Watford 3 Burnley 3 (29/03/2013)

1. Much earlier in the season, before all of the water went under the bridge, I’d prepared a rather pointed and yet, hopefully, vaguely amusing analogy for a report on our home game with Brighton. It rode a favourite hobby horse, of the type you can use to test how much your partner really loves you: the tendency of restaurants to serve panna cotta, that most gently, kindly delectable of puddings, with some kind of fruit compote, rhubarb or blackcurrant or something similarly sharp. And really, why would anyone who actually likes panna cotta enough to pick it from a menu want that? It’s like writing a piece for string quartet and amplified foghorn. I blame Masterchef.

I quickly realised that the analogy, an attempt at drawing a comparison with the drowning of an essentially mild and likeable Championship side by a new regime and its vast quantity of randomly-imported rhubarb, had a serious flaw. That flaw, of course, was that nobody compares Sean Dyche to a milk pudding and escapes without a thick ear. And besides, the game itself didn’t fit the mould I’d prepared for it.

The analogy fits even less well now. The most tiresome aspect of the recent glib, misinformed controversy is that we went through all of that stuff months ago: there’s an implicit suggestion in much of the criticism that Watford supporters have blindly followed a winning team, oblivious to the wider issues and ignorant of the facts. The reality is that many of the supporters I know wouldn’t blindly follow anything; some of them, and me too, would obstinately and proudly run in the opposite direction at the very suggestion. In short, if this didn’t still feel like Watford, if it just felt like someone else’s kindergarten team or a theoretical exercise, the league table wouldn’t shut many of us up.

But it does feel like Watford. In many ways, it feels more like Watford than anything for many years: this is a club whose identity has been enhanced, not obscured or replaced. A new version, undoubtedly, with much to get used to. But the remarkable achievement of this season, however it ends, has been to pull this club closer together, to turn it into something coherent and comprehensible. The point of vintage Watford – Graham Taylor’s Watford, to be clear – was always to be more than a team on a pitch; the club had ends other than merely producing three points on a Saturday. That, of course, made the three points on a Saturday all the more sweet. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting a lot of things right again.

And so we welcomed Sean Dyche back to a very different club. We applauded him warmly, and quite rightly; he applauded us, which was typically decent of him. And he stood on the touchline with Ian Woan, pointing and shouting and looking as if he’d never left. And then we went our separate ways again. And now we’re here, you wouldn’t change it, would you?

2. Oh, and he took a point with him. A point from the kind of tetchy, irritable, much-interrupted match that ends some time after Grandstand or whatever it is now has been through the reading of the final scores. The kind of match that Adrian Boothroyd briefly turned into a bit of an artform, “managing the game” as if it were some kind of viral outbreak to be contained for the sake of public safety; you’re fooling yourself if you think that last season’s Dyche-built Watford side was any less aggravating than Burnley were here. (Exhibit A: Joe Garner.)

The suspicion all along has been that we might eventually be undone by a lack of streetwise survival skills, that there might be one or two occasions too many when we’d miss John Eustace. We were comfortable winners of the beauty contest, but there were physical and mental challenge to be met too, inevitably, and we definitely weren’t winners in either of those. Instead, we were too easily distracted by irrelevant fussing around minor decisions, by things that we didn’t need or want to get involved in. By whether the ball was exactly in the corner quadrant, for pity’s sake. We didn’t play to our strengths nearly enough. Adrian Boothroyd would’ve been appalled.

3. The end result is that a vital game in which we scored three rather exquisite goals of a very un-Boothroyd class finished with a stunned, desolate silence hanging around Vicarage Road and a hole below the waterline of HMS Automatic Promotion. All of that stuff about scoring one more than the other lot is fine as long as you do. If you don’t, it just looks careless and a bit silly, like you’ve bought the Lamborghini and the mock-Tudor mansion before checking that you put the winning lottery ticket somewhere safe.

It’s true that we’ve built our free-flowing football on a defence that isn’t afraid of the ball, which, by necessity, has a trade-off in terms of security and control. You have to compromise somewhere. But this was a bit much, even so: two desperate goals resulting from people blazing past Marco Cassetti in the first half, then following reorganisation and reinforcement to solve the problem, the bitter blow of seeing the same thing happen to Matthew Briggs when we thought the game was won. As with Neuton, it has to be said that Briggs is the point at which Zola’s cavalier approach to defending starts to descend into self-parody. In truth, I don’t know that I want us to change the compromise, now that it’s been struck…but it shouldn’t become an excuse. This isn’t really the time for excuses.

4. Which leaves us with a well-deserved thunk for the forwards, some positivity to balance out the frustration. It being a team game – a squad game, really – having the best player in the division doesn’t really count for anything on its own; besides, Matej Vydra’s impact has been sporadic, if spectacular, through the course of the season and his last days in the Championship might echo those of Danny Graham, such an evident threat that he almost becomes a decoy. We’ve needed others to step up.

Never any doubt about Troy Deeney, of course. Not since his return to action, so clearly the missing ingredient, have we had cause to think of him as anything other than our first choice centre forward, our line leader…and he was massive here, one of too few who really could claim to have matched finesse with an appetite for the physical battle. Splendid goal, and a mere couple of inches from an almost equally splendid second, just lifting his lob ever so slightly too high and onto the crossbar in first half injury time. For all the focus on our loanees and ex-loanees, it’s Deeney, I’d suggest, who has lit the way for this team, much as John Eustace did for the two previous campaigns.

But if you want cause for optimism – aside from the marvellous Palace scoreline that came in as I was writing this – then you should find it in the rejuvenation of Fernando Forestieri. Another brace of sublime goals…particularly the first, in which Fitz Hall borrowed Almen Abdi’s sliderule and a crowd of defenders wasn’t enough to prevent the little magician from tricking his way into position for an instant, unstoppable finish. An exuberant, glittery party popper of a goal; that’s the football we’ve been playing this season and that should, for better or worse, see us through to the end.

5. At some point in the second half, an errant throw from Jonathan Bond gifted Burnley their clearest opening of the game, which they duly fluffed…and for the next ten minutes, every opportunity to distribute from the back was greeted with insistent howls to avoid a repeat and clout it forward out of harm’s way. But that’s an admission of defeat: we’ve built from the back all season, we’ve accepted that risk, we’ve made it our strength. It’s what we do.

Sometime during April, perhaps even in May, we’ll find out how all of this ends. Modern football is full of people rushing to be first with a definitive conclusion: the must-win game, the title decider, the point of no return. But you’re in the wrong place if you want that: Burnley’s late goal felt like a punch in the stomach, but that’s all it was. It hurt, but we’ll live. Nothing’s decided yet.

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