Watford 1 Leeds United 2 (04/05/2013)

1a. Oh God. Oh God. OhhhhhhhhHHHHHHH. AaaaarrrrgggHHHHHHHH. Bloody hell. Bloody f***ing hell. Bloody f***ing sodding hell.

1b. And so on.

1c. And some more.

1d. Look, we’re all grown-ups here, right? We like to think of you, dear reader, as someone who’s a bit brighter than the phone-in knee-jerkers who can only see things in the purest black and white, no shades in between. So we can take it as read, can’t we, that we’ve had a great season and have no cause for complaint? We can all agree that there’s nothing to moan about, especially not in the context of the last five years? And we all know that whoever the hell keeps offering playoff places around like sweeties to children would’ve had their hand bitten off. Yes, yes, yes.

1e. But you should be allowed a moment or two – a day or two – before perspective dulls the pain. This ought to hurt. When you turn away and distract yourself with other things, it ought to be staring you straight in the face whenever you look back. It ought to make you want to punch the wall and throw things and find some really destructive gardening to do. If I take solace in anything – and I’m struggling – then it’s in the reaction of Jonathan Hogg, whose post-match lap of honour was so reluctant and desultory that it barely took him beyond the centre circle and never, not for a moment, involved looking at anything other than his own feet. Lap of honour? Bollocks to that.

1f. It ought to hurt. It ought to hurt because we failed, how ever much you might try to dress it up. And because we have a second chance.

2. Pre-match, it felt like one of those special days. One of those surreal days, when strange and wonderful and memorable things happen. There’s a group of Leeds fans dressed as nuns at the end of Vicarage Road, wishing us success on the basis of hating ‘Ull. We pass Derek Payne, who’s carrying a large bag of socks down the road, away from the ground. (Is the punditry thing just a cover, I wonder, for a slow, methodical asset-stripping exercise?) A thunderstorm disturbs the spring calm. Richard Johnson, as near to my favourite Watford player ever as makes no difference, is on the pitch for the first time in a decade or more; applause for him, applause for Ron Rollitt, noise and colour everywhere.

This is Vicarage Road as it never is: passionate, optimistic, celebratory. Loud. There’s a flood of joyous tears building up behind a facade of quiet anticipation and gnawing eagerness. It’s a great day to be a Watford fan.

3. The rest is hard to make sense of, even now. And yet, in many ways, it’s quite simple. We were wracked by misfortune from the start: if Manuel Almunia’s warm-up injury seemed like a bad omen, then Jonathan Bond’s collision with Iketchi Anya went beyond mere portent, genuinely horrific even without the season-finale context. (For what it’s worth, there wasn’t a player out there, on either side, who wouldn’t have given the defender a nudge in that position, just to see whether anything happened. Standard practice, no particular malice. A booking, no more, was quite right.) We were left with our substitute-substitute keeper, a pool of blood on the pitch and enough injury time to wonder whether we ought to be consuming half-time lucky chocolate during our interval or Hull’s.

We were surprisingly bright and lively before all of that, Hogg denied an obvious penalty by an unsighted referee. That would’ve settled the nerves, and put some pressure on Hull. You wanted us to play with some freedom, not be too burdened by the occasion and too distracted by other matters…and we did all of that, until our flow was broken by the injury and our concentration interrupted by a goal that never was for Cardiff. Even then, we were back in it quickly: Almen Abdi’s superb equaliser setting off celebrations that, no matter how exuberant, felt like an aperitif for what might follow. And then Cardiff went ahead during our interval…

4a. And then Hull pulled it back and went ahead. And this, for me, is where the real regret lies, where we ought to be kicking ourselves hard enough to raise egg-shaped bruises. Because surely, surely, we spent the week stressing the need to take care of our own business before we worried about whatever Hull were doing. I’ve had one phrase rattling around in my head for days: just win the game. There’d be nothing worse than having other results go our way and failing to have done our own bit. And lo, there isn’t anything bloody worse.

4b. Really, we pissed away the most crucial half hour (so far) of the entire campaign. The atmosphere went flat, the team visibly deflated, the frustration grew until Troy Deeney (the first person you’d want in a last-ditch quest for a winner, the first person you’d want on the teamsheet at Leicester) was dismissed for an absurd, idiotic lunge that was only necessary in the sense that, presumably, his head would’ve exploded otherwise.

What we were doing? Collectively, we admitted defeat. We played a third of the match in dismal silence, no tempo and no urgency; it was as if the final score had come in from the Hull-Cardiff game, leaving us with nothing to play for. Whatever else happens, just win the game.

5. And that would’ve been enough. We were starting to rally as the half dragged on, Paddy Kenny denying us with one superb stop to a deflected shot that appeared to have wrong-footed him. But we’d wasted so much time: when news of Cardiff’s improbable equaliser came through, we had fifteen minutes to find the goal that’d send us up. We had fifteen minutes, potentially some of the most memorable and heart-stopping moments of our football-supporting lives.

We collapsed under the weight. Jack Bonham’s desperate fumble took most of the attention, but in truth, we were over-committed in a way that only a Zola team chasing a winner in the last five minutes can be. A great stampede towards water without thought of safety. It’s the kind of goal that you concede when you’ve gone for broke. Sometimes you just get broke.

I question whether we needed to be in that position. I wonder how different things might’ve been if we’d played for the whole second half rather than just a bit of it. I wonder…and I’ll never know. Bugger.

6. At some point afterwards, on the outside of a couple of much-needed beers, the smiles start to return. The conversation gradually turns away from regret and despair, the banter starts to free itself from the gallows. And Pat from Dublin, whose boundless, irrepressible optimism has been on life support for the last couple of hours, turns with bright eyes and says decisively:

“But there’s no way we’ll lose the away leg, is there? Right?”

And the earth starts spinning again…