Watford 2 Portsmouth 1 (26/12/2024)
Yesterday at 09:10 AM
1- “Yes, but it wouldn’t be my cup of tea…”
July, 1990. Ish. Probably. Long time ago, but ish. The recording of the first album. Or maybe the second, as above, long time ago. Anyway, we’re on the patio in the sunshine, taking a break. The conversation has been raging for a while. “Raging” perhaps overstating it, implying as it does something vibrant, febrile. In motion. The conversation has instead been stuck in a rut for some time, entrenched positions well established.
Guitarist Kieron, presuming he was still around, would have been rolling his eyes. Ben, front man, was adamant; the taste of tea was the taste of tea, unadulterated by milk, sugar or anything else. Howard, drummer, equally adamant. Tea with milk and sugar was what tea tasted like to him, the taste he associated with tea. His cup of tea.
I’ll close the account there. But if in any doubt as to how mind-numbingly unproductive (not to mention long) the discussion was, consider the fact that I still remember this much detail more than thirty years on.
But the topic of “the best seat in the house” is similar, in that there are different angles from which to approach the question that will dictate different versions of the answer and as such any dispute becomes tediously based on semantics. So… from one point of view, so to speak, “the best seat” is the one that accords you the fullest view of the pitch. Fairly high up, ideally in a steepish or two-tiered stand above the halfway line. If that’s your priority, a good view, that’s the best seat surely – though perhaps the experience becomes more akin to watching from home. From another of course… “the best seat” is your own seat, a position with special associations, surrounded by friends and memories. Three seats along, one row down, not the same thing at all.
I’ve had “my” seat in the Rookery for 25 years this past summer. If you think your seat is the best, you’re wrong.
2- On this particular Boxing Day an enthusiastic researcher could sample a good proportion of the vantage points at Vicarage Road given the depressing number of empty seats on show. Always the way on Boxing Day up to a point, of course, but a growing concern this season in any case and scant reward for the absurd level of entertainment on show.
The inhabitants of the eastern side of the Vicarage Road end would be forgiven for thinking that the Best Seat in the House is actually at Fratton Park where – presumably – there is space to swing a cat in the concourses. The unforgiving nature of the back of the Vicarage Road stand is presumably a contributory factor to the away section being rammed very early whilst the rest of the stadium looks empty but even as kick-off approaches and the home fans emerge from the depths, patches remain.
It’s thirteen years since we last hosted Pompey, during Sean Dyche’s season in charge. Few under the age of 20 will recall these games, much less remember Portsmouth as the staple opponent of second division fodder games that they were in the nineties. Those that remember those days will have been reassured to see us facing… well, in the spirit of Christmas let’s describe them as a solid, well-drilled side with a competitive edge. At other times of year you might describe them as a bunch of chippy thugs in Pompey’s finest tradition, but not today.
3- The away end was boisterous. In between choruses of “Play up Pompey” (surely it hasn’t really been thirteen years…) we were chastised with all the stuff about Vicarage Road’s similarity to a library, which was all the more irritating for its accuracy as the rest of the ground slouched in post-Christmas Day stupor.
And this despite a positive start on the pitch and a game that didn’t feature anything resembling a “lull” for 95+ minutes. Portsmouth started with an aggressive high press; they’re far from the first to come here with that approach of course, and we did a pretty decent job of playing through it, particularly via Larouci and Chak down the left, even if we didn’t initially crown our positive breaks with anything consequential. More startling was a break instigated by Daniel Jebbison on a rare start, flicking a ball over Pompey’s high line and haring after it after four minutes. It was devastating, exposing a lack of pace on the turn in Portsmouth’s defence but unmatched by the quality of the finish. Any number of options – lobbing the stranded keeper, going past him, shooting down his exposed right hand side – would have been more effective than kicking the ball at him, the finish of an anxious striker who needs a goal but who nonetheless has shown more in the last week than in his Watford career to that point.
