Pretendance, Watford’s weird tactics, bleak future, gulf in quality – Notes on Town’s loss to the Hornets

There have been a few days for the dust to settle on Saturday’s defeat to Watford and it still hurts. Even though it was one of the division’s better teams and Town played relatively well in patches, we still looked completely toothless and struggled to lay a glove on our opponent. 

The post-match reaction that I’ve seen makes me think that other fans may have taken the defeat harder than me but it was still a bitter pill to swallow. With off the pitch issues looking almost as bleak as the results on the pitch, it’s not a great time to be a Town fan. But things can turn around quickly in football (it’s only seven months since we were two denied VAR decisions from a place in the Premier League). 

 Here are a few of my thoughts on Saturday’s game.

A positive start squandered

I really enjoyed the way Town started this game, we dominated possession, stroked the ball about well and at times even moved the ball quickly and created space to move into when we attacked. It was tentative and laboured at times, like a team that was low in confidence and was playing its way back into form but there were glimmers of something there. Particularly when you consider we were up against decent opposition and more than holding our own.

The best thing about this initial period was that we controlled the game well, keeping possession and holding it in Watford’s half for decent spells of time. There wasn’t always a lot of penetration or threat in our play, which is something that has been an issue for a long time now but at least we managed to show some decent build up play.

Things looked a bit more ragged when we progressed into the final third and when a bit more quality was needed we lacked the finesse needed to crack open their defence and that meant we didn’t make the most of that period of dominance. 

Then our control slowly ebbed away as the game progressed. It was more clear to see in the second half but the warning signs were there in the final fifteen minutes of the first half too, as Watford started to find more time in our half and got their better players on the ball more often.

Quality the main difference between the two teams

It’s not exactly a breathtaking insight but I think we lost to Watford because they had better players than us. And that’s not exactly surprising, given their wage budget is probably larger than ours by a factor of four or five. They were rumoured to have rejected a package worth around £25m for Joao Pedro from Newcastle in the summer. And Ismail Sarr was lining up against England in the World Cup for Senegal, the star player for the African Champions. 

We just don’t have anywhere near that kind of equivalent quality in our ranks. Sorba Thomas is the only one close and, as commentators are so fond of reminding us, he was playing in non-league football fairly recently. 

I’m not trying to make a “little Huddersfield” argument here and say defeat was inevitable. Of course we shouldn’t be rolling over and showing our tummies to teams like Watford when they come to our stadium. The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be surprised when Premier League-quality players come to our stadium and we struggle to contain them. 

We actually did effectively contained these players for long periods and frustrated them but unfortunately a few minor lapses and a couple of bits of quality shone through and we lost the game. 

Watford’s strange approach

Given the fact I’ve talked up the quality among Watford’s ranks, I was a bit surprised about their tactical approach to the game. It was a strange match to watch tactically. They didn’t seem all that bothered about possession or playing nice football. Instead they seemed more concerned about trying to play the perfect pass through to their forward players. It mostly didn’t work for them either and they spent a lot of the game defending, offside or chasing lost causes.

I suppose it’s silly to criticise the tactics of the team that won the game 2-0 and could have scored a hatful of other opportunities too but I wasn’t impressed by them. I also found them to be an unusually dirty team. They were ridiculously physical and pushed the limit of the ref’s leniency with their muscular jostling, which Town struggled with and were punished whenever they snapped back at rough treatment.

I couldn’t really understand the approach to play on the counter against the bottom team in the division and to try and kick us off the park when we’re so low on confidence and lacking in quality. If anything, I think they played into our hands a little bit with their approach and that was a factor in why we enjoyed a good start to the game. 

Pretendance – people with tickets not turning up

Officially there were 18,434 fans in attendance at the stadium on Saturday. The capacity of the stadium is around 24,500, so in theory there were just over 6,000 empty seats in the stadium. Ha! I’d be shocked if the stadium was even half full. Looking around my section of the Riverside stand there were vast swathes of empty seats and the Kilner Bank opposite was the same. The away end was hardly heaving either, so it feels like this the announced attendance was even more far fetched than usual. 

The football finance podcast, The Price of Football covered this phenomenon this week and called it the “Pretendance”. It’s pretty common for clubs to announce their tickets sold number rather than their bums on seats, as this inflated statistic is better for them in terms of attracting sponsors, players and prestige in general. However, while the club won’t openly advertise the real number of fans at the game, they will know how many people failed to turn up to the game and will no doubt be concerned.

Mark Fotheringham spoke after the game about how he understood the fans in the stadium expressing their anger. I wonder how he feels about fans expressing their apathy by staying away? Because that seems to be a bigger problem the club face. 

I’m not sure I can blame the fans that aren’t coming to games either. Personally, I still enjoy going to games but I hear all the people around me  grumbling, moaning and shouting throughout the 90 minutes and I wonder why they’re spending money to make themselves so unhappy 23 times a year. There are specialist establishments they could go visit that can make them experience much more pain in much less time if that’s the kind of thing they’re into (or so I’ve been told)!

On a more serious note though, it does feel a bit concerning that fans are so fed up that they’ve decided they have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon. They aren’t fair weather fans that decide if they want to go on the week of the game. These people paid up front for their tickets at the start of the season and, despite having already paid, still don’t want to watch us play. That’s how bad some fans see things are at the moment.

(In fairness, it was also the weekend before Christmas and some fans will have just been away and it was freezing – but I’m not going to let common sense and logic get in the way of my point.) 

The future feels bleak

We’re rooted to the bottom of the table, have the lowest number of goals scored in the league, have an incredibly inexperienced manager, there’s a messy double takeover taking place which seems to be turning sour (there are rumours about rumours but I’m so out of the loop I don’t even know what the rumours are!) and the fans are turning on the club (and each other). Then there’s the mess with the stadium company which is another complicating factor for the takeover.

Trying to focus purely on the football side of things. It was a bit worrying to see how badly the team responded to going behind. The air completely went out of the team when Pedro scored his first and we were on the ropes for a good ten to fifteen minutes and Watford enjoyed their best spell of the game. The way heads dropped pointed towards a worrying lack of faith behind the scenes which could become a real problem if losing becomes a habit. It felt very similar to the back end of the 2018/19 season, when Town turned into the Premier League’s whipping boys. Which was bad enough, but being the Championship’s whipping boys would be beyond the pale.

But things can turn around quickly…

Town had one of their best wins of the season at QPR just before the World Cup break and followed it up with a respectable 0-0 with Swansea the weekend after. So these consecutive defeats to top Championship teams don’t have to be the end of the world. If we win our next three games (huge “if” I know) then suddenly things completely change. 

While it’s hard to see where the goals are going to come from, never mind the victories, the reason football is great is because of its ability to shock us. A turnaround in fortunes isn’t likely right now but it’s not impossible either. All it would take would be for someone like Tyreece Simpson, Brahima Diarra or (if he ever returns to fitness) Pat Jones to become a source of goals and we could be a much less rubbish team. Maybe even a half-decent team.

It’s pretty hopeless at the moment, there’s no point pretending it isn’t. There’s also not likely to be a solution arriving via the transfer market as we’ve been told that there won’t be any money for investment. But there’s always a possibility in football that things could turn around. It’s the hope, as the saying goes, that kills you.