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 Watford’s Sky Bet Championship fixture away at Coventry City on Saturday (September 2, 3pm KO), this piece focuses on a Sky Blues legend who also featured for the Hornets...
To be fair, there have been worse days in this parish - but none spring immediately to mind. We woke up on the morning of December 9, 1980 to discover John Lennon had been shot dead outside his apartment in New York. A legend senselessly exterminated.
Hours later, Watford travelled to Highfield Road for their League Cup quarter-final replay against Coventry... and the Hornets were routed 5-0.
Maybe we thought a run decorated by that 7-1 miracle against Southampton three months earlier, and sustained by a Ross Jenkins hat-trick in the 4-1 thrashing of European Cup holders Nottingham Forest in the previous round, would somehow make Watford invincible, and all that remained was to queue up for Wembley tickets.
Sadly for Graham Taylor’s giantkillers, the Sky Blues had other ideas - notably Garry Thompson, a fearless centre-forward the Hornets would sign nine years later.
On his day Thompson was, in the best sense of the word, a beast. He was one of those strikers who seemed to hang in the air until a cross arrived, hovering like a kite before devouring his prey.
In the 2-2 draw at Vicarage Road, he scored twice in a pulsating first half, one of them a towering header which dipped under the angle, leaving Watford keeper Eric Steele stranded - and that night would have notable consequences for Steele.
For the replay, Taylor chose to recall Steve Sherwood, who had been restricted to just one appearance in 16 months, and poor old ‘Shirley’ walked into a firestorm.
Among the 6,000-plus travelling Hornets in an armada of coaches, many only just made it through heavy traffic before kick-off - and they had barely found a square foot of room on the cramped away terrace when Peter Bodak cut in from the flank and fired Coventry ahead.
In those days, Watford were acquiring a reputation for direct football favouring aerial routes. But with Thompson and future England striker Mark Hateley enjoying generous service from the flanks, it was the Sky Blues who controlled the skies that night.
Hateley scored his first goal for the club after half-an-hour, and seven minutes later Thompson - soaring to meet Bodak’s cross, put the result beyond doubt with another emphatic header.
Coventry’s first major semi-final appearance in 97 years was rubber-stamped by Hateley’s second goal and Steve Hunt adding a fifth after the break, but it was Thompson who wreaked the most havoc.
Sherwood kept his place, going on to complete a full house of playing in all four divisions, in Europe and the FA Cup final.
Three years later, with the Hornets making an uncertain start to their second season in the top-flight, Thompson was at it again, scoring with another thumping header for West Brom in a 2-0 defeat for the Golden Boys at the Hawthorns.
I bumped into Thompson at Aston Villa not long ago, gently chiding him for those games when he was a monster Watford couldn’t tame.
“Sorry about that,” he grinned. “If it’s any consolation, I really enjoyed my time at Watford. We had a good side and quite a few of those lads went on to be top players elsewhere - Rick Holden, Neil Redfearn, Tim Sherwood, Dean Holdsworth....”
I agreed that Steve Harrison, the manager who signed and then discarded Thompson, was a good judge of players but too often looked for other solutions in haste.
“Not long after he told me I was surplus to requirements, I bumped into Steve in the town centre and he apologised to me for cutting me adrift,” said Thompson, who is now a summariser on BBC Radio West Midlands.
“I scored more goals for Watford than against them for other clubs, but I wish there could have been a few more.”