An early escape for the visitors then of which they soon took full advantage. They’d come close from an earlier attack that saw Josh Murphy – who scored on his senior debut for Norwich here some eleven years ago – send a deep cross in from the right that Callum Lang crashed wide. Minutes later Pompey attacked again and a sloppy piece of defending from James Morris gave Zak Swanson the opportunity to score a Ryan Andrews goal, a tidy finish swiping a dropping ball across the face of the helpless Bachmann and into the far corner.
This gave the visitors licence to play the way they were best equipped to play… to sit deep, defend a lead and chase another on the break. It took us the rest of the half to feel our way back into it, as if stunned by the lesson that you can do mostly the right things and still get a break against you.
4- Increasingly however this period of shaping ourselves to the game feels more like a necessary part of the process rather than something reactive, or something indicating that we’d had the wrong plan to start with. I say “shaping ourselves”, but of course there are specific hands on the bench doing the shaping and at the break, once again, we changed formation by taking off one of the three centre backs and bringing on Rocco Vata play down the left, mirroring Kwadwo Baah’s threat on the other flank.
The consequence was yet another one of those second halves that are becoming all too familiar. Overwhelming, packed with incident, breath-taking, mentally exhausting but ultimately successful. It’ll never catch on.
As so often the change in the lay of the land was in the air from the start. The revised shape, for all that Pompey appeared to respond to it quickly with a switch of their own, effectively gave us an extra player in an active part of the pitch and Vata, not one for shying away from a challenge, was quickly involved. Twelve minutes in, a simmering game ignited.
It wasn’t a penalty, obviously. Or rather it was, but it shouldn’t have been… I thought at the time that the challenge was outside the box, replays confirm this. Nonetheless, the handwringing and outrage that emerged in response to it is ridiculous. That it was a foul is also beyond dispute so the error in judgement was on where the foul took place, a decision made without VAR (thank the heavens) in a split second. Wrong, but hardly outrageous.
Because apart from anything else, to clutch your pearls at this decision seems to imply that there’s an art, or a moral high ground, in committing a tactical foul on the edge of the area. That this sort of cynicism should be rewarded. Nobody’s arguing that Potts should have done otherwise in that situation but… you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Now and again you’re going to get them wrong, now and again the officials will. If you don’t like those odds, defend better.
My Sheffield Wednesday supporting mate bemoans the fact that they haven’t had a penalty for years, as if this is a random act (or worse, a conspiracy) unconnected to having players capable of committing players and forcing them into difficult decisions. Given that we have these coming out of our ears it should be no surprise that Tom seems to have put considerable stock into identifying reliable penalty takers of which, again, we have several. Edo Kayembe was completely unphased by the kerfuffle that preceded his kick and sent it top corner.
5- Pompey, meanwhile, lost it completely. Captain Marlon Pack had been booked for his protests, five of his colleagues followed him into the book, four for foul play (including one for Lang on Pollock that sailed close to a red). The first of these was goalkeeper Schmid, who traded yellows with Kayembe after prolonged attempts to protect the ball from a quick restart and this incident more than the equaliser seemed to finally ignite Vicarage Road which, after a yawn, stretch and bounce, bellowed it’s way through the remaining forty minutes or so.
What followed wasn’t one-way stuff, but our foot was on their throat. Some excellent hold-up play from Jebbison set up Baah to cut in from the right and shoot across goal bringing the save of the game from Schmid who stretched to claw wide. Minutes later Andrews screamed a cross-shot from the right, Schmid again deflected the shot and was luckier this time that Jebbison’s boot wasn’t a millimetre longer at the far post. How the striker could have done with a break there. Ngakia sent a dipping shot over, Towler made an inhuman challenge to interrupt Vata on the edge of the box. At the other end, hearts briefly in mouths as a scruffy attack was defended equally scruffily, the ball rolling across the face of the goal with a yawn waiting for someone to do something decisively competent and settling on Andrews’ challenge as close enough.
