The signposts are clear, but what direction will the owner take Watford in?
If ever a team gave a performance that screamed ‘sign some players’ then Watford’s offering at Queens Park Rangers yesterday was exactly that.
Tom Cleverley’s post-match comments about his side lacking nous and being short of one or two Championship-wise, experienced players underlined that – though anyone watching could see it with their own eyes.
Following on so quickly after the home defeat to Cardiff on Sunday, this was a 3-1 defeat that in terms of performance and portents is perhaps one of those moments that can define a season.
Certainly, how the club choose to show support for their head coach through January will indicate whether they feel speculating to possibly accumulate from a run to the play-offs and beyond is something they truly believe in.
Outside of Cleverley and his staff and players, there would have been few connected to Watford who thought in August that the club would be looking at keeping a bid for promotion alive when the January window opened.
Remember when Cleverley took over from Valerien Ismael it was at a time when the spectre of a battle to avoid a relegation scrap had to be fought.
He achieved that pretty quickly, but then saw his captain and the club’s young player of the season sold in the summer.
It was little surprise that the club kept most of the summer proceeds back as that trading model has underpinned the Hornets through 12 years of Pozzo ownership which have delivered six seasons of Premier League football and an FA Cup Final appearance.
However, what money the club did spend in the summer was on young players like Keiky Almeida, who is playing for the Under-21s, and Pierre Dwomoh – promising, talented but not a possessor yet of the nous or experience Cleverley has talked about.
Losing Hoedt and replacing him with 37-year-old Angelo Ogbonna, Kevin Keben (who arrived at the club injured and has spent most of his time in the treatment room) and on-loan Antonio Tikvic (who didn’t look good enough on trial in pre-season and has played zero Championship minutes) had not looked too much of a problem for the first few months of the season.
But the five goals conceded in the past two games have all been highly avoidable, and it wouldn’t be much of a risk to say a defence containing Hoedt would not have shipped all of them.
So, an experienced Championship defender who knows his way around the likes of Stoke and Bristol City, and is fit and ready to go seems a must after watching the defence adopt an ‘after you sir’ style of escorting QPR players into the six-yard box yesterday.
Or as Slaven Bilic perfectly described it, players you can give a shirt to, tell them where they’re playing, and they can go straight out on the pitch and know what to do and how to do it in a Championship arena.
Don’t forget, Cleverley’s rearguard this season has almost exclusively featured players that were at the club already, and his work to bring the best out of Mattie Pollock has made that more sustainable than it might have been.
Why is the defence such an area for concern? Ask anyone at the game in west London as they had a very good view behind the goal of the first two shockers that Watford conceded.
Being caught out by a free kick that the coaching staff prepared you for is bad enough. Having it happen inside the first 10 minutes – again, and that’s getting frighteningly repetitive – is worse still.
But when the ball is dragged back across the box and it goes past four Watford players before arriving at the first blue and white hooped shirt, worn by Michael Frey, who sweeps it into the net – that’s pitiful.
Frey is totally unmarked. Only a mathematician or the Watford defence could squeeze that many bodies into a few yards and manage to put one of them in splendid isolation.
Goal two was equally horrific.
When Ilias Chair collects the ball on the left there are four Rangers teammates in the box, and five Watford players goal-side of them. The odds, at that point, are highly stacked in favour of the defence.
Except when he clips the ball to the back post, it’s the four Rangers players who have moved there. The Watford defenders don’t follow them, or in fact move very much at all.
Consequently, Jimmy Dunne is the first of three players forming a QPR conga line at the back post. If the defender hadn’t scored, one of his teammates behind him would have done – and if for some reason the header had been blocked, the fourth Rangers player was standing unmarked in front of goal to knock the rebound in.
Of course it’s possible to critique what the players are told to do in training, how they are set up, the individuals selected and so on.
But Cleverley and his staff cannot stand next to each player and remind them what to do. They can’t give the team earpieces so they can continually guide them through each minute.
The players have to own their actions, and when they look back at those first two goals, they would hopefully accept it was a collective shambles.
While those in front of him offered about the same protection as the ponchos given to the disabled supporters at the front of the away end did against the rain, keeper Dan Bachmann was also part of the malaise.
For goal two he starts to move towards the cross, goes back and ends up scrambling along his goalline.
Not being a keeper makes it difficult to comment beyond the fact that when Cleverley refers to needing leaders, organisers and nous on the pitch, those are characteristics it would be reasonable to expect from a 30-year-old full international club captain.
There have been suggestions that it’s ‘matches for mates’, that Bachmann is selected because he and Cleverley go back years as teammates and friends.
That’s just plain stupid – and if it were the case, then surely Ken Sema would be starting every week, and Imran Louza would not have been sent to the Under-21s before rediscovering his form.
Cleverley played with Bachmann on 31 occasions; he was in the team with Sema 52 times.
While we don’t know who ‘hangs out’ with who away from the training ground, if the allegation is that Bachmann is picked because he played a lot of games with Cleverley then Sema would surely be playing, team captain and taking penalties.
Down the other end of the pitch was also far from exempt from blame.
He works extremely hard, much of what he does goes unnoticed and he’s one of the division’s top goalscorers this season – but Vakoun Bayo had to do better with the header at the back of the six-yard box from Jeremy Ngakia’s cross.
The ball is in the air a long time, he is unmarked and Rangers keeper Paul Nardi is running back across his goal.
Just hit the target. Force Nardi to do something, be that parry it, fumble it, whatever.
But what you cannot do in that situation is head the ball down into the ground and a couple of feet wide.
If the Watford defence was culpable, so was the attack – as Cleverley said himself, they were poorer than Rangers in both boxes.
And that is where the head coach has backed himself into a corner somewhat.
