Anyone know how to get hold of any old BM footage of watford ? We used to feature quite a lot but cant find any / many online. in particular, i seem to recall us beating Leicester City in 1969 in the old Div 2 - we had just come up and they had just come down, so it must have been Aug / Sept ? there were quite a few other times we were featured, especially in the early days of GT in division 4 - newport ? Am surprised there is no record of some of the Big Match footage - was an excellent regional programme
About ten years ago ITV4 ran a series of The Big Match revisited covering a single season (about 1983) so I’m sure those must be available. Of course the network franchise back then was London Weekend Television which ended in the 90s I think, so I don’t know if all the older stuff, back to the 60s would even still exist in ITV archives.
This website has a list of every game shown on The Big Match from 1968-92. http://carousel.royalwebhosting.net/itv/BigMatch.html
I was there too. Keith Eddy with a penalty on 90 minutes then Leicester (David Nish, I think) gave the ball away straight from the kick off and we scored the winner.
Watched the big match revisited this week. Billy Jennings for WHU and John Farley for Wolves. Bill McGarry and Sammy Chung in charge of Wolves. As a kid I was distraught when we sold Billy.
I stumbled on a Big Match from 1974 this week, including Luton (with Alan Garner) being beaten at home by Burnley in a relegation season. Ground looked as big a dump then as now, but the paint was fresher. Pleasure to watch.
I’ve gradually been watching these and one thing I’ve noticed is how much teams, especially in Div 1, played out from the back. Not in the way they do today, but goalies regularly rolled the ball out to defenders to take it forward, rather than punting it downfield.
It was easier for defenders in those days though as there was no point pressing them as they could simply play back to the keeper who could then pick it up again.
That’s true, but somewhere along the line (late 70s?) the trend must have changed to the goalie kicking the ball long and that was well before Dave Beasant at Wimbledon started the practice of dribbling out of his area and clearing it even longer. This in turn was before the pass back rule was introduced in the 90s.
ITV4 at 10.30- one of the games (the last one on) is us at Newcastle in November 1980 in front of a massive 14,000 crowd -ok its Div 2 and our second season before reaching the promised land at the end of the following season.
No. Are you mixing him up with John Mitchell, who looked a bit like him, and played for Fulham in the ‘75 Cup Final against Jennings’ West Ham?
Don’t let the ghost of Jimmy Hill hear you say that! He was also all for awarding penalties for ‘professional’ fouls outside the box.
Seems so. From what I can recall, he came training with Watford after Larry McGettigan asked if he could 'bring along a mate who's quite good.' Not quite in the realms of John Barnes being spotted by a Watford fan when he was playing for Sudbury Court, but a good slice of luck all the same. Jennings' style could be described as 'languid' at best, which led to some mutterings about whether his team mates were happy with his overall work rate. Laurie Craker put that one to bed by saying 'I've told him I'll do all his running as well as my own if he keeps scoring the goals to get me my win bonus.' At a time when win bonuses were a vital part of a player's potential wage level, a goal scorer such as him were routinely 'accommodated' by their team mates even if they were perceived as being slightly 'lazy.' Despite not being all that tall, he had an amazing ability to jump before his marker and appear to 'hang' in the air until the ball arrived resulting in him being surprisingly good in the air. We soon found out the impact of losing him as we went down to Div 4 the next season.
Larry McGettigan himself was a strange case. Apparently often brilliant in the reserves, he never seemed to be able to reproduce that form when he was given a number of chances in the first team. As a result he couldn’t establish himself at Watford, was eventually released, then suddenly gave up on his career. Sadly died very young as well.