Things hadn’t remotely calmed down anywhere in the stadium. By the corner flag with Louza shaping up, Moussa Sissoko was amongst our subs protecting him from the attentions of Portsmouth’s warming-up replacements, a confrontation that boiled into another shoving match once the game had departed back up towards the Vicarage Road end.
Sissoko has proven to be anything other than a calming influence in such situations and as he lined up to come on himself with three minutes of normal time left it seemed likely that he’d either kill someone or score the winner. In the end he didn’t quite do either, but would play a key role in the decisive goal which involved three of the substitutes. In the fifth and final minute of added time with a disappointing-but-OK-in-the-circumstances-I-suppose point on the cards, Dan Bachmann humped a final long clearance, Vakoun Bayo – who enjoyed a spiky cameo himself – did brilliantly to control and flick on for Sissoko to run onto.
There was no elegance or dexterity in Sissoko’s thunderous run. He never had the ball under any sort of control, the BBC’s ungenerous report peevishly describes him as having miscontrolled the ball towards Schmid. And yet it was a run that half-time guest Tommy Mooney would have been proud of, 100% willpower and personality over guile. Schmid spilled the ball, Rocco Vata was in the right place and rolled the shot in with a gentle precision worthy of poetry. No doubt the intellectuals in the away end would have had choice words had they been close enough to appreciate it, the detritus of Pompey’s menagerie of trolls on the pitch were certainly close enough and collapsed to the ground as one in search, presumably, of a choice metaphor as Vata and the team hared towards the South East corner and the ground exploded.
This, of course, is why my seat is the best. Because this is the optimum point from which to suck an attack towards you, to bask in the drama of yet another late victory – and worth noting that while our ongoing home run hasn’t featured many thrashings, there haven’t been many run-of-the-mill wins either. I was in this seat for that goal of course, but also for… Janmaat against Chelsea. Tom against Arsenal. Hell, Dom Foley against Barnsley. The drama of this moment bears comparison with almost all of those.
6- I didn’t hear about the red card until we were halfway up Yellow Brick Road, those in the Rookery comparing rumours and overheards and finally sharing confirmation via Google. Kwadwo Baah had been booked in the first half for overzealously trying to win back possession and, presumably at around the same time, had invited the attention of the away end with some shushing gestures. Certainly he was goaded loudly and mercilessly by the away end for the rest of the half which… you have to deal with. Certainly if you’ve played a part in inviting it.
So whatever the provocation, his victory dance was silly and irresponsible, his booking justified even if it hadn’t come at the hands of a referee who had done a reasonable job of a combustible game for the most part but by now presumably just wanted to get home and back to his Christmas without further silly shenanigans. Baah’s one-match ban could be a cheap lesson – allowing Cleverley to read him the riot act, forcing him to miss a game which, presumably, would have been a candidate for resting him in anyway given the current schedule. More of an issue will be the target on his back going forward, though the signs are on today’s evidence that he’s more likely to go all Jamie Vardy at getting stick rather than retreat into his shell. One hopes that as penance he will contribute funds to support the counselling that will no doubt be needed to support the knuckledraggers in the away end that had been traumatised by the dancing incident.
Meanwhile another manager departs bleating about how his side didn’t deserve to lose, this one adding for good measure his own advice to Baah on behaving gracefully, apparently without irony (“it’s like “goldy” and “bronzy” only it’s made out of iron”, he may well have said if challenged).
Tremendous again. And very much Our Cup of Tea. Obviously.
See you Sunday.
Yooorns
Bachmann 3, Ngakia 4, Larouci 4, Porteous 3, Pollock 4, Morris 3, *Louza 5*, Kayembe 3, Chakvetadze 4, Baah 4, Jebbison 3
Subs: Vata (for Morris, 45) 4, Andrews (for Ngakia, 71) 3, Bayo (for Jebbison, 82) NA, Sissoko (for Kayembe, 87) NA, Ince, Dwomoh, Ebosele, Sierralta, Bond
