Proving people wrong 'motivates me and the players' says Cleverley
Before the season started, Watford were largely written off as lower-table also-rans, or even relegation fodder.
Having not been below eighth all season long, the pundits are now anticipating the Hornets eventually and, they feel, inevitably falling away.
It’s that sort of lack of external belief which drives Tom Cleverley and his squad.
“I’d be lying if I said proving people wrong doesn’t motivate me, and motivate the players as well,” he said.
“People’s predictions for us were, and maybe still are, that we’d fall away.
“Whether that’s because of our league position at the end of last season, because of the players we lost, because we didn’t invest too much in the summer – all those things have added up to people predicting we won’t be in the top six.
“That really motivates me, and it really motivates the players, so we can keep proving those people wrong.
“We certainly don’t train or prepare to be an inferior team or a team that isn’t going to be in the top six.
“We prepare ourselves to be right there, and so far we’ve proved that we are.
“Now it has to be about continuing to do that.”
To those outside of Watford, having them sat in or just outside the play-off places has been viewed as something of a novelty.
But with every passing game, their presence at the top end of the table has led others to view their bid for promotion as a serious one.
“I feel like it’s always been a serious campaign from where I’m sitting,” Cleverley stated.
“We prepare the team, we have ambitions for it to be a serious campaign, and this is now an important period where I have to take it literally a game at a time.
“Instead of trying to get myself thinking about targets and where I want to be after the Sheffield United game it has to be one game at a time because there are 12 points up for grabs in 10 days.
“So we’ll take it one at a time and the focus is purely on winning against Portsmouth.”
