In light of the Vicarage Road centenary celebrations earlier this season, writers from The Watford Treasury magazine look back at players who performed great feats on home soil.
First featured in last season’s matchday programme, Nick Catley writes about a player who his manager Ray Lewington described as the type who comes along once in a generation.
Words you’d probably associate with Heiðar Helguson: Emphatic. Power. Commitment. Energy.
Words you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Heiðar Helguson: Deft. Silky. Languid. Delicate.
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Symbolically for someone who would become our first great player of the new century, Helguson burst into our world in January 2000 in a home game against Liverpool. He made a massive impact, scoring in a 2-3 debut defeat by beating defenders and keeper to a crossed free-kick, an effort we would come to recognise as typical Helguson, and managing five more goals that season in a relegation-bound side.
He had a decent enough 2000/01, but flaws started to emerge. He could struggle when one-on-one with the goalkeeper, and seemed hugely affected by setbacks. Wearing his heart on his sleeve and playing like he was trying to kick the opposition’s door down made him a firm fan favourite, but he sometimes found controlling his emotions difficult. Things got worse in 2001/02. Gianluca Vialli looked at this Tigger in human form, with his striker’s instinct and capacity for bloodcurdling headers (it’s a source of continuing amazement that he was two inches short of six feet) and decided he would make a perfect wing-back. He didn’t.
Helguson appeared to have reached a crossroads, but his ‒ and our ‒ fortune was our next choice of manager. Ray Lewington helped him to previously unimagined heights. The change in Helguson’s confidence was obvious and immediate, illustrated most clearly in the storied game at Sheffield United after the players had taken a pay cut to help the club avoid administration. He scored a striker’s goal and won a penalty in one of the most famous wins of those years.
The best, though, was yet to come. The 2004/05 season was Helguson’s finest in a Watford shirt. More than anything, it was intensely gratifying to see how much he’d developed. He kept all the good stuff, but added composure to his game, and suddenly associating him with that second set of words didn’t seem so ridiculous. He was far more emotionally robust. His reaction to a bad game was to have a better one. He had more awareness, bringing others into the play and developing into a genuine centre-forward. You didn’t put your fingers over your eyes when he was through on goal. He even took (and scored) penalties ‒ something unthinkable a couple of years previously. He was completing himself as a player before our eyes ‒ and do fans warm to anything more than that?
The zenith of his time with us, in my eyes anyway, came in two matches at either end of November 2004, and propelled us into the last four of the League Cup. Southampton and Portsmouth were solid, established, lower mid-table Premier League sides, while we were solidly second-tier. Both played their strongest team. Winning one of those games would have been a decent achievement, let alone both.
Of course, we did win them both. But that statement is like saying that Tenzing and Hillary climbed a mountain, or that Victoria Wood told a few jokes. It doesn’t begin to do justice to the nature of the achievement. We bullied them. We battered them. We dominated them. We flippin’ murdered ‘em.
In my mind’s eye, Helguson was the only player on the pitch in those matches. This is perhaps because he had become the team’s spiritual leader to such an extent that we had 11 Heiðars on display ‒ spirited, tough, hard-running and indefatigable, but also intelligently making the right decisions.
Helguson scored three of our eight goals in those games, and two stand out. The first against Portsmouth was peak Helguson, literally and metaphorically. He outjumped goalkeeper Jamie Ashdown in an unfair contest ‒ Ashdown was allowed to use his arms, but Helguson had springs in his legs. Think Maradona v Shilton, but legal. The fourth goal against Southampton, though, was New Heiðar to the core, a cast-iron beauty ‒ a screaming volley from a dropping ball that required composure and technique in equal measure.
By the end of that season it was clear he was a Premier League player in all but club, and he duly departed to Craven Cottage. However, he did return, on loan from QPR in 2009, and gave a second-debut performance that arguably out-Heiðared anything we’d previously seen ‒ on as sub, he scored twice to put us 3-2 ahead against Leicester having been two down, before being forced off injured. (We then conceded an equaliser in injury time. It might sound like a fairy tale, but it’s still a Watford one).
He went on to have a decent final season with us, but that seems the perfect ending, so let’s leave it there. Heiðar Helguson, Watford legend. All he ever left on the pitch were blood and sweat.
