Watford 0 Queens Park Rangers 0 (30/11/2024)

Yesterday at 08:15 AM

1-  Many years ago, I was advised to “do something different every day”.  Something I hadn’t done before, however small or apparently inconsequential.  Take a different route to work.  Speak to someone you haven’t spoken to before.  The objective, I think, was to fight against falling into a rut, to train yourself to explore the world and not see it as a given, as constrained by your own circumstances.

I maintained this for maybe a week.  Since then I’ve remembered the instruction once every couple of years or so, bought a different sandwich filling at work and felt simultaneously virtuous and slightly inadequate as a consequence.

Fighting against this, apart from my own inertia, has been a tendency towards routine, towards habit.  On matchday this is barely distinguishable from superstition but in truth I don’t believe that most of it has a material impact on the outcome of the game.  We meet up with Dad for food before the game because it’s a good thing to do.  Similarly stopping for post-match sustenance at St Albans having braved the queues out of Watford is a matter of practicality and could hardly influence the outcome after the event anyhow.  Lucky chocolate at half time, long time readers will appreciate, is entirely a different matter of course, and I’m not convinced that my parking choices don’t affect our fortunes either, if only via the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon or some such.  I’ve parked in the Lower Car Park at the Girls’ School for every home game this season bar one, Coventry, which until today represented the only points dropped. Perhaps this had more to do with our performance than my choice to park in the Upper Car Park but perhaps not.  Best keep parking in the Lower Car Park, just in case.

Today, due to one thing and another, I arrive relatively late and am confined to parking in the tennis courts.  I’m the second to be given this instruction and line up next to the first at the rear of the space, condemning myself to a long wait afterwards.  My neighbour has already departed, but his passenger side window is wide open and the joyless drizzle is already peppering the unprotected leather seats.  I retrieve a bin bag from the boot, rip it open and try to cover the seats, setting off my neighbour’s alarm in doing so and trudge to the ground, once again, feeling a little inadequate.

2- No pre-match meal with Dad today;  neither he nor Daughter 2 have made it, for different reasons.  Rick and his son are here, will be here, but don’t turn up until about ten minutes in;  amongst Rick’s first observations is that “QPR must have brought ALL of their fans” and indeed the away end is full and occasionally noisy, although the irony-free refrain of “football in a library” sung by three members of the away end (oddly popular amongst fans of all persuasions including our own) wanders across the pitch occasionally.

It is quiet though.  That’s an inevitable consequence of 12.30 kick-offs, of which there are now far more thanks to Sky’s simultaneous broadcasting of several lunchtime fixtures.  As a consequence football at this level becomes less of a spectacle worth televising, perversely.  Perhaps the drop-off is less pronounced amongst travelling support, who after all have invested more, on the whole, to be here even if they’ve only had to shlep up from West London, and therefore boast a higher level of determination to have a good time irrespective of the outcome of the game let alone the kick off time.  The one match I always cite in favour of this argument is the 6-1 mauling at the hands of Alan Shearer and friends at Ewood Park in 1992.  If you were there, you know what I’m talking about.

In any case, I am able to report to Rick in good faith that we’ve started fairly well, if inconsequentially so.  Whilst we’re still in the habit of beginning games slowly, the pathological concession of early goals seems to have gone.  Here, we have looked bright and purposeful prior to Rick’s arrival, with the caveat that the first time that a limited looking QPR side found themselves in our box, almost by accident, they made alarming progress.

3- It’s a scruffy, hurtly, rattly game of football with all of the discipline and control of a wasp stuck in an overturned glass – and similar impotence.  This was Andrew Kitchen’s third irritating refereeing of a Watford game this season; he’s officiated three of the five games in which we’ve failed to score which is surely pure coincidence.  The irritating bit isn’t though and  it’s clear fairly quickly that he’s going to blow up every time anyone hits the deck.  QPR’s Japanese winger Saito skittles along at high speed and is going to win decisions as a consequence, any contact will send him over – though the highlights suggest a greater degree of cynicism on his part in this regard than we afforded him on our way back up Occupation Road afterwards.

The referee can’t be blamed for our descent into madness in a first half which we were delighted to end on level terms.  The temptation is to use the word “lucky” of course, but there’s nothing unlucky, from QPR’s point of view, about slicing comically wide when given time to shoot in the penalty area as Nicolas Madsen managed, or of Liam Morrison getting underneath the ball and spooning over an open goal with Bachmann prone after one of those astonishing stops that we’re in danger of taking for granted.  “Lucky that we were playing someone shit”, perhaps, as Rick reflected afterwards… not entirely fair on QPR really since there would have been  a lot to admire about the attacking play that got them there had it not been QPR doing it.  

