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 Birmingham City (September 16, 3pm KO), this piece focuses on a former Blues star who later established himself as a bona fide Watford legend...
First impressions often count the most, and Tony Coton was on many Watford supporters’ radars before he joined the Hornets in September 1984.
Nine months earlier, as the Golden Boys’ surge towards mid-table safety was gathering pace after a leaky start to their second season in the top flight, Graham Taylor’s side completed a Second City ‘double’ against Aston Villa and Birmingham in the space of five days.
Jimmy Gilligan had scored twice in the 3-2 home win over Villa when, five days later, the Bluenoses came calling on New Year’s Eve in 1983. Incidentally, the Hornets had gone to the Dell 24 hours after their Boxing Day feast and lost 1-0 at Southampton – just imagine the caterwauling and protests from managers today if their teams were required to play on consecutive days after Christmas.
Birmingham’s resistance for the best part of an hour started with the goalkeeper who had saved a penalty after 54 seconds of his league debut against Sunderland in 1980.
Coton commanded his box, caught every cross and one soaring save, to keep Mo Johnston’s header out of the top corner, was a tribute to leaping salmon. Crikey, this bloke was good. It was almost 1984 before MoJo found a way past him, and the ‘Orns signed off for the year with a 1-0 win.
After only one home win in the league until December, they had now strung together three in a row, and finally it looked as if the shackles had been lifted.
But Coton, then only 22, had made his mark. I came to suspect – and the great man later confirmed as much – that Taylor’s signings included a sprinkling of players who had either thwarted the Hornets or put them to the sword.
Six weeks before Coton’s stoic resistance at Vicarage Road, Colin West had run Watford ragged in a 3-0 defeat at Sunderland – 18 months later, Taylor would bring him to The Vic for a tidy £115,000 – and, sure enough, this narrow win against Birmingham was the game where TC caught GT’s eye.
When the following season began with a series of high-scoring but worrying draws and defeats, Taylor scouted Coton personally, standing behind the goal at Craven Cottage as he kept a clean sheet against Fulham, and his mind was made up.
The following week, Coton was summoned to manager Ron Saunders’ office at Birmingham. Certain Blues players of that era had a reputation for, shall we say, nocturnal mischief – including TC – but this time he was baffled.
Whatever the grasses around town thought they had seen, Coton had been nowhere near any trouble this time. Then Saunders broke the news: Watford had offered £300,000 for the Blues keeper, and he was being given permission to talk to the Hornets.
Just one problem: Coton didn't have a car... so he got one of Saunders’ assistants to drive him down the M1.
All Hornets fans of a certain vintage know the rest of the story.
He may have conceded five goals on his Watford debut against Everton, but he went on to win the club’s Player of the Season gong a record three times and he was, in this scribe’s opinion, the best goalkeeper never to win an England cap.
In the four-act FA Cup marathon against Newcastle in 1989, where he kept three clean sheets, I have never felt more convinced that a Watford keeper was unbeatable. He was that good. And those first impressions, from New Year’s Eve 1983, were not wrong.
To this day, Tony Coton remains one of the Hornets’ finest signings and greatest players.
