In the Back of the Net, with Oliver Phillips

I wrote a series of articles on this very subject in the Watford programme back in 1987-8 and the fans voted then.

It might make an interesting comparison to look at who was chosen then. The exercise was run through the season, when the team and club were undergoing the real traumas of the Bassett-Harrison-led death-throes in the top flight.

The rules then with regard to the dream team were similar, only so as to avoid any embarrassment to the existing squad, it was decided in the club publication, to limit the choices to past players and you were not allowed to include any players in the current squad.

That meant Rostron, Blissett, Coton and McClelland were not allowed in the all-time team, for a start.

The fans were asked to select 19 players in the various categories, putting together an all-time squad. Fans were allowed to pick one keeper, one right back, one left back, one centre half, one dual centre half, one right half, one left half, three midfielders, three wingers, three inside forwards and three centre forwards (strikers), based on their peak Watford form and not on any heights they had achieved before joining the Vicarage Road fraternity or after.

The various sections enabled fans to acknowledge those heroes of bygone eras, whose positions have now evolved into different roles.

The fans sent their votes in and a total of 80 names were submitted, culled from the club's all-time list of appearance-makers. That is a pretty harmonious total when you think about the number of players they had to chose from.

A group of "experts"" were asked to select their squad. I remember I was one of the "experts" and Trefor Jones another, and we had a couple of older hands whose memories could go back to pre-war days. One of them was most certainly the former director Jim Harrowell, if my memory serves me right.

We did not agree among ourselves but those who had majority selections, made it to our final squad. We had 45 names proposed between four of us for the 19 positions, as opposed to the public's 80 names.

Then the fans who came up with the nearest 19 to our selection, won prizes. Tim Turner from north London; Michael Day of Uxbridge and the unrelated Tony Turner of Watford, won the prizes. I wonder where they are now?

We so-called experts came up with some interesting permutations but the only players who won unanimous approval were John Barnes, Stewart Scullion, Tommy Barnett, Keith Eddy and Cliff Holton.

There was a large degree of agreement overall. Of the 19 players who received the most supporters' votes, only five did not make the judge's squad. They were midfield Tom Walley, Andy Rankin, left-back Johnny Williams, 1960's miDfielder George Catleugh and Charlie Livesey.

In the final expert selection, two or three players were included from the 1920's including Skilly Williams and Frank Danky Smith (the Richard Johnson/Les Taylor of his day).

It was felt that we had to doff our caps to the past, even though we had not witnessed it, so Skilly edged ahead of Pat Jennings in the goalkeeping stakes. Skilly was famed throughout his Watford days, for he had been recruited from Leavesden Hospital where he worked and after a spell of 13 years, bridging the First World War, he moved on to captain Brighton.

By the 1930's, Skilly had hung up his boots and was driving double decker buses round the locality, usually one at a time. Some 20 years later, as a short-trousered schoolboy catching a bus to Hemel Hempstead, I was told the driver was Skilly Williams.

At that stage, I had no idea who Skilly was but Skilly, to my schoolboy mind and those of fellow pupils, was just a really famous bus-driver: "one of the all-time great bus-drivers" as Bob Newhart would say.

Now don't tell me you have never heard of Bob Newhart! That makes me feel depressingly old.

The fans loved Skilly in their day, but how good he was in comparison to the modern game, is not easily judged. Certainly he was a character, fearless and brave and there is unlikely to have been a bigger "on-field" personality in between the Watford posts over the years.

I think in the the 1988 dream team list, I went for Pat Jennings, who I did watch regularly in the 1963-64 season. He was a couple of months past his 18th birthday when he started the first of an ever-present run. Pat was impressive and would almost certainly have finished second or third in the Player of the Season Award, running away with the young player of the season trophy in 1964.

He had just the one season, Watford's most successful in the Third Division up until then, with a record 58 points in the old two-for-a-win days.

There is little doubt that he is the finest keeper Watford have ever produced, but that one season, he played in a very defensive-minded team. All bar one player funnelled back and the players had but one instruction when they received the ball in a defensive position: "Kick it up to Charlie".

While Charlie Livesey went walkabout with the ball, the remainder hared out of defence and started to attack.

Tony Coton, who was not eligible in the programme vote, played in sides that loved to attack. They regarded defending as something you did when the opposition had the ball, as opposed to an art form some have tended to develop iT into.

So Tony was exposed quite often and whereas no one could rival Andy Rankin's penchant for saving penalties, Tony has my vote as the all-time finest Watford keeper.

I would put the 18-year-old Pat Jennings, who went on to become a greater keeper than Coton, albeit away from Watford, on the substitute bench.

Another keeper worth mentioning is Jim McLaren, highly-rated and revered as "Big Jim" before the war. And then there are David James and Kevin Miller. I would put Coton and Jennings ahead of them all however, always remembering that the comparisons are based on their Watford peaks.

I will deal with the remainder of my dream team in future columns, but it certainly makes a change or more like something of a relief, to discuss the past.

Talking about the present and the anxieties of the League table can send you round and round in a circle of frustration.

In fact I wish I had remembered to put my mind to the dream team over the weekend, instead of gazing glassy-eyed at the league table with a depression hovering just beyond the receding hairline.

And finally, I noticed on the WML, mention of a certain station called Oldham Mumps. I travelled on some bit-part railway to Oldham back in the days when we never had it so bad: the Hornets' 1971-72 season.

I looked out of the train window without paying too much attention and after the train left a little station, my brain did a double-take. Was that Oldham Mumps? I asked myself.

It was not one of the most burning issues of the day but later, when a Millwall fan in our office was heading off for an away game at Oldham, I mentioned Oldham Mumps station.

He returned telling me I was making it up or imagining it all, but I did not regard this as a significant slight to go rushing to British Rail and attempt to determine the existance of the station.

And the years passed and one's brain is filled with many more thoughts until some 27 years later, reading the digest, a thought suddenly speeds through my brain, plunging deep into the attic of my thoughts.

So there really was an Oldham Mumps. That's another loose end cleared up.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.