One of the most promising products of the Watford youth system in recent years, Chris Johnson's career appears to have taken a fairly calamitous wrong turn at some point. In his first year as a professional, he should've been pressing his case for inclusion in the first team - instead he and his brother were sacked by Graham Taylor for breaches of club rules regarding alcohol, thus thwarting attempts to field an entire Watford side made up of players named Johnson.

We could spend all day speculating on the reasons for their demise (personally, I suspect a case of Ramage Syndrome - players more in love with the idea of being footballers than the practice), yet it's probably pointless. Just as there will always be careers terminated by injury, so there will always be careers terminated by general twattishness. Boys will be boys.

Shame, though, because what I saw of Chris Johnson was really very good indeed. A midfielder with an eye for a through-ball as well as a firm tackle, he appeared to be one of the young players most likely to find a first team role at the start of the 1996/97 season. His debut, a 2-0 defeat against Plymouth Argyle at Vicarage Road, gave us twenty minutes of commitment and invention before he disappeared from the game - but that possibly had something to do with us spending the entire match wellying the ball over his head in the general direction of Devon White...

Since then, he appeared to be getting further away from the first team rather than closer to it - perhaps that's explained by his ultimate demise via the seemingly irresistible temptations of Kudos, perhaps other factors intervened.