Watford 0 Southampton 3 (25/02/2012)

Five thunks from a grotesque afternoon at Vicarage Road.

1- It should have been such a splendid afternoon.  Glorious sunshine on matchday, for the first time this year.  Yes, I know we play football in the winter, predominantly, in the wet and the cold.  And yet there’s something about a sunny day and football, together, that puts a kick in the step of a Saturday morning.  And Rahelle’s coming again, my five year old daughter, teaching her little sister to sing “ye-llow red and black ar-my” at the breakfast table.

Maybe she had a premonition, I don’t know.  At five-to-one, we’re about to leave and suddenly she has a tummy ache and “I shouldn’t really come to football if I’m poorly should I Daddy, maybe I should stay at home”.  So she does. And of course it’s sunny but the sunshine is deceptive, in the shade of the Rookery it’s not pretending to be anything other than February.

And there’s a drip.  Which is also a cold, February drip, oblivious to the fact that it isn’t raining and hasn’t done, that there isn’t a cloud in the sky. And someone’s turned up the volume control on Mr Bassini’s new tannoy system again.  This probably suits him, as it means that he can’t hear the bloke chewing his ear off at the front of the Rookery, probably complaining about another drip.  It also means that “Chariots of Fire” is not the ethereal, subliminal soundtrack to the warming up that it should be.  It’s suddenly in your face, a bangin’ tune.  Today is going to be bloody awful.

2- Today is bloody awful.  The more so for miserable indifference to the sense of anticipation that the arrivals of Kuszczak and Trotta, two big fillips for areas of the team that neeeded fillips.  Yes, OK, we may have been dicked by Crystal-effing-Palace last week but we’re at home, and new striker and new goalkeeper, and it’s all going to be fine.

Kuszczak’s every move is being cheered. Simple things for the moment, nothing challenging.  Scott Loach’s eyes presumably rolling in his head as he kicks his heels on the bench.  And then a deep cross comes over from the right and it really, really shouldn’t be a problem and it certainly shouldn’t be something that the keeper should be thinking about coming for.  Except he does and then he doesn’t and Rickie Lambert has got his head to it and the ball’s in the net and several thousand home fans mouth “oh shit”, a delayed reaction not to the goal but to the implications of the episode.  Actually for the rest of the debacle Kuszczak doesn’t do an awful lot wrong;  indeed he looks commanding for the most part, pulls off a stunning stop in the build up to the penalty award and isn’t asked to do a lot otherwise.  But he isn’t asked to do a lot because Southampton are already ahead and, frankly, we aren’t going to score a goal.

Trotta, meanwhile, is tidy;  he drops deep looking for the ball, trying to get involved, but plays in the wrong areas of the pitch and is lost in the frantic pace of the game, a rabbit in headlights. There will be other games, this was anything but an easy one to come into, but Martin Jol reportedly selected Watford as Trotta’s loan destination, faced with seemingly with a choice of half the Championship, on the basis of the games he would be involved in.  Which means predominantly, one assumes, this one and West Ham.  He’ll hope to give Ray Lewington more positives to report at Upton Park in ten days’ time than he did today.

3- You know it’s been a bad day when Big Chris comes on and peps things up.  A reflection on the state of the game as much as anything… the insane pressure which Southampton have been putting on the ball, the rabid, high speed charging down of possession, has forced the error which lead to the second, and has perhaps for the first time this season left both Eustace and Hogg chasing shadows.  Yeates and Dickinson look horribly exposed, lumpy and leaden, and it’s not as if Lloyd sticks all of his passes on a sixpence on the best of days. By the time Chris arrives it’s already happened, he’s late at a party when everyone else is sleeping it off.

It will be interesting to note how the Saints cope next season, on this evidence.  There’s plenty of quality, but in terms of style, direct and frantic and merciless, they’re as close to Allardyce-vintage Bolton as anything else and nobody does that inyourfaceness in the top flight at the moment, not even Stoke.

4- The highlight of the afternoon comes with the introduction of David Connolly from Southampton’s bench for whichever dying swan was the third to limp off forlornly for the visiting side, something which happens remarkably frequently given that the side is made up almost exclusively of huge brutes that wouldn’t flinch at being hit by a truck.  As so many footballing traditions are consigned to history, the relentless persecution of this horrible little gobshite goes on unabated nearly sixteen years after Mick McCarthy told him that he no longer had anything to prove at Watford’s level.  In the context of this encounter, desperate for anything to be cheerful about, Connolly’s arrival was greeted with more joy and gusto than it has been at Vicarage Road since, arguably, the spring of 1996.

Meanwhile, a small but determined group of youngsters behind the goal are determined to remind a haggard looking Kelvin Davis of his Luton heritage for much of the second half .  Dave wonders whether any of them are old enough to remember Davis playing for Luton.  Ian wonders whether any of them are old enough to remember Luton.

5- The silver lining, seriously now, is Troy Deeney’s performance. In defiance of the pathetic nonsense going on around him Deeney kept going, kept fighting and looked like, whisper it, a proper centre forward, exposing cracks in the Saints backline even if it never quite came together for him.  We’ve missed him badly in his absence;  he still doesn’t look like a goal machine, but he’s definitively a striker again, our best striker.  He batttles and scraps and profits and buffets and holds up and links and keeps doing it.  Other days will bring more rewards than this one ever looked likely to.