If luck was on our side, it manifested itself in Andrew Kitchen’s failure to penalise Ryan Porteous for handball in the area, presumably because it didn’t involve anyone falling over.  At the time, even from above the incident, I saw only the protests of the QPR players;  on replays it certainly coulda and probably shoulda.  

But otherwise…  it’s not luck that keeps the ball out.  We’ve got bloody good central defenders all of a sudden…  Pollock, Sierralta, and the ever more disciplined and dependable Porteous all tremendous here, Ogbonna a force for good when fit, Kében being talked up by Tom and James Morris looking a very capable deputy at worst.  It’s not luck that we’re getting bodies in the way, that QPR can’t get a clear shot on goal as the ball bobbles around the area.  

If there’s a concern it’s further forward where the midfield has rarely looked quite right despite having good players in it.  Or perhaps being too easy to exploit… but even there, based on what’s going on elsewhere on the pitch, you’d back Tom to get that sorted in time.  The sight of Pierre Dwomoh effortlessly mopping up at the back of the midfield at Hillsborough feels underexploited since, but then eight points from five games – including an absurd sting in the tail costing us two points at Home Park – isn’t a terrible haul and Tom has seen more of the young Belgian than anyone in the stands.

4- As so often the transformation in the second half is startling.  It’s tempting to ask why we tend to start so badly;  more generous would be to note that Tom and his team are performing remarkable surgery at the interval, and with an increasingly broad armoury of options under consideration.

Here there won’t have been a Watford heart in the ground that wasn’t warmed by the sight of Rocco Vata and Kwadwo Baah coming off the bench to line up on either flank after the break.  This involved a change in formation with Francisco Sierralta perhaps slightly unfortunate to be withdrawn, but with a recent injury and on a yellow he was the obvious fall guy as we went to four at the back with an extra body – Chakvetadze – in the middle of the park, effectively.

The impact was immediate.  QPR had dealt with our threat comfortably before the break, but were far less comfortable with players running at them, let alone from either flank.  Giorgi Chakvetadze has had better afternoons… under close attention throughout, his best involvement came in a move that saw him break centrally towards the left of the area before insisting on getting the ball back onto his right foot and closing out the chance.  Now, however, Rocco Vata was thrusting in from the left and he was bright and sharp and A Problem for QPR from the off.  Baah on the right offers the challenge of being able to bully through opponents or trick is way around them… or simply to put the burners on and leave them standing.  Only his apparent stamina issues stop him from being a nailed on starter – here his best effort on goal was a firm downward header to a left wing cross that could have done with being further away from goalkeeper Nardi, but his better contributions as ever involved unpeeling his opponents.

The energetic Sissoko found his way down the right and overhit a cross into the chest of Bayo at the near post, the deflection not quite falling for us.  Jeremy Ngakia came on for his first action since August.  One day we’ll write about him without using the word “pugnacious”, but it won’t be today… one move ended with him shooting optimistically over the bar and I can’t quite decide whether him finally putting one “top bins” will have a positive effect (in that he’s no longer desperately chasing his first goal) or negative (because he thinks he’ll be able to do it again).

The best chances came through Imran Louza.  A magnificent, malevolent curled shot forced Nardi into a sprawling save, alert enough to push the effort out of the path of the prowling Bayo.  Then a wicked, dipping free kick was almost perfect, clipping the underside of the bar, bouncing on the line and somehow evading a touch from the prone keeper that would have surely knocked it in.

QPR had chances too…  Harrison Ashby at the end of a clever break before confirming that he’d inherited Dad Barry’s poacher’s instinct in front of goal, and then Zan Celar cracking a shot off the post from a narrowing position on the right of the box… again, it wasn’t luck that forced him wide or narrowed his window of opportunity by hurtling outwards.

5- A game that we should have lost in the first half and won in the second, then, with the output a better point from a better game than you might imagine from the scoreline.

The critical thing is that, unlike me, Tom’s team are demonstrably able to retain good habits whilst productively trying new things.  A side that was leaking too many goals will now have gone two months and nearly four-and-a-half games without conceding at home.  That belief in what is, in a toe-curling way, called “the process” builds the mental resilience that sees us hold out in the face of that first half – and others before it – any of which would have seen us shrug and fold in seasons past.

It’s not all sorted yet.  But it’s getting sorted.  And it isn’t half fun, nil-nil or otherwise.

See you at Cardiff.

Yooorns.

Bachmann 4, Andrews 3, Larouci 2, Pollock 4, Sierralta 4, *Porteous 4*, Louza 3, Sissoko 3, Kayembe 2, Chakvetadze 2, Bayo 3

Subs: Vata (for Sierralta, 45) 4, Baah (for Kayembe, 45) 3, Ngakia (for Andrews , 65) 3, Ebosele (for Larouci, 65) 3, Ince (for Sissoko, 79) NA, Doumbia, Dwomoh, Morris, Bond