So the first leg of the play-offs in the Championship has been and gone. There were three major surprises. Bristol City won at in-form Crystal Palace, Phil Brown showed that he has achieved his success partly due to having the vision of a fictional superhero and Watford played some half-decent football against Hull City.

There were also three things that happened that were no surprise at all. Neil Warnock was very upset with a referee, Watford lost and a referee made a quite appalling decision that could decide the outcome of the play-offs.

Let’s look at the surprises first. Bristol City put in a wonderful performance at Crystal Palace and deserved their victory. I thought the celebrations of the players were a little premature and the tie is far from over. The strike from David Noble was worthy of winning any game and I admire they way they went about their business. It is rare for a team managed by Warnock to be bullied and intimidated, but Bristol City appeared to manage to do just that.

'Compared to what we have watched all season, Watford's performance was like watching Arsenal'


Phil Brown is a man I admire hugely. He has done a wonderful job at Hull City and he comes over as a nice man and a fine coach. I was amazed to see that he has done all he has partly because of his amazing eyesight. That is the only explanation for his comments about Watford’s fourth-minute disallowed goal: "For the goal it looked to me that he was climbing all over one of our defenders and the whistle went before he even headed the ball."

Interestingly, .millions of people have seen the same incident several times from several different angles and not one other person can see anyone climbing all over anyone else.

The third surprise was the quality of football Watford played. Having watched the awful dross we have served up this season, I was looking forward to the game with some trepidation. In the end, we actually passed the ball a little and didn’t always look for the hopeful punt forward.

Neutral supporters may wonder what I’m talking about as they might not think Watford were all that great. Trust me, compared to what we have watched all season, Watford's performance was like watching Arsenal.

Then we come to the things that we could have all predicted before a ball was kicked. Warnock was furious with the referee after the game. He felt that Bristol City should have been reduced to ten men after a foul by Marvin Elliott. He may have just about had a point, but presumably he didn’t see the tackle by his own Shaun Derry that was equally as bad.

The second obvious outcome was that Watford lost. One win in 14, eight wins in 34 and roughly the same set of players on the pitch, it didn’t take a genius to work out that we were unlikely to win. We’ve won 11 home games in two seasons for goodness sake, yet the bookies still made us favourites yesterday, (it's not often they give money away).

Without wishing to sound like Warnock, it came as no surprise when one of the games was hugely affected by a terrible decision by a referee. Kevin Friend disallowed Danny Shittu’s towering header in the fourth minute and I would love to know what he thought he saw. Obviously Phil Brown could explain it to me but nobody else in the entire world could.

For a team lacking in any confidence whatever, who knows what taking a fourth-minute lead would have done to the Hornets. As it was, the goal was disallowed for some unknown reason and three minutes later Watford were behind. Thanks ref, you could have cost us £60m.

I’ll not even start on the sending off of Watford skipper John Eustace.

So, it is advantage Bristol City and advantage Hull City. The first game isn’t over, but I sadly think the second one just might be.