Tag Archives: West Ham United

7th March 2012- Championship, West Ham United 1 Watford 1

Highlights: West Ham 1-1 Watford

West Ham needed a late Ricardo Vaz Te goal to earn a point as they blew their chance to go top of the Championship. Teenager Sean Murray fired Watford ahead midway through the second half with a fierce low drive.

Substitute Vaz Te struck with three minutes of normal time to play and West Ham laid siege on the Watford goal throughout nine minutes of stoppage time following a nasty injury to Dale Bennett.

Sean Dyche’s Watford, by contrast, were fearless. Outclassed on paper, they defended heroically and “looked after each other”, as Dyche put it. Leaders stood tall all over the pitch. Captain John Eustace shed blood for the cause. Goalkeeper Tomasz Kuszczak, in his third game on loan from Manchester United, kept Watford in the game with some excellent saves. “We believe in what we do,” Dyche said. “We’re realistic, you know you’re in for a tough task at a place like this. But the mentality of the team is fantastic, and that was on show tonight.”

A clash of heads between John Eustace and Dale Bennett, Watford team-mates, forced a seven-minute delay. Eustace left the pitch, returning with a large bandage on his head, but Bennett, his neck in a brace, was taken off on a stretcher and then to hospital. “We suspect it’s not as serious as it looked,” Sean Dyche, the Watford manager, said. “We’re waiting on the doctors to see if he’ll be kept in overnight.”

Away matches are brilliant. Evening kick-offs are brilliant. Nothing-to-lose, dammit games are brilliant. So an evening kick off at the Boleyn Ground, preceded by several hours of build-up… verbal, nutritional (Nathan’s Pie and Mash shop a thing of rare beauty) and liquid is something to savour. Yet more so given that astonishingly sensible stewarding permits actual standing for the entire ninety minutes. That’ll never catch on. And of course that the Boleyn Ground is a claustrophobic, suffocatingly intense venue. Industrial-scale bubble machines of a size that would cause my daughters to combust with excitement are stationed at the side of the pitch, propelling countless swarms of the things into the night sky. I must have seen that here before, but I can’t believe it’s anything like as effective when the floodlights aren’t catching them. Not sure it would work quite as well with Hornets, one to mull over though. I’m sure there are financial reasons for leaving Upton Park, reasons that might even benefit the football club, but you’d have to be bloody mental to want to abandon this place. If the atmosphere is slightly subdued before the game, from kick off onwards it positively crackles.

More games from 7th March at https://oldwatford.com/tag/mar7

16th August 2011-Championship, Watford 0 West Ham United 4

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http://watford.fcdb.info?id=4969

BBC-Sport-Watford-0-4-West-Ham Download

James Tomkins opened the scoring for the Hammers with a powerful back-post header from Matt Taylor’s corner. Joey O’Brien prodded home after bustling his way into the penalty area, before Carlton Cole slotted home Herita Ilunga’s low cross. And Scott Parker added the fourth late on to leave Sean Dyche still searching for his first win as Watford boss.

Of all the sentiments provoked by last night’s game, the most striking was the chill echo of the futility of Premier League fixtures. During any number of games in each of our seasons in the top flight since football was invented in 1992, we’d look plucky and promising and positive and not really terribly like scoring and then concede. And then look plucky and positive and get our heads up and keep playing and not really look like scoring and maybe concede again, maybe not. This is what a game between a newly relegated Premier League club and anyone else was supposed to look like.

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23rd September 2008-League Cup Third Round, Watford 1 West Ham United 0

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Guardian report

report:Admirable, inspiring, gutsy, competent, solid, neat and tidy stuff. Terrific.

http://watford.fcdb.info?id=4823

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27th January 2007- FA Cup Fourth Round, West Ham United 0 Watford 1

http://watford.fcdb.info/index.php?page=matches

Watford earned a welcome respite from their Premiership struggles as they moved into the FA Cup fifth round with a hard-earned win over West Ham.

Sunday Telegraph, 28 Jan 2007

The Independent, 28 Jan 2007

Wellington boot (fruit) at the pantomime dame (game)*

Given that both Matt and I were living it up overseas while the cup heroics were going on, it’s your turn. Let’s have your one-word match reports, please….

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22nd August 2006- Premier League, Watford 1 West Ham United 1

http://watford.fcdb.info?id=4717

Watford had to work hard to pick up their first point of the season in an entertaining draw with West Ham.

BBC-SPORT-_-Football-_-Premiership-_-Watford-1-1-West-Ham Download

Tuesday was great. Football. Right in front of you. So close it suffocated you. So close it got hold of you by the neck and shook you until you took notice. So close I could smell Shittu’s deep heat-laden legs. So close I could sense the tension in Ben Foster’s every mis-kick. So close I could see the menace in the eyes of Aidy Boothroyd. Hell-bent on non-failure (that’s success to you) this team, hell-bent on being something more than nothing. Hell-bent on casting aside memories of ’99, 2000. Just hell-bent. Whatever they want to do, they really want to do it. And more often than not they go out there and do it as they wanted to do it before they went out and did it.

Comparing last night with Goodison Park on Saturday, we managed some more of what we’d tried then, considerably more effectively – but that could have had something to do with the opposition being different. Everton were big and solid, to a man. (Have you seen Alan Stubbs close up?) West Ham were more…human, somehow, faster (Andy Johnson included), more our cup of tea. And if the rest of the teams we’ll play are in that mold, rather than the brick en-suite low-flush houses of the Toffeemen, we may very well prosper enough to survive. Our first home game was bound to be a bit special, though. A splendid sight greeted us, once we’d got into the ground and past the security checks, which I hope are to do with the global paranoia, rather than merely the Premier League’s. A beautiful pitch, and the Yellow Army dense in seven-eighths of the ground.

I did not, in all honesty, expect to be at the match. First home game in the Premiership would surely be a sell out? Er…apparently not, and late in the day I was able to take my place in the Vicarage Road stand – despite having no membership credentials other than my dad being a season ticket holder.

https://www.soccerbase.com/matches/results.sd?date=2006-08-22

https://www.11v11.com/league-tables/premier-league/22-august-2006/

8th May 2005- Championship, Watford 1 West Ham United 2

http://watford.fcdb.info?id=4662

Helguson scored his 20th goal of the season but it was not enough to prevent Watford slipping to an eighth home defeat of the season and sending West Ham into the play-offs.

On the last day of the season, the result itself is more often than not largely irrelevant. The last time that the last game of the regular season might have been remotely important was during the game against Grimsby in 1999. We won and made the play-offs… as it turned out, had we lost we’d have made them anyway. In 1998, famously, Jason Lee’s scuffed shot won us the title, but we were already promoted some time earlier. The last time that the final game of the regular season had a direct bearing upon which division we operated in during the following campaign was 1994, when we’d have needed to have lost by two goals to Palace at Selhurst Park to have been relegated.