Odds and sods

It’s been a while since I posted anything here – mainly because, in the midst of the turmoil of the autumn, I didn’t have anything startlingly original to say about what Watford could or should do to drag themselves out of the hole they’d got themselves into. Who knew that the answer would be something as simple as hiring an English head coach who knows the Premier League and how to stay in it? (Not that we’re actually out of the hole yet, of course, but we have at least started to build a ladder.)

I still haven’t got anything particularly original to contribute, but here are a few random thoughts occasioned by yesterday’s topsy-turvy FA Cup tie:

• Isn’t it great to hear ‘Z-Cars’ all the way through for a change? It’s almost worth paying the £10 just for the sax solo in the middle.
• For anyone who’s been trumpeting Watford’s strength in depth, the line-up Pearson sent out against Tranmere was a bit of a wake-up call. Giving the players who busted a gut for the team over those four magnificent Christmas games the day off was absolutely understandable, but when you also discount the long-term injured, what’s left looked very much like a collection of odds and sods. In happier circumstances, yesterday’s team would have included the likes of Prödl, Cleverly, Welbeck and Janmaat, a core of battle-hardened pros who would have been much less likely to crumble under pressure in the latter stages.
• Talking of pressure, it can’t be much fun when you’re a fringe player and a handful of cup ties are the only chance you get to prove what you can do. Isaac Success and Domingos Quina in particular seemed to be self-consciously auditioning for the first team yesterday, showing off their tricks and flicks whenever they could. Quina is pure class and mostly got away with it, not least because he balances the showy stuff with a furious competitiveness. As for Success, much of what he tried didn’t come off, and his best moments were those when he opted for simplicity and direct running.
• Personally, I will be very surprised if both Success and Andre Gray are in the Premier League squad of 25 the club names at the end of the month. Success has been here three and half years now, and while he’s got something, the refusal of successive head coaches to trust him with anything more than cameo appearances speaks volumes. He needs regular football, and he’s not going to get it at Watford. A loan or sale in this transfer window would be best for all concerned.
• As for Gray, he’s unfortunate to be stuck at a club that doesn’t play in a formation that suits him. Playing him as the lone striker yesterday just highlighted his limitations, as he was completely neutralised by a bog-standard lower-division lunk of a centre-half. His best spells at the club have come playing alongside Troy Deeney – the two of them built up a decent understanding for a spell early last season – but unless Pearson is tempted to revert to 4-4-2, then Gray is going to be stuck on the subs’ bench for the forseeable future. He too might be better off leaving, but I suspect Watford won’t let both him and Success go unless they can bring in another striker.
• One player I’d expected to see in the line-up yesterday was Dimitri Foulquier, but instead he was loaned to Granada for the rest of the season a couple of days ago. I feel sorry for Foulquier. I saw him in the League Cup tie against Coventry and thought he looked like a decent full-back, solid and tidy. The club obviously saw something they liked, too, or they wouldn’t have recalled him after two seasons of loans and put him in the first-team squad, and both Gracia and Flores regularly included him in the 17. But he had the misfortune to make his league debut in the 8-0 drubbing at Man City, and copped some of the blame for the scoreline. After that, some fans were never going to give him a chance.
• One final thought about players who might have expected to get a game against Tranmere: what the hell has happened to Marvin Zeegelaar? As far as I know, he’s still at the club (I’ve occasionally spotted his name in under-23 line-ups), but he doesn’t even get his name listed on the back of the programme any more. I know he turned out not to be the long-term solution at left-back he was intended to be, but I’d be intrigued to know what he’s done to be sent to purgatory.

Forwards in reverse

It seems churlish to complain, given how well the ’orns have been playing for the past couple of months (even if the results don’t reflect that), but there is one fact that stands out as we approach the halfway point of the Premier League season: our strikers aren’t scoring.

It wasn’t until I checked that I realised quite how serious the goal drought is. Troy has scored two in 12 starts, Andre Gray scored three in the first six games, but has barely played since, and Isaac Success has just scored the one Premier League goal – albeit a corker, finishing off a sublime training ground routine for the third against Huddersfield. The dates of their most recent goals are, respectively, September 2nd, September 22nd and October 27th. (By the way, I’m not counting Gerard Deulofeu as a striker here; he’s a winger who’s sometimes deployed in the middle of the pitch, which isn’t the same thing at all.)

It’s not as if they’re missing lots of chances, either. In the last couple of games, Troy had one against Everton where he got a toe to a tricky aerial pass (it was barely a half-chance), and against Cardiff there was that sliding attempt to reach a through ball that gave Neil Warnock a conniption fit. That’s about it.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that Javi Gracia is building a successful football team that isn’t designed to create chances for its strikers. Which is a bit odd, isn’t it?

I may be prejudiced here, as I was brought up on GT’s teams where everything revolved around supplying the ammunition for the centre-forwards. In their early-80s pomp, Barnes and Callaghan were tasked with providing the crosses for Blissett and Jenkins to convert, and the service was so good that they filled their boots. The wingers scored a fair few themselves as well, but that wasn’t their primary function.

