Watford 0 Preston North End 0 (06/04/2024)

1-  This morning, we cleared out the container.

It’s been sitting in the car park outside the centre for as long as I can remember, and it was full of crap.  If that were all there was to it life would have been easier but there was actually useful… no, essential stuff in there too, nestled amongst the crap.  In the build up to every theatre group production Chris makes positive noises about “sorting the container out”.  In the event, despite his best intentions, we end up lugging out the stuff we need – flats with which to construct the set, doors, batons, costumes, curtains, cables, paint, glue, shoes, wigs – for the duration, then shoving it all back in, padlocking the doors closed and trying our best to forget about it entirely until the next one.

This morning, we cleared out the container.  It helped that the sun was shining, which in part surely abetted the handsome turnout.  The were all sorts of folks present, only two of whom will actually find their way onto stage during the next production but any amdram group is necessarily a large extended family and many hands make light(er) work. Things were lugged, sorted, carried, sawed down, thrown out, arranged.  There were worthy people making tea and coffee, brave people crawling around under the stage lugging out long forgotten bags of even more crap.  People with power tools, people carrying things and plenty of standing around drinking tea. There was, it must be confessed, more willing incompetence than direction…  those with any expertise at all were thinly spread, the rest of us floated about desperately looking for an unclaimed job. Jude and I spent a happy fifteen minutes constructing a set of plastic shelving, establishing that it was still functional and then packing it away again.  Daughter 2 mucked in quite literally… using her own particular set of skills in sorting through an ancient bag of mostly revolting and possibly dangerous makeup and was rendered speechless by an unlabelled pot of green something that was quickly disposed of.  By the end of the day everything would be removed from the container, sorted, disposed of or replaced and the necessary for the next production lined up and ready to go.  Daughter 2 and I, needless to say, had made our excuses and headed for Vicarage Road long before.

2- The sense of a shared passion, of being part of something bigger and experiencing it with people who are similarly minded and similarly motivated isn’t unique to the theatre of course.  This, too, is surely part of what supporting a football club is all about…  the football matters, up to a point, and our mood is overly dictated by the vagaries of the team’s success or lack thereof.  But at the heart of it, the Thing that we support isn’t the players or the owners, the stadium or the colours or the badge – though they all represent the football club in different ways.  It’s the community.  The spirit, the sense of shared belief.

This is true despite the fact that Watford have a distinctly unimpressive trophy cabinet and will not spend much time in the consciousness of many other football fans in any normal week unless they happen to be facing us at the time.  Other people’s indifference is utterly irrelevant.  This is our club.

On which note, what a bloody wonderful thing Preston North End’s gentry day is.  It’s not new, it’s been celebrated in this way for nearly twenty years…  and I’m sure I was aware of it before today.  But we’d never seen it, never hosted until now the annual celebration of Preston fans, players and friends recently lost.  There are bowler hats all over Vicarage Road.  Not just one or two blokes having a laugh, which would have been fine in itself, but sported by hundreds upon hundreds in the away end.  Many have gone the whole hog and suited up, enough such that the spivvy suits aren’t unusual either, they’re everywhere.  Before the game, we are told, a wreath has been laid at the grave of former PNE invincible and Watford boss John Goodall in the Vicarage Road cemetery.  And the away end is full.  Not just busy, full.  Anyone who’s done the reverse trip knows that Watford to Preston is a bloody long way, PNE don’t have the biggest fanbase in the division and an outside chance of a play-off place isn’t going to do the job on it’s own.  Folk have come down specifically for gentry day, that’s what fills their stand.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  It’s poetry.  PNE celebrating their own people, their own reality.

3- Unfortunately, the game is shit.

There was a degree of inevitability about this from the moment that Daughter 2 and I took our leave of the hard work (and tea drinking) going on in North Bedfordshire of course, such behaviour would never be rewarded by that long-awaited home win.  Nonetheless it’s a numbing thing, a cold shower after the relative thrill of the Easter fixtures. 

