In light of the recent Vicarage Road centenary celebrations, 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, Olly Wicken writes about a player who played at The Vic in all four divisions as the club stormed up the Football League under Graham Taylor.
Ross Jenkins put in so many superb performances at Vicarage Road that it’s difficult to choose the one that stands out most. Scoring a hat-trick against the reigning European champions will have to do.
It was a League Cup tie against Nottingham Forest in October 1980. Watford were in the Second Division and Forest were in the First. Forest had won the European Cup in both the previous two seasons, and were also the holders of the UEFA Super Cup. The Hornets won 4-1. It was comfortable. And astonishing.
Ross scored in the 45th, 54th and 70th minutes. The first was from a rebound after the Forest goalkeeper saved a powerful Kenny Jackett shot. For the second, he coolly slotted home after a deft Luther Blissett flick-on. The third came at the end of a counter-attack and a clear run on goal. These three clinical strikes were from a man renowned for his height (6’4”) and aerial ability, but the truth is that Jenkins was an exceptional forward in every aspect of his game.
Already by then, Jenkins was no stranger to scoring goals on memorable nights at The Vic. Earlier in the cup run that autumn, he’d scored Watford’s fifth in the scarcely believable 7-1 win over Southampton. Two seasons before that, he’d scored in the 3-1 extra-time win over Stoke City that had put the club into the League Cup semi-finals for the first time ever. He had form under the lights.
Nor was he a stranger to scoring hat-tricks at Vicarage Road: this one against Forest was his fifth. His first had come in August 1976 against Hartlepool, and in 1978/79 he’d scored three or more goals against each of Blackpool, Oxford and Dagenham. Now he’d done it against the champions of Europe.
After the game, manager Graham Taylor said the win had to be the best result in the club’s history. It had been a superb team effort with brilliant individual performances (notably from Blissett, playing in midfield and scoring the first goal from the penalty spot), but it was Jenkins who’d come away with the match ball.
His achievement wasn’t something anyone associated with Watford could have predicted during his first few years at the club. Initially, fans had derided him, and his second manager, Mike Keen, had admitted to the Watford Observer that people saw Jenkins as ‘a joke, a bad signing who was destined never to make as much impact on the game as our other strikers’. But his destiny turned out to be very different — as Brian Clough and his European champions would later find out.
Things hadn’t started well for Jenkins at Watford. He had arrived at the club in November 1972, and within a month the Hornets had embarked on a losing run of 10 games, sliding down the Division Three table. In his first two seasons he’d scored only six goals — which hadn’t felt like a good return on the club’s record-breaking investment of £30,000. The following season, he’d started scoring more regularly, but by then Watford had been relegated to Division Four.
Over the first two seasons in the bottom tier, he notched 30 league goals, forming partnerships with Arthur Horsfield and Keith Mercer, and winning the Player of the Season award in 1975/76. But it was Taylor’s arrival in 1977 that properly transformed Jenkins’ and the club’s fortunes.
He became an outstanding leader of the line — running diagonals into space, holding the ball up and laying it off, and timing his runs into the box. He scored 55 goals in the next two seasons, many of them in a partnership with Blissett that made English football sit up and take notice. And now, in October 1980, Jenkins and Blissett — and Taylor and Watford — did it again by walloping the best team in Europe.
Over the next couple of years, after the win over Forest, Jenkins went on to enjoy more great moments at The Vic. He scored the two goals against Wrexham that ensured Watford’s first-ever promotion to the top flight. Then he scored a brace against Sunderland in the famous 8-0 win to complete his set of scoring for Watford in every league tier. From an inauspicious start, he became the second man, after Tommy Barnett, to reach the landmark of scoring 100 league goals for Watford.
He retired in 1983. Across the course of his career, he scored a total of 88 times at the Vicarage Road and Rookery ends. Ross Jenkins will always be one of the very greatest Home Ground Heroes.
