I had the opportunity to watch Watford play Chelsea this past weekend on FSC. The American Jay Demerit returned to Watford's starting lineup and would have been the man of the match...until stoppage time hit and Chelsea snuck in a game winner (1-0). Damn them.
Demerit had 2 game winning saves and was a steady presence in the back line. The biggest save was in the 77th minute when he stuffed Frank Lampard with a sliding tackle in the box. Coming off of a pretty boring and easy defensive game against Guatemala, it was good to see Demerit put to the test and even better to see him rise to the occasion.
In the end though, Watford fell. Demerit's quotes from Soccer365:
"We deserved a point, but it is almost laughable now, because we have had these feelings before. You hope these things will not happen again, but they keep on happening. You have to take the positives from each performance, and there were a lot of them to come from Saturday's game."
Jay has an awesome story that you can read about in many places. His Wikipedia page is a good summary. The gist is that he was playing in the 7th division side in 2004. 3 years later he is in the first division (although with heavy threat of relegation). That's right, he went from the 7th division to the 1st division in 3 years.
On May 21, 2006, Jay scored the goal that advanced Watford to the first division. Wicked cool to see an American have such a big impact at that level. Watch the highlight of that goal below.
You can go here and read the Watford program with info on Jay.
2 comments:
I hope he has done enough to get an off-season move to a team staying in the Premier League, that would really be a good situation for him. You have to like someone who works as hard as he does.
Agreed. It would be a shame to see him get relegated. We need to keep the number of American EPL players greater than the number of American EPL owners.
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