First featured in last season’s matchday programme, Daily Mirror sports writer Mike Walters recalls some of the best individual displays he has witnessed the Hornets come up against…
Ahead of Saturday’s Sky Bet Championship clash against Preston North End (December 16, 3pm KO), this piece focuses on a former attacker who enjoyed two spells with the Lilywhites, at either end of his career...
One-cap wonder David Nugent scored for England on his only full international appearance.
In stoppage time, Jermain Defoe’s goalbound shot was inches from crossing the line when substitute Nugent took the honours to complete a laboured 3-0 win against Andorra in Barcelona 16 years ago.
His 11-minute England career is said to be the shortest of any player who has scored for the national team, but if his goal was unremarkable - and frankly, he couldn’t miss - Nugent became the first Preston North End player to win an England cap since Sir Tom Finney 49 years earlier.
“Strangers still rib me about that goal,” he said in 2021. “But I just tell them, ‘You haven’t scored for England - I have.’ I’ve ran in and scored, basically on the line, and Jermain has run off celebrating.
“I was like, ‘It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine!’ You can see it rolling in but I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to get this. I’m not leaving it!’ Coming on to make my England debut was my best moment on a football pitch.”
In a career spanning 694 club appearances and 171 goals spread across almost 20 years, if Nugent was not quite in the very top bracket of prolific strikers, he often came up trumps against Watford.
Like others who have featured in this series - Kevin Phillips and Garry Thompson among them - Nugent always appeared to be galvanised by the hart on the ‘Orns badge in the same way that bulls are energised by red rags.
At Vicarage Road in March 2005, as Watford stumbled towards the danger zone and Preston were closing in on the play-offs, we got our first look at Nugent. It would not be the last time we were treated to a close-up of him celebrating.
He opened the scoring in a comfortable 2-0 win for Preston which proved to be Ray Lewington’s swansong as Watford manager.
Lewington had worked wonders, leading the Hornets to two major semi-finals while presiding over wholesale cuts to the wage bill, but his team was outplayed that afternoon. Preston looked a decent side and Nugent lived up to his billing as one of the country’s best emerging forwards.
Eight years later, he played a prominent role in the supporting cast on Do Not Scratch Your Eyes Day.
Nugent’s glancing header had proved the winner in the first leg of Leicester’s Championship play-off semi-final against Watford, and amid the tumult of the astonishing climax in the return at The Vic, it is easily forgotten that his equaliser pushed Gianfranco Zola’s Hornets to the limit.
Nobody who witnessed the wonderful mayhem of that 3-1 win will ever forget Manuel Almunia’s penalty save and Troy Deeney’s punchline 18 seconds later.
Watch the highlights - as many of us have done, on an almost daily basis, over the last 10 years - and you’ll spot Nugent consoling the crestfallen Anthony Knockaert, whose hugely-controversial spot-kick could have sent the Foxes to Wembley instead.
“I probably should have taken the penalty, to be honest with you, but Anthony won it and wanted to take it,” he admitted several years later. “I didn’t want to cause any commotion or anything like that, saying ‘I’ll have it’ when he wanted it and he had the confidence to take it. We all know what happened next.”
Nugent, an FA Cup winner with Portsmouth in 2008 when he came off the bench in Pompey’s 1-0 win against Cardiff, ranks Do Not Scratch Your Eyes as his biggest regret.
