Watford vs Liverpool: FA Cup Final hero Ben Watson set to spring second surprise

Midfielder goes from Wembley winner at Wigan to table-climbing with Watford

(2015 Getty Images)

Reggie Watson is six and plays football at least four times a week. When his father watches him, does he ever allow himself to wonder if Reggie might score the winner in an FA Cup final one day?

“It would be some dream, wouldn’t it?” says Ben Watson. When he came off the pitch having scored the winner for Wigan against Manchester City in 2013, his own father went over to his son and could barely speak. “He looked at me and was just overwhelmed by it all,” said Ben.

Nearly all the great upsets in an FA Cup final have been decided by a single goal – Sunderland in 1973, Southampton in 1976, West Ham in 1980, Wimbledon in 1988 and Wigan on a rain-spattered Wembley evening two-and-a-half years ago.

As for the men who scored those goals; Trevor Brooking has a stand named after him at Upton Park, Bobby Stokes a hospitality suite at St Mary’s Stadium and Ian Porterfield has given his name to a pub in the centre of Sunderland.

There is nothing for Lawrie Sanchez because of the troubled history of the club for which he scored Nothing yet for Watson, although you presume he wouldn’t have to buy a drink should he go back to Wigan.

When he returned with Watford in March, the 2-0 win at the DW Stadium suggested the clubs were heading in different directions, one to League One, the other to the Premier League. So it proved.

Watford, astonishingly, look as if they might stay there. Everything about them suggested they would be where Aston Villa are now. Watford have the lowest wage bill of any team in the Premier League. They have changed managers six times in the last three years. The incumbent, Quique Sanchez Flores, had never previously managed in Britain and brought in 15 players in the summer. He was not the manager who had won them promotion. Watford’s three previous seasons in the top flight had ended in relegation.

“When I watched him buy 15 players, you think it will never work, they will never gel but it has,” says Watson, who has forged a place in the heart of Flores’ midfield.

“Quique won the Uefa Cup with Atletico Madrid, he has managed Valencia, his pedigree is outstanding but, if he keeps Watford in the Premier League, this will count as one of his biggest achievements. He has signed young players, hungry players, who want to impress.”

For Watson, who at Wigan and Watford was on his sixth manager in two years, the fact he had worked under Roberto Martinez gave him an advantage with Flores.

Watson celebrates Wigan's FA Cup victory with Roberto Martinez (Getty Images)

“It prepared me 100 per cent for what was coming,” he says. “They come from similar backgrounds, they have similar ideas about football. Quique doesn’t just train us, he drills us. We go through things over and over again. When you’re a pro and you’re 30 you might wonder if you really need to be told your job but Quique goes into so many tiny details that you keep learning.”

This afternoon Watford take on Liverpool in the Premier League. Watson’s last game against them is imprinted on his mind and his body. In November 2012, he jumped for a high ball with Raheem Sterling and broke his leg.

He waved away the stretcher and limped off, returning seven days before the FA Cup final. Nine months later, facing Barnsley, he broke his leg again. The scar where the surgeon inserted a metal rod to work on the broken tibia and fibula is still visible on his leg.

“The Barnsley one was a lot worse,” the midfielder recalls. “When you do it, you can never see yourself walking let alone running on a football pitch. But there was always a high after the low. After I broke my leg at Liverpool, we won the FA Cup. After I did it against Barnsley, I got promoted with Watford. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a third one. I don’t want to break my leg just so Watford can stay up.”

The highs and lows encapsulated in 72 hours in May 2013 have rarely been equalled. Wigan won the FA Cup at Wembley on the Saturday and were relegated 10 miles across north London at the Emirates Stadium on the Tuesday.

Wigan went straight home after their Wembley success. “We got on the bus and drove north,” says Watson. “There was no real celebration because of what we had to do on the Tuesday. We had to get home and get recovered.

“Looking back, you might say what we had to do was impossible but we left for London pretty confident. We had just won the FA Cup, we had escaped relegation before and we would escape again. But it was Arsenal at the Emirates and you know how tough that can be.

“What did I think when we went on holiday? We thought Wigan might go back up, we hoped Roberto would stay, although we knew the odds were against it, I thought he might be attracted by playing in Europe. But a new manager [Owen Coyle] came in and it just never worked.

“They let players go and I think some of those left behind might have thought the Championship was going to be easy. We won our first match at Barnsley 4-0 and maybe we thought all the games were going to be like that. And when a team comes down from the Premier League people want to beat them, especially when they come down as FA Cup holders.

“The Championship is a very tough league and suddenly you can find you don’t know where the next win is coming from. You look at a team like Chelsea, who looked unbeatable last season. They don’t win a few games, confidence drops and suddenly you can’t buy a win.

“It is like a golfer trying to take a putt; it is all in the head. And you are not talking good players at Chelsea, you are talking world-class footballers – the best.”

Should Watford have to fight for their Premier League lives, you imagine Watson would be a valuable voice in the dressing room. At Wigan he was part of a side that pulled off two great escapes. In 2012, they won five of their final six fixtures to avoid what seemed certain relegation. The year before they had to win their last two matches to survive.

“The thing about Roberto [Martinez] was that he was so calm,” says Watson. “If you are a footballer, the pressure of having to win your last two games stays with you every moment of every day.

“In the first of those matches we were 2-0 down at home to West Ham. Lose that and we are relegated, we are done. We came back to win 3-2. How do you feel after a game like that? You are all over the place and then we had to go to Stoke and win, never having won back-to-back games under Roberto.

“But we did it and one of the reasons we did is that he took the pressure off us. I think that’s the key to staying up because if the manager panics, everybody panics.”