Watford 1 Doncaster Rovers 1 (08/08/2009)

1. Fizzle. It should, of course, be remembered that there have been less auspicious starts than this to very auspicious seasons; we all crave answers, but these early season games often raise still more questions instead. It was a bit of a non-alcoholic beer of a match: the same fizz as the bottle’s cracked open, but some bite missing from what’s inside. This tight, well-drilled Donny side – atypical of the Championship in terms of their patience, but not in terms of their organisation – should remind us how badly clubs without financial clout require stability and continuity. That process has to start somewhere, auspicious or otherwise.  There’s plenty of hard work ahead.

2. For the two debutants, a mixed afternoon. Danny Graham was excellent, visibly growing in confidence after Tommy Smith’s cross-shot dribbled his way for a Scott Fitzgerald-style tap-in; a centre forward can’t ask for much more than that in their first game. Even as the service dried up in the second half, he showed an encouraging combination of work-rate and touch, a bit like Darius Henderson with the volume turned down.

In midfield, Scott Severin also had a fine game: he clearly has the ability to pick out a pass and to pop up in convenient places at convenient moments. However, technical problems meant that he was a couple of seconds out of sync with everything else, as if beamed in from another continent via a ropey satellite link. You hope that he’ll come up to speed quickly: there are times when you can afford one or two failures in the transfer market, and this decidedly isn’t one of those times.

3. Elsewhere, it was hard to avoid the impression that selling Tommy Smith would be utterly disastrous, much as you’d try to take it on the chin like a grown-up if it really had to happen. For without him, there’s just a whole bunch of fairly pedestrian huffery-puffery: Don Cowie’s limitations would be severely exposed if he were required to become a creative force; Jobi McAnuff is much too prone to days like these, days when nothing goes right, days when he’d find a winning lottery ticket in the road and get hit by a bus as he picked it up; Will Hoskins still looks like a decent player and plays like a decent looker. Smith, on the other hand, add so much energy and so many ideas, bringing the game to life by trying to make something happen every time he picks up the ball. Heaven knows what we’d do without him, frankly.

4. The good news, Danny Graham aside, is that the defence looked like something you might be able to rely on for more than ten minutes, something that might not require constant, fretful attention. Mike Williamson picked up where he left off: willowy, elegant, Foster-esque for those who still hold that memory dear. Bar one slip in the first half, superbly covered by Ross Jenkins, Jay Demerit was all power and muscle alongside him; they complement each other superbly.

It’s not to everyone’s taste, I know, but I rather like Demerit’s insistence on attempting to play implausibly ambitious defence-splitting passes from deep within his own half; the memory of those deathless early games under Brendan Rodgers, when it appeared a crime to even think about trying to score without constructing an elaborate forty-seven pass move first, is still fresh enough to treasure a bit of good old fashioned up-and-over.

5. Is it not time that someone tackled the issue of time-wasting substitutions? Given that the number of allowed substitutes and substitutions continues to grow, I imagine that we now spend the equivalent of a full ninety minutes every season watching players – theirs and ours – amble towards the touchline like sulky teenagers being dragged around the clothes shops by their mums on a Saturday afternoon, barely able to put one foot in front of another for sheer ennui. I hereby propose the following simple measures:

• If you’re not ready to make the substitution – fourth official lined up, player stood on the halfway line – when the ball goes out of play, tough toffee. That also applies to instances where the player being substituted finds that they’re suddenly and temporarily deaf and blind, unable to hear the call of the touchline and unable to find their way home.
• Between them, the four officials on duty ought to be able to count to twenty-two. Why should several thousand people have to wait for one player to wander off, shaking the hands of everyone along the way and applauding all around, before the other one enters the field of play and the game re-starts? Send ’em on and get on with it.

Lecture ends.