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 fixture at home to Middlesbrough (September 30, 3pm KO), this piece focuses on a former Boro star and a 1966 legend...
The 1971/72 campaign was certainly a tricky season. A run of 10 consecutive home defeats included a 4-1 shelling by Notts County in the FA Cup - a setback for an impressionable eight-year-old making only his second visit to the Hertfordshire ministry of culture, 12 months after his allegiance to Watford had begun with a 5-0 demolition of Reading.
By the time Middlesbrough came calling at The Vic in mid-February and won 1-0, the die was already cast. The Hornets needed snookers to avoid relegation, and they didn’t have a cue.
Boro’s winner was scored by John Hickton - a vastly under-rated striker beyond Teesside, where he scored 192 goals in nearly 500 appearances. You don’t hear Hickton’s name lionised often in the same sentence as other prolific North-East forwards, but he is up there with George Camsell, Brian Clough, George Elliott and Wilf Mannion by any yardstick.
But the visitors’ line-up that afternoon included an England World Cup winner from the Boys of ‘66 cast - Nobby Stiles, the ‘toothless tiger’ whose relentless midfield beat shut down so many opposition attacks before they could gain momentum.
Stiles was only 29 when he joined the payroll at Ayresome Park for £20,000 after 14 years at Manchester United, and there was still enough ‘snap’ left in his tackle to test opponents’ appetite for a battle.
Even if he wasn’t the best player on the park against Watford, if there was any privilege in the drudgery of yet another home defeat, at least the 8,109 crowd - gates were beginning to tail off as Hornets supporters accepted their inevitable return to the lower divisions - saw a legend at work.
Born during an air raid, as the Luftwaffe swarmed in the skies over Collyhurst in Manchester’s suburbs, Stiles was the original dancing destroyer.
False teeth in one hand, Jules Rimet trophy in the other and socks rolled around his ankles, none of the images from England’s triumph at Wembley 57 years ago captured a nation’s joy more than the spring in Stiles’ step as he danced with the World Cup above his head.
Even when those false teeth were safely stored in a jar beside his bed, few could bite in the tackle like Our Nobby. And few footballers, of any generation, have matched our fondness for a player who never gave his rivals a moment’s peace, like a terrier refusing to let go of a burglar’s trousered leg.
Not bad for a man who, in his own words, had been born “a half-blind dwarf who was bombed by the Germans and run over by a trolley bus when he was one year old.”
Stiles spent two seasons with Middlesbrough before he joined Preston North End as player-coach, linking up again with another Manchester United and England World Cup-winning legend, Sir Bobby Charlton, who was manager at Deepdale.
On their tailspin down the league, Watford never lost against Charlton’s Preston - and only once against the Lilywhites when Stiles later took charge. But even in the jaws of another grim defeat against Boro 50 years ago, patrons of WD18 looking for crumbs of comfort saw a World Cup winner at work on the shop floor.