On the pitch, Preston are a charmless breeze block of a team…  grey, solid, uncompromising and without decoration or accoutrement.  That the game follows the trend set by both of last season’s encounters with Ryan Lowe’s side is not all down to them, of course… our own limitations are cast into sharp relief by the afternoon, any overexcitement after the Leeds and West Brom performances quickly doused.

But the joylessness of the spectacle owes a lot to the nihilistic approach of the visitors.  Many a side has thrived in this division with a solid, obdurate team that is set up to allow opponents to crash against them with enough magic dust up front to nick a goal and a win here and there.  Hell, any number of Watford teams have employed that blueprint, Sean Dyche’s side and Quique’s team that comfortably survived our first season after promotion both good examples.  

None have followed it this absolutely.  None have interpreted the blueprint as a religious document to be followed unquestioningly, absolutely and dogmatically.  None have prioritised the suffocation of space in the final third to quite such a degree, none have so readily substituted magic dust with, frankly, more concrete in the shape of a brutal forward line of elbows and shoulder barges.  That Ryan Lowe’s relatively high water mark as PNE boss hasn’t seen him taken to Preston hearts is much easier to understand having seen the team play, let alone after three games in two seasons of fist-chewing tedium.  This is the sort of football that will see a manager turned on as soon as it fails to be successful and even, perhaps, before that.

4- Really, any attempt at a blow-by-blow would be doomed to failure from the off.  There weren’t any blows for starters, not that didn’t involve people colliding with each other; the closest that either side came was a header in the opening minutes that either came off Whatmough or his marker and squirrelled  its way around Daniel Bachmann’s woodwork.  Other than that the story of the “blows” is in quite how the few that came along were blown…  Jamal Lewis, frequently the attacking outlet since playing around the outside of the breeze block proved easier than bludgeoning through the middle of it, was on the end of a reasonable half-chance in the closing minute of each half and shanked the both. The first, a rare unattended ball in the Preston area, more forgivably clouted over with his weak foot; the second at the end of a good move in the second less excusably well wide.  The visitors had far less possession but made as much with it in terms of clear chances, Hughes executing the most spectacular miss of the day by slicing across an open goal in front of the Rookery and almost hitting the corner flag before the break whilst Keane came rather closer with a first time shot in the second half.

But long before the end it was clear that what residual enjoyment was to be bled from the afternoon would come from the fact that Richard Walker had been let loose with the microphone again.  Having long perfected the art of finding comedy in both the introduction of the ever-growing column of mascots and the participants in the fabulously futile “hit the centre spot” half time challenge that doesn’t involve humiliating anyone involved, the chucking-the-mike-down “f*** this” drawled, hopeless announcement of Preston’s last sub (“Coming on for Preston….  number 17.”) captured the mood of the stadium entirely.  The whistle blew, we went home.

5- Tom Cleverley may or may not be a football genius.  Time will tell, and the first disappointing performance of his short tenure doesn’t prove the case either way.  Elements of the team look much stronger for the new shape and thus for Cleverley’s influence…  defensively we look much more solid, four goals conceded in four games a figure distorted by two worldies, “could maybe have closed down better” notwithstanding.  Tom Dele-Bashiru continues to sparkle in that midfield and was again the pick of the bunch here, at the centre of a second half upping of the tempo that saw us at least threaten to play through Preston’s rearguard.  This improvement has been backed up by Tom’s post-match assessment, the need for more risk-taking when teams are sitting deep against us.

The next week brings two further tests against top six sides of the sort that have brought our best recent performances – I won’t make Ipswich (rehearsals trump driving to Suffolk midweek) but hope to be at Southampton.  Hopefully those that travel will enjoy performances akin to those against Leeds and West Brom against opponents less likely to sit back than Preston were.

But you do suspect that any lasting, permanent improvement rather needs us to get around to clearing out the container.

Yooorns.

Bachmann 3, Andrews 3, Lewis 3, Porteous 3, Sierralta 3, Hoedt 3, *Dele-Bashiru 3*, Kayembe 3, Asprilla 3, Bayo 3, Dennis 3

Subs: Chakvetadze (for Kayembe, 62) 3, Rajović (for Bayo, 62) 3, Koné (for Dennis, 82) NA, Ince, Martins, Livermore, Pollock, Morris, Hamer