I’ve watched Watford home and away for years and I often tell the story of one particular experience I had while following the Golden Boys.
I like telling this to kids because they’ve only known a connected world.
When I decided, at the last minute, to join Big Al and other mates who’d gone to Chesterfield to watch Watford, one Saturday in the early or mid-1990s, things were very different.
I got on a train at St Pancras station in London and headed north. It’s nearly a 300-mile round trip from Pinner, where I lived at the time, to Chesterfield.
I saw a bit of snow as I travelled, got to Chesterfield and quickly discovered that the game had been called off because of a frozen pitch.
Big Al was staying in the town that night, with a mate who didn’t have a landline at his house. None of us had a mobile back then as they hadn’t been invented yet.
So I visited a couple of pubs that I’d been in before and where they might have been (I knew the chances of them being there were slim), wondered – when that plan had failed – who else was playing in the area that day (Rotherham vs Millwall, and I didn’t fancy that), turned round and came home.
Today, one simple phone call lasting a few seconds would’ve solved everything and I’d have joined the boys for a cracking night out.