Once he sent Mileta Rajovic out on loan and brought in Daniel Jebbison, there were always going to be comparisons drawn between the two, as well as with Bayo.
After nearly every game there is the ‘would Rajovic have scored that one’ debate.
Truth is, none of us know.
Rajovic scored goals for Watford but, while it sounds a stupid thing to say, what else did he offer the team?
He provided exactly zero assists, he lacks pace and his link-up play in the No.9 role that Cleverley wants was questionable.
However, by pinning his colours to the Jebbison mast, the Watford boss is now in a position where he is having to support a striker technically and mentally (which will help him and, ultimately, his parent club Bournemouth) who has not even looked like scoring a goal – while the one of the trio of strikers the club actually own (Bayo is ‘on loan’ from Udinese remember) is out in Denmark and will continue his development in February when their league resumes after the winter break.
Jebbison may come good. He could be the hero of the second half of the season. But without access to training sessions and judging purely by what we have seen publicly, it’s going to take some seismic shift for that to be the case.
There was a reprieve for Watford early in the second half when Bachmann’s punch landed at the feet of Chair.
The keeper recovered to charge down the Rangers midfielder’s volley, but the ball ran perfectly for Jonathan Varane, who didn’t just hammer his shot wide of the goal but also wide of the penalty area.
The next action brought Watford’s lifeline. Giorgi Chakvetadze – once again the talk of the impressed media room after the game – often gets called out for his lack of end product, but on this occasion he did exactly what was required.
Picking the ball up just inside the Rangers half he ran at their defence, attracting the attention of four players before rolling the ball into the path of Kwadwo Baah, who scored with the help of a deflection.
Going back to forward options: it’s hard not to think the Georgian would have created more goals, and even scored more himself, with a better No.9 in the team.
At that point in the game, and with so much of the second half left, 2-1 looked a very retrievable scoreline.
Well, it might have done, had it not changed to 3-1 so quickly. It was, in fact, just 89 seconds between the ball hitting the net at one end, and then the other.
When Paul Smyth got to the by-line on the right, it didn’t need 100s of games of professional football in the bank to have a good idea of what he was going to do: cross the ball into ‘the mixer’.
And so he did, clipping the ball into the heart of the six-yard box where Watford had six players to Rangers’ three.
However, it was only midfielder Sam Field who attacked the ball, heading home from about five yards.
Twice in four days Watford totally and spectacularly undid their own hard work by simply not doing the basics.
At 2-1, they had a chance . . . at 3-1, the game was pretty much gone. You couldn’t even have cleaned your teeth properly in the time between the two goals.
After that Bayo failed to connect with a Baah cross, though the ball was marginally behind him and Smyth nearly added a fourth when his low shot flashed across the face of goal and just wide of the back post.
At the death, Baah thumped a shot against the junction of bar and post, but by then the home win was pretty much assured.
Afterwards Cleverley dropped several not-so-subtle hints about what he will be looking for in the month’s transfer dealings.
It’s clear he needs a defender and a striker, even if the latter means Jebbison’s game time is negligible (after all, Watford has to be the primary concern, not Bournemouth).
And if, as he says, he wants on-field coaches with nous then he may have to overcome what appears a bit of a blind spot: Moussa Sissoko.
The captain has just not delivered often enough of what might be reasonably hoped of him and, while Cleverley pointed to Sissoko’s top-level experience and international caps, it’s those same reasons why he is falling short – he’s not bringing to the table the characteristics and qualities of a player with 70+ caps for France and some 600 games at the highest level of club football.
Of course, we don’t see or hear what he brings to the training ground or in the dressing room. But while it may be a huge amount, none of that directly earns points on a matchday.
A good team starts with a strong spine, and currently Watford look like a side with sciatica.
However, this is January – the one chance during the season to deal with such issues.
Despite fears that the likes of Chakvetadze and Baah might be sold, one thing that has been pretty constant through the Pozzo era is the club doesn’t tend to sell first-team players in January.
It would be counter-intuitive to address the shortcomings of a squad that is still within two points of the play-off places, lest we forget, by cashing in on the players that other teams fear.
However, incomings in recent January windows have been less than inspiring.
For all his tricks and badge-kissing, Emmanuel Dennis arrived out of shape a year ago and was not the player that shone so brightly in his previous spell at Vicarage Road.
Two years ago, Slaven Bilic made it quite clear what he wanted, several times and publicly. When he was provided with pretty much none of it, and with the benefit of hindsight, it was a message from on high that his days were numbered.
While Cleverley hasn’t gone as far as Bilic, who regularly held three fingers up to the press while counting out the type of player he was after, he has started to give some very clear indications.
He wants players for the here and now, who know the Championship, are well versed in the dark arts often required, and will lead, inspire and guide those around them.
Therefore, he clearly isn’t asking for some more young South Americans, loanees from Udinese’s B team, or the result of a couple of lucky dips into the mystery bag of a certain agent.
The last two games have been very disappointing. There are obvious problems to be dealt with, both in terms of performances and personnel. And the head coach needs to make some tough decisions around players has so far shown faith in.
However, Watford sit eighth in the table, with a game in hand and have been bobbing around the play-off positions all season despite having a squad the bulk of which struggled for 75% of last season.
The difference, this season, has been Cleverley-driven. The owner must back him now, and do it publicly by allowing him – an England international, top-level pro and Watford legend – to sign what he thinks he needs.
And then do it again, in the summer, and start to put some foundations in place around a man who sounds Northern but bleeds yellow, red and black.
Changing head coach has not worked for some time. Bringing in players for the future is great, but not if the future is blighted by the here and now.
The progress from March to the summer, and then from the summer to now, has been obvious. Not perfect, not faultless, but progress.
Now we reach the January crossroads. Over to you, Gino.
