parachute payments just aren’t spending any meaningful money anymore and they’ve stopped gambling on getting PL promotion. Can you name a big transfer in the championship that wasn’t by a team without parachute payments? Fulham spent £12m on Harry Wilson, meanwhile Troy going to Birmingham on a free was probably the biggest transfer to a non PP club. You won’t always get all there clubs yo-yoing, but we’re starting to see at least two per season doing it’d which was unheard of a few years back, ourselves and Norwich last season being a case in point. This season Fulham and WBA are in the top three, along with Bournemouth from our relegation season. The Sheffield United’s are now becoming the exceptions themselves.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2021
  31. WillisWasTheWorst

    WillisWasTheWorst Its making less grammar mistake's thats important

    I accept it might be a little easier right now to bounce back, but I still think a club needs to be pretty well managed to do it. As you say, there are no guarantees.
     
  32. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    Yesterday's game was extremely hard to love. I watched it in a pub in St Albans because I was going to the St Albans City v Forest Green Rovers FA Cup tie. After six minutes it became apparent that most of the people watching were Arsenal fans. And very soon after that it being apparent that almost none of them understood the offiside law. Extraordinary, really. People were protesting: "But he's not offside," and "That's a joke."

    The rest of it was Premier League Template A. Smaller away side huffs and puffs and creates almost nothing. Referee subtly, and perhaps unconsciously (if I am being charitable), influences the outcome with a hundred micro decisions that all contribute to giving the Big Team the upper hand. An absolutely woeful performance by the referee, unless of course he was doing it deliberately, in which case it was brilliant. Arsenal failing to give the ball back after Rose had kicked it out so their player could receive treatment was dreadful. Just weary, cynical professionalism.

    And then to Clarence Park, which is a lovely place to watch football anyway, and a sell-out crowd of 4,000 and two committed sides playing decent football. Obviously it's a once-in-a-generation result and football without that sense of a lifelong emotional attachment is not quite the same, but it was a brilliant evening.
     
  33. EnjoytheGame

    EnjoytheGame Reservist

    Sky seem to be suggesting that Rose kicked the ball out so it was Tufan who could get treatment? Then one of our players was lying on the floor as Smith-Rowe strolled past him and lashed the ball into the net. What a mess.
     
  34. Knight GT

    Knight GT Predictor extraordinaire 2013/14

    The Pandemic has affected my love for top level football far more than I thought it would. I still watched on Hive Live but it didn't take up a large proportion of my day (I live 50 miles away) with travelling time taking anything from 1 to 2 hours each way. We then have the ridiculous salaries for very average players, VAR, the bottomless pit that some clubs now have, FFP being a complete waste of time, cheating, players lacking respect for officials. My son now has a season ticket and suspect I always will unless I move further away but he also plays football on a Saturday morning making away games difficult to go to as he quite often finishes at 1pm.
    Lower level football I still enjoy and if I'm out walking the dog and see a Sunday League game going on I will always stop and watch for a while. I've been going since 1979/80 and will never not follow my team or change to another team but if Watford ceased to be I would watch very little football on TV.
    Having said all of that I still enjoy meeting up with the group of lads I've been going to football with for 30 years. I suspect it's a lot to do with the fact that to be in this league I know it will always be a struggle but would take that over mid table (or worse) Championship like we had in the 90's which is easily the worst period of football I've ever seen us have.
     
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  35. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

    Yes, Rose kicked it out for Tufan. And in honesty he really shouldn't have. PL clubs were told a few seasons ago to not do that as the referee will decide if an injury warrants play stopping or not. Given how easily players go down that's surely the right approach?
     

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