Amidst a historic season, Watford Football Club looks to make even more history on Sunday, which is when the Hornets will face Wolverhampton Wanderers in a highly anticipated FA Cup semi-final match.
The last and only time that Watford successfully navigated the semi-final stage occurred in 1984. The club’s most famous cup victory was a 1-0 victory over Plymouth Argyle, which was played at Birmingham’s Villa Park, before the team came just one win shy of lifting the hardware, losing to Everton, 2-0, in the final.
This time around, Watford eased past Woking, Newcastle United, Queens Park Rangers and Crystal Palace en route to the club’s seventh semi-final appearance in history and its second in a four-year span.
The club has also performed at a high level in Premier League play this season. In fact, if Watford finishes in eighth place, its current placing, it will mark the second-best showing in history, only trailing its incredible 1982-83 campaign, when Watford finished as the Division 1 runner-up.
Watford headed into this historic cup tie on the heels of an impressive 4-1 win over Fulham, officially relegating their opponents to the 2019-20 Championship in the process. The performance was highlighted by an incredible goal that was scored by Will Hughes. His volley from 18 yards out was perfectly placed, and it resulted in the Watford supporters singing for him to be named to the next England side. His score was also timely as it occurred as the teams were trudging through the second half tied at 1-1, and it sparked three successive Watford goals as the side pulled away in what ultimately became an easy win.
That performance was a nice response to a tough 2-1 loss to Manchester United at Old Trafford that had preceded it three days earlier. In that earlier contest, the hosts took a 2-0 lead and cruised to the win with the visitors only able to secure a consolation goal in the 90th minute.
Interestingly, this weekend’s FA Cup semifinals – the other one, which features Manchester City and Brighton & Hove Albion, will be played on Saturday – will feature VAR incidents being shown on the scoreboard at London’s Wembley Stadium. Previously, this public showing had been avoided due to concerns over how fans would react, but those fears were trumped by the decision that they should know why calls are being overturned and that those concerns were unwarranted.
Watford is also looking to qualify for a European competition for the second time in the club’s history. The first occurred in the 1983-84 campaign, when the Hornets played in the UEFA Cup after that second-place league finish the previous season. In the first round of that competition, Watford impressively rallied from a 3-1 aggregate deficit to Kaiserslautern with a 3-0 home win to prevail, 4-3 on aggregate. A win over Levski Sofia followed before the London-based side was knocked out in the round of 16 by Sparta Prague.
In order to enter the 2019-20 Europa League, Watford needs to either win the FA Cup or move up to seventh place in the Premier League and hope that first-place Manchester City claims the FA Cup, causing the Europa League spot that would normally go to the cup winner to instead be handed to the Premier League’s seventh-place side.
The reason for this renaissance? There are a lot of factors, but one of them is Gino Pozzo. He and his family have owned Watford since their takeover was completed in 2012. Gino plays an intimate role in the running of this football club, enhanced when he moved to England a year later, while his father, Giampaolo, focuses on Italian side Udinese, which is based in Udine, Italy, where Gino was raised. The family has owned Udinese since 1986, and Gino became a member of Udinese’s board in 1993.
Watford has risen in stature considerably since that takeover occurred seven years ago. The team had just finished a mid-table season in the second-tier Championship, placing 11th in the 24-team league, but success was experienced immediately as a third-place finish and a promotion play-off spot followed the next year. Although that team fell one win shy of promotion, it earned an automatic promotion spot two years later with a second-place finish and is now wrapping up its fourth successive season in the Premier League. As a result of all of this success, the honors have come in too. For example, in October, talkSPORT ranked Gino as the fourth-best owner in the Premier League.
Gino has also spent time in the United States, earning a master’s degree from Harvard University while there. He later spent a couple of decades in Barcelona, Spain, after marrying a Catalan woman before their move to London.
The Pozzo family has been prominent in Italy since its family business, Freud, a woodworking company, reached prominence. Giampaolo would later sell Freud to Robert Bosch in 2008 and focus more on the various footballing efforts, which also included Spain’s Granada CF before that was sold to Jiang Lizhang in 2016, and overseeing an electrical appliance company in Spain and various property and finances mergers.
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Dil Bole Oberoi