Now look at the current Watford team. The modern equivalents of Barnes and Callaghan are Deulofeu and Pereyra (and Hughes, when fit), but you don’t often see them crossing to a striker. That’s partly because they’re hugely talented players who are more than capable of scoring themselves, as they’ve demonstrated. They’re also, let’s be honest, a bit selfish at times, trying to dribble round one more player, or curl the ball round the goalie from the edge of the area, rather than pass to a better-placed teammate.

Even when crosses do arrive in inviting areas, it’s rarely a striker who’s on the end of them. Unusually, both our goals against Everton came from crosses; the first found Bobby P, who was unlucky not to get the addition to the tally that his volley deserved, while the second was met by  Doucouré running in from deep.

So where does this leave Troy? It seems that his role in the team these days is mainly to keep opposing defenders occupied, thus creating more space for our creative midfielders. It’s a reasonable ploy; every Premier League manager knows that you can’t risk giving Troy too much space, so they’re going to allocate one of their stronger defenders to stick close to him. Still, it seems a shame that a player of Troy’s experience and expertise has been largely reduced to the role of a decoy, apart from his (admittedly important) role as the one who wins headers from goal kicks, or who holds up the ball and lays it off.

As a result of all this, most our goals this season have been spectacular efforts (narrowing down the shortlist for the goal of the season award is going to be a nightmare). But I can’t help wondering whether, if we could just create a few more chances for Troy (or Isaac, or Andre), we might have the opportunity to truly fulfil the potential of this remarkable squad of players.

Still on the up

Happy Premier League Survival Day, Hornets fans! Okay, it was actually yesterday, but I think we can safely extend the celebrations across the entire Bank Holiday weekend.

PLSD (as no one but me calls it) has come a bit later this year - we reached 40 points on the 16th and 17th of April in 2016 and 2017, respectively – and I’m sure I’m not the only Watford fan who spent most of the second half of the game yesterday wondering if it was going to come at all. As Newcastle battered our defence (aided by some decidedly odd substitutions by Javi Gracia), it was all too easy to anticipate a defeat, followed by results elsewhere going against us in midweek and leaving us needing to get something from the game at Old Trafford next Sunday.

In the end, we got the win we probably should have managed weeks ago. In truth, we haven’t been playing badly for the past month, but we’ve made critical errors at both ends of the pitch when it mattered. You may have seen that Watford came top of the Guardian’s ineptitude index for this season, and the reasons were on display again yesterday; countless misplaced passes, chances spurned (there were two breakaways late on that should have been converted), a missed penalty. And it was ironic that Abdoulaye Doucouré picked up the Players’ Player of the Season award at the end of probably his worst game of the campaign. A cynic might suggest that he played like someone whose signature on a big-money transfer has already been pencilled in.

Against that, Roberto Pereyra again showed the skills we’ve missed all that time he’s spent injured, Etienne Capoue continued his remarkable transformation into a latter-day Roger Joslyn, and Andre Gray demonstrated what we all knew – that he needs another striker to play alongside in order to be truly effective.

And so we can look forward to a fourth successive Premier League season, without ever having truly been in danger of relegation in the first three. We’re over halfway to matching what Elton and GT achieved in the 1980s, and that’s worth celebrating. I finally got round to reading Rocket Men recently, the Tales from the Vicarage book which focuses on that era. The unspoken implication of that title is that all space rockets eventually plummet back to Earth, but for all the frustrations and irritations of this odd season, it honestly doesn’t feel like the Pozzos’ rocket is anywhere near the peak of its trajectory yet.

A game of frustration

Older readers may remember playing Frustration as a child. It was a fairly basic board game where you rolled a die and moved your pieces around a circuit; the first player to get all their pieces home was the winner. The twist was that, if another player landed on a spot that one of your pieces was occupying, yours got sent all the way back to the start, even if you were only one place from home. Hence the name of the game.

It’s as apt a metaphor as I can think of for Watford’s season, a season in which, again and again, a promising beginning has been undone and we’ve ended up back at square one. The games where we’ve played well, taken the lead and then ended up drawing or losing. The players who’ve lit up the pitch for a handful of matches and then picked up an injury that kept them out for months on end. And, of course, the head coach who looked like he might be the one to take Watford to the next level, only to have his head turned by a rival club and lose focus.

Yesterday’s opponents provided a timely reminder of how things could have been, like the ‘here’s what you could have won’ reveal on a TV gameshow. In a parallel universe, we could have been where Burnley are, sitting in 7th place, dreaming of winning a place in Europe.

Imagine for a moment that, throughout the season, we’d been able to field Chalobah, Cleverley and Doucouré in the centre of midfield, in front of a defence anchored by the strength and experience of Kaboul and Cathcart. Imagine we’d had access to the speed of Femenía and the skill of Hughes and Pereyra in every game. Imagine (and admittedly, this is a bit more of a stretch) that we’d managed to find a way to make a pairing of Deeney and Gray work up front. I know ‘what if’ is one of the most pointless phrases in the lexicon, but you can’t help wondering, can you?

The fact that, despite all these frustrations – all the leads chucked away and the absurdly lengthy absences through injury – we’re still sitting fairly comfortably in mid-table,almost makes it worse. So near, and yet so far.

Hopefully we’ll pick up a few more points before the season ends (although you can look at our remaining games and make a plausible case for us losing every one, given the form and/or desperation of the opposition), and then regroup in the summer, ready for the season we should have had this time round. But of course, somehow it never works out that way.