Tattered, torn, reborn: Watford in the league

Don’t let the cloud of the apocalypse fool you, mate. Even though there’s no one in the ground to hear it, on Saturday a great big fucking tree will fall in the allotments. And it will make a sound.

Watford in the league. A football fixture. A flash point. A century of songs, 7am starts and CCTV highlights. Then a great big gap.

Estranged for 14 years, Luton Town and Watford are two clubs that the wave of modern football smashed onto very different rocks.

Fate would see one become an international franchise, pottering around the Premier League powered by a shrewd model that sapped the local soul from the game across a continent; mining Football Manager stats, getting football managers sacked. Confused by the lights and reassured by their derby-less existence, the vegetable wielding adults of Vicarage Road would eventually be joined by the flag waving youngsters they met online. Loners finding glimpses of new life in the loopholes of the loan market.

The other club, mine and yours, faced exile.

Years of watching the game split into what felt like two separate sports followed. But our locally owned, supporter centric Bedfordshire beacon bobbed below then flickered slowly back to life.

We became a non league club. Not only in status, but in the consciousness of a generation of young football fans who saw Kenilworth Road for the first time in cup “giant killings” jet washed of history by the skin care regimes of its teenaged millionaire player / influencers.

“LOOK. AT. THESE. BACK. GARDENS.” They’d say.

But the blasé buzz around the Man United visit the other night was a useful reminder of what really does it for people like me and you.

Some might dream of the Champions League or the top four one day. A Danny Hylton Super Sunday Shithouse Special or headlining deadline day. But standing on a terrace at Dartford or Welling or Kiddy Harriers back then, checking your bets to see if the unshackled spending of the Premier League might at least trickle down to our pockets, the thought of one day doing Watford again, even though it had begun to feel embarrassingly unattainable, was the prize.

Ged, I’ll level with you, it was absolutely fucking shit being loads of divisions apart. Just really shit. Poxy old Watford with their Herts Senior Cup and their fraudulent shell of an existence. Really shit. For absolutely ages.

Not being able to go is hard. Football days are a big part of who we all are. How we think, dress, sing, and speak. They’re one of the remaining real things that can bridge the surreal divides of our time and probably why we we’re mates, me and you. While we struggle to chew on our own unwanted cold turkey sandwich of a season, the very foundations of the game are again creaking under the new weight of this year of endless waiting. 

It should make all of us proud and grateful to be living this as Luton rather than Bury or Macc Town or the next community forced to say goodbye or start again. 2020 knew that being exiled from the top table meant if we wanted to keep our soul we had to build something different here. 

We return to the derby stronger for it, on and off the pitch, but the way the world is that wolf will never far from our door.  

So forget everything else.

Forget how it should have been.

It’s Watford in the league on Saturday. A return to order in a year that’s been bang out of it.

TTAGU