Tuesday talking point: Goalless draw can galvanise Hornets

Matt Rowson, BHaPPY blog, external

The conventional wisdom is that goals are exciting. Given the choice between a 4-4 draw and a 0-0 with no emotional investment you’d choose the former every time.

This equation changes with a stake in the game. Watford’s FA Cup fifth-round replay with Walsall at Vicarage Road finished 4-4 after a tremendous effort by the third-tier Saddlers in a fine game, but my grandad was so exercised by the whole thing that he committed never to attend another game and didn’t.

Equally, there can be beauty in a goalless draw. Not always, admittedly. Sometimes a rubbish game is just a rubbish game, to mangle a popular saying. But when you’ve gone through half a season of shipping goals far quicker than you can score them the sudden ability to throw a wet blanket over a game and club the life out of it can be a fine, fine thing.

Witness the goalless draw at Old Trafford. If there was more fortune about it (not to say two fewer points) than the win at Villa Park a week earlier you’d nonetheless have to be a miserable soul not to enjoy Cristiano Ronaldo running into Hassane Kamara, falling over and gesticulating in impotent desperation, or Samir slamming into a defiant block, or Bruno Fernandes’ shot through the forest of legs bouncing off the affronted Ronaldo and away.

It may not be enough in the long term. But it’s something, and we’re clinging to it.