Trail of the Lion King

Vicarage Road is one of two Championship grounds that I’d not yet been to and so when I found myself back in the UK it was an easy decision to head south for a couple of nights. I had thought about staying in London but as I’ve never knowingly been to Watford thought we might as well see what it had to offer.

There’s a busy town centre where we ate and drank in a Spanish bar on the Friday night. They served draught Estrella Galica which took me back to my Ferrol days, although I suspect that it’s probably now brewed in Tadcaster or somewhere.

London has its attractions though and on the Saturday morning we took a Metropolitan Line train into the city for the Paul McCartney photo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It was the final weekend before it moved on to the US.

It was worth a visit to see the two hundred and fifty or so photos that he taken around the world in 1963 and ’64. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing or hearing new Beatles stuff.

We were staying in the Watford Travelodge and so it was only a fifteen minute or so walk to Vicarage Road. I was able to just follow the crowd through the backstreets to the ground. I was hoping that we might have turned the corner after our poor early season form, with wins in the League Cup against Bradford and over recently relegated Southampton in the League.

It was an end-to-end game that could have gone either way. Riley McGree scored twice for us in the opening twelve minutes, before Watford quickly pulled one back. When Watford levelled in the second half my expectations of taking anything from the game were minimal. I was wrong though, with Josh Coburn beating their keeper in a one-on-one and then the bar coming to our rescue in added time.

The win lifted us out of the relegation area on goal difference and Jen and I celebrated in a Romanian restaurant. It was decorated in a way that our house may end up one day if we don’t tone down impulse eBay purchases. I think we might have been the only non-Romanians in there but from what I can remember of the rest of the evening it was as enjoyable as the match had been.

Tags: McCartney photo exhibition, Nondescript Travelodges, Romanian decor

This entry was posted on December 15, 2023 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Football, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.