Chasing Shadows: Simon Garner

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 Blackburn Rovers (December 23, 3pm KO), this piece focuses on a former attacker who scored a club record 194 goals for Rovers between 1978 and 1992...

It didn't seem particularly fair at the time, and it doesn't feel especially just now.

Watford became the first team to be knocked out of the play-offs on the away goals rule – which was scrapped 10 years later – when they drew 1-1 with Blackburn Rovers in May 1989, closing the door on the Hornets' chances of an immediate return to the top-flight.

If truth be told, Steve Harrison's side ran out of steam with the chequered flag in sight and automatic promotion was there for the taking.

Had they taken maximum points from the last two home games of the regular season, against Sunderland and relegated Shrewsbury, Watford would have accompanied Chelsea through the old Second Division skylight, leaving Manchester City to negotiate the white-water hazards of the play-offs.

But the Hornets ran out of road after a bankrupt 1-0 defeat by the Mackems and a buttock-clenchingly grim 0-0 draw with the Shrews, and they landed a two-legged semi-final with Rovers at the gateway to Wembley.

An efficient shut-out, with few alarms, in the first leg at Ewood Park augured well for the return at Vicarage Road. Then Simon Garner, Blackburn's all-time record goalscorer, played his hand.

Inside two minutes of the second leg, Garner's predatory finish beyond Tony Coton – who started all 60 of Watford's competitive games in the 1988/89 season, including the four instalments of an FA Cup marathon with Newcastle – gave Rovers a precious advantage.

Neil Redfearn equalised, but as much as they camped around Blackburn's box, after 120 minutes it transpired that the decisive blow had been landed after only two.

Garner may not be mentioned in posh metropolitan circles among the all-time greats, but in Lancashire's blue-and-white heartlands he is revered as football royalty.

Mobile, robust and clinical, he scored 194 goals for Blackburn in 14 years and in February 2019, he was among the first seven players to be inducted into the club's Hall of Fame.

Although Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton's SAS partnership would bring the Premier League title to Ewood Park three years after he left for West Bromwich Albion, none of the partnership's stardust would have been possible without the foundations laid by Garner.

Now 64, he tried his hand as a mortgage adviser and postman in his post-football incarnation before setting up his own painting and decorating business, based in Cookham, after a “mate down the pub” had offered him some work.

Fortunately, he took to the job like a paintbrush to emulsion, and he learned to mix colours as deftly as he juggled tins of paint with assignments as a BBC Radio Lancashire summariser following his beloved Rovers.

Garner denied being involved in a notorious fly-past when arch-rivals Burnley had lost a Fourth Division play-off against Torquay in 1991, and a plane flew over the ground trailing a banner which read: "Staying down forever. Ha ha ha. Love Rovers."

Speaking to Blackburn messageboard BRFCS in 2003, he said: "I know the people who were involved. I didn't know about it until after the event. I laughed long, loud and hard. But it wasn't me."

Garner, who once scored five on his own against Derby in 1983, wasn't the first striker to hit the Hornets where it hurts most – in the back of the net.

But after his bolt from the blue-and-white halves at Vicarage Road in 1989, it would be another 10 years before Watford got another sniff of the top-flight.