Watford 0 Nottingham Forest 1 (24/09/2011)

1. There are times when writing a report about a televised game feels fairly redundant, those at home having had better, repeated views of key incidents and some immediate studio analysis too. Not here, though. If you saw this on television, through a camera following the ball on its frequently directionless travels around the pitch, you saw considerably less than the full picture. You saw enough to draw some damning conclusions, I imagine. But if you were there, you saw it all: the collective, constipated horror of this new-look, old-feeling Watford side and its management team laid absolutely bare. There was nowhere to hide.

2. The first half was often so devoid of final third incident that you wouldn’t have known who was kicking in which direction had you missed the start. We let any home-side impetus – and to their credit, the Yellow Order keep trying to raise the atmosphere in the Rookery – drain away with a dull-as-dishwater half hour in which we mustered not a single half-chance. It was a performance that couldn’t have been more workmanlike if it’d turned up two hours late with a fag wedged behind its ear and its arse hanging out of some unpleasantly stained jeans.

The formation appears designed with containment in mind; containment not just of the opposition, but of our own creativity and imagination, as if getting too carried away might prove dangerous, as if risk and chance are things to be eliminated at all costs. Reinforcement of those ideas comes from the bench, with substitutions so numbingly conservative that they’re announced in the small ads of the Daily Mail rather than over the tannoy. The totality is a crumbling communist edifice, built with the thought that attacking is merely defending with the ball.

It’s as though we’ve spent the summer condemning shapelessness as the root of all evil, then defined a shape by banging six inch nails into the dressing room wall and tying them together with string. With John Eustace and Jonathan Hogg nestling in ahead of the back four, seven of our eleven players barely crossed the halfway line; the two wide players might’ve been further forward, but usually only by a matter of a few yards. Somewhere up there, Marvin Sordell ploughs a lone furrow with a coughing, spluttering tractor; in this context, ‘service’ counts as having another Watford shirt within thirty yards, let alone catching fleeting sight of the ball.

3. Only individual courage can enliven this act of collective labour. When Carl Dickinson stampedes up the wing to win a corner, or John Eustace ploughs through some tackles to drive in a shot, or Mark Yeates comes off the flank to play a quick pass and Joe Garner darts into the six yard box, we suddenly look like a football team again. We suddenly make our opponents turn around, we suddenly catch a passing whiff of some enthusiastic backing from the home fans. And then we’re back to banging long balls up to Craig Forsyth’s head, a relentless chipping away to establish a foothold, then put in supply lines to consolidate, then start a fresh bombardment of enemy positions, then push on north for tea and cakes in the oppo six yard box by Christmas. Ah, the linesman’s flag again.

There were chances to win this match, either side of half-time. Before it, the diving header from the tidy-but-indistinct Joe Garner was our first goal attempt…and very nearly our first goal, denied only by Camp’s fingertips. After it, the aforementioned dart from Garner finished with a frustrating header wide from Eustace’s chipped cross; that would’ve been a fine goal, a fresh air breeze amid the stagnation. As we finally made some runs into potentially dangerous areas, Forsyth might’ve done better when played through; there are so few hints of last season’s fluid attacking that anything mobile and fluent almost becomes an end in itself, for now.

But a side so blunt up front can’t afford to be anything other than sound at the back. And we are very much anything other. Quite how a defensive unit as well-established as ours can concede a winning goal like that is yours to decide based upon your personal preferences; I can see you drafting the comment identifying a scapegoat as I type. An instant deflation of our sails, and all our unimpressive visitors needed to take the points with little further worry, a scuffed Eustace shot late on aside.

4. Playing like this, we’ll do the same to other teams on our travels. But God knows, those of us who largely restrict ourselves to home games are in for a lot of unsweetened gruel in the coming months. The thought of enduring this once the winter nights set in is enough to make you shudder.

You know us, you know Matt and me, we don’t jump to conclusions. We don’t join in with the chorus just because we’ve lost; we’ll find a few positives, smudge the black and white into something in between, see the wider picture. But the problem here is the wider picture. It seems to me that we’re heading for the kind of impasse that Brendan Rodgers wedged himself into within a few weeks of his arrival; we’re heading for a point where the approach simply has to change, for a club cannot sustain an audience on performances this utterly charmless, whatever its league position.

Perhaps we’ve been spoilt by two seasons of remarkably bright, youthful, upbeat football. Perhaps it’ll take more time. But here’s the thing: give us something to hang onto. Give us a reason to look forward to it. It’s a job for you; it’s not a job for us. It just feels like extraordinarily hard work, and that’s not the same thing.

5. Thunk #5 is carried over for another day, there being nothing else worth saying.