YBR! From the Vaults

Peter Morgan recalls some of the lesser-known Watford games during his first 50 years following the Hornets   I was still at school when GT arrived, so evening games on most school nights were strictly off limits, but on 13 August 1977, in the middle of the summer holiday, we went to watch the ga...

Nick Catley pays tribute to a man who was to shape his life   When we think of formative experiences at football, we tend to look back to our first game. What the team was, what the ground looked like, who the manager was, who we went with, and so on. But for many of us, I suspect those aren’t th...

Colin Payne on the joy of an evening kick-off   Perhaps it goes back to those games under Graham Taylor, those wonderful encounters; Hull, Stoke, Southampton, the oft-forgotten Forest tie, Wrexham, Kaiserslautern, the list goes on. But there is something special about a nightgame. A proper night-...

Ian Grant remembers a time when the stadium was more... organic   In the olden days, before the unpleasantness, we gathered at dinner parties in each other’s houses, sometimes as many as eight or ten of us, and sipped educatedly on a crisp white wine our host had selected to go with the fish and ...

David Harrison looks at 1959/60 promotion season   Most supporters will be aware that Watford joined the Football League prior to the 1920/21 season. When asked to summarise the club’s subsequent performance in a single sentence, something along the lines of ’40 years doing nothing much, followed...

Simon Cheetham tells the tale of the inception of The Watford Book of Soccer   It was late summer 1990, the earth was parched, the sky an azure blue, the nation was taking stock after Italia ’90. I sat alone at my desk, nursing a now-cold cup of espresso coffee, flicking through the first issue o...

Peter Morgan recalls some of the lesser-known Watford games during his first 50 years following the Hornets   Previously I revisited my first-ever game at Watford, in November 1970. It was another three and a half years before my brother and I were treated to an away-day by our dad, by which time...

David Harrison recalls a man who mapped his path to Vicarage Road   My grandfather set me on the right track, football-wise. My dad subsequently did all the heavy lifting, not to mention motorway driving, but it was old Alfred who laid the foundations. You’d have liked him, but then it was imposs...

Richard White looks back at when Watford won a league.   There have only ever been two occasions when Watford FC has ascended to a higher tier in the Football League than ever previously experienced, and this was the first. The painful wait for this achievement, and the delight of the club’s supp...

Pete Bradshaw recalls his first sighting of Vicarage Road   October 1971, Watford at home to Portsmouth on the Saturday and to Preston North End in the League Cup on the Tuesday. I had never been to Vicarage Road although I had become very interested in football in the way that teenagers are. In ...

Olly Wicken on when it's appropriate to venture onto the turf   The very best moments as a football fan are the moments of overwhelming elation. It might be an injury-time winner, or a third goal against an invincible Liverpool side, or a fourth goal at the Kennel against The Team Whose Name Must...

Nick Catley on his chance encounter with a not-so Watford legend   As a Watford supporter for 40 years, plenty of them spent in West Herts, you’d think I’d be bumping into Watford players all the time. But until Halloween 2017, excluding pre-planned events (open days, book signings and so on), I ...