Watford supporters have watched on with annoyance as their club has slid down the Championship table this season while their local rivals have flourished.
For much of the last 10 years, there has been a tempering influence on much that could be said about the Pozzo family. The Watford owners may have had their eccentricities, but supporters of the club itself in the main seemed to be fairly content with the way in which it was being run. And that has to count for something, doesn’t it? After all, the fans are the people who know a football club best. If they’re happy, then those of us peering in from the outside should probably take that into account.
Well this season may turn out to be the one when this particular dam broke. It has has been another distinctly Pozzo-esque campaign at Vicarage Road, but this time around something seems to have changed within the fanbase itself, and it’s not particularly difficult to see why this should have reached critical mass in the last couple of weeks. Because while a cursory glance at the Championship table shows the club exactly halfway down it, this can hardly be described as a sleepy mid-table season after burning through two managers and reportedly soon a third.
To lose a local derby is one thing, but to do so in the way in which Watford recently lost to Luton Town is something else altogether. The first manager that Watford jettisoned this season, Rob Edwards, was in charge of the team that brushed them aside with a 2-0 win, and if enough layers of rich irony hadn’t already been heaped upon this defeat, it all came on April Fool’s Day, the sort of happenstance which leads one to the postulation that God may be a headline writer after all.
Looking up from their mid-table berth, all at Vicarage Road can see the difference between the two clubs at the moment. Luton may not have been the beneficiaries of Premier League money – and Premier League parachute money – over the last few years, but they have established themselves as A Well Run Club. Despite the lowest attendances in the Championship, they’re in the play-off places for a second year in a row and, while the accounts for 2022 showed a financial loss of £6.3m, this has to be placed within the context of two not insignificant factors: the general madness of the finances of the EFL Championship and the recovery steps needed following the effects of the pandemic.
All of this raises an obvious question. What’s Watford’s excuse? This is,…
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