Southampton 2-1 Watford FC - 30/11/2019

Unless it's Allardyce.

 

So we have 6 1st team centre half’s, loan one out, three get injured, then there were 2!

I don’t remember Duncan Welbourne and Keith Eddy going missing through injuries, someone seriously needs to look at how a player can be sent off in one game serve their suspension then be injured, are they doing something in training they shouldn’t be doing, something’s not right!

 

It’s been going on season after season. Last year was an outlier. We are an utter shambles in every department. Conditioning. Recruitment. Discipline. Leadership. Mental fortitude. Continuity. Player development.

 

All the despair seems justified... although, if my memory serves me right, the despair was much more enjoyable after that infamous home game against Yeovil ho ho. Htf have we stayed in the Premier League for so long ...? There must be something we're doing right. Actually, the players that are injured in defence for tomorrow are not that good, are they? we are carried by the leadership and skills of about 6 players ... Capoue in particular

 

He should be in the team anyway. He’s a really nice guy you know.

 

Am starting to believe this is true - what was quirky charm is now becoming a shambles

 

Don’t tempt him!

 

Very much hope the new guy is actually worth his salt, as after we get smacked by Hassenhutl's Heroes we're going to legitimately need to take points off the top clubs to have any chance of correcting the balance, something we've been historically terrible at during this run in the Prem. We usually manage one surprising outlier top six scalp a season, juxtaposed with lifting our skirt, bending over and getting ******* reamed by every other one of them.

 

We're now embarking on Mariappa's annual run of games in the team. To be fair to the guy he steps in when someone is injured and manages to keep his place quite often. I just cannot get over the fact that we are in our fifth season in the Premier League and we're probably going to see a back three of Mariappa, Cathcart and Masina on Saturday. Our backups are 33 year old Mariappa and 32 year old Prodl, usually when a club has injuries they throw the kids in.

 

I think it says an awful lot about how things are, when we’re facing a team that were beaten 9-0 just a couple of weeks ago, and there’s basically zero chance of a positive result.

We’re so ****.

 

Southampton 1 3 Watford

2 points off safety.

Bed wetters shut up for a week.

Seriously though, it's time for QSF to drop the losers and give Foulqier, Quina, Sarr a go.

 

I normally try and look at positives and get a bit of stick about it on here but even I am majorly concerned now coming in to a massive game like this. We surely cannot stick with 3 centre backs when we don't have 3, can we? Might this force QSF's hand a little to go to four at the back. I know he's a defensive coach but I don't believe he's stupid so he must know that this is a game we must win if we are going to get out of this. Can we go with a bit more of an attacking formation considering the lack of numbers at the back? Can we give Sarr a start and put him on the wing with Delefeou on the other side and Pereyra or Hughes in the middle and Deeney up top? Still gives us two holding midfielders and even one of these can push forward to join the attack. It is surely, with only two centre backs fit and a game against the second bottom side, the best way to go. Go and win the game and not just wait to see what the opposition do. Will we do this? Sadly, probably not.
I'm beginning to feel like Nath and it's only Friday!

 

I don't understand the "must win" tag you've given this game. Must win was last week.....this is a "doesn't matter" match.

 

No lies detected.

 

Get Hoskins in

 

No it's not.

 

It’s quite depressing to hear of yet more injuries occurring to Kabasele and Janmaat. Who knows how bad they are but Watford players rarely, if ever, seem to recover ahead of schedule.
Now we learn that Dawson won’t play due to the stitches he had to have in his head wound last week. I hate to hark back to the past but I suspect the likes of Sims, Bolton, Terry or McLelland would have been turning out for the team on Saturday wearing a headband.

 

Let's be honest, half the injuries we seem to pick up didn't exist 20 years ago.

 

I'm hearing Quique is planning a rousing, if brave three-word pre-match motivational speech for tomorrow:
"Must win game" followed by a single hand clap.

 

I’m helping him write it.

“Guys the one thing left we have is pride. We all know we lost the must-win game last week, so this and the rest of the games are meaningless regarding our final position. Therefore fight for your pride!”

 

[Whispered conversation with Gino]

"Oh, actually it turns out we've loaned the pride out to a Portugese second division club. So just fight each other. I mean for each other."

 

Wages must get paid on a Monday morning, hence the upbeat attitude.

 

I’m gonna don my tin hat for this one - but Capoue’s standards have dropped this season as well. Hardly showing much more than his more heavily criticised teammates.

 

Why is beating the team in 7th a must-win and not the team directly above us in the table?

 

So you can probably tell from the write up that I am not exactly looking forward to the prospect of watching us tomorrow. If I wasn't catching up with a bunch of mates I probably wouldn't have gone at all! Shout out to those of you who go week in week out regardless of how we are playing, you are better fans than me. We absolutely must get something from this game and we need to strike early - concede first and I can't see anything other than another disappointing capitulation.

 

There comes a time when you have to accept the magnitude of the situation.

Burnley are 7th by virtue of their win at our place. Had we won they'd now be 12th. Burnley are poor on the road. Their last away win was on April 6th. It was their first away win of the season. It's just another example of how utterly hopeless we are at home. Home form is what will keep you up. We've not won a home match since 2nd April, which has led to a club record 11 match winless streak to add to the worst start to season in the club's history.

Even a win tomorrow will be futile as we cannot get results at home. If we win tomorrow, it will just prolong the hope for another week. The only way out of this mess is to have beaten Burnley, getting back-to-back wins and breeding confidence in the squad. They clearly cannot handle the pressure of the situation. Even Flores has gone on record admitting they are suffering a crisis in confidence. The Burnley defeat was so crushing, that I believe it to be a fatal wound.

We need at least 30 more points from the remaining 25 matches. You have to factor in those virtually impossible matches like Liverpool home & away, Man City home, Arsenal away, Spurs home, Chelsea away, Leicester home and away, United away......that's 9 games where I'd give us very little chance of even a point. It's pretty much 30 points from around 16 games. In other words, winning 10 of those games.....or at the very worst 8 wins, 8 draws.

The margin for error, has eroded to zilch now. Watford cannot have anymore slip ups, which is impossible for them to achieve. We're just not good enough. The last 17 Premier League matches have seen us win just once. There have been far too many collapses, where we've just fallen apart in games. It's inherent in this squad. Flores has not had the new manager bounce, which is something the owner heavily relies on to inject an uplift in form.

No, for me, Burnley was our last chance to convince people, even the players themselves, that we'd turned the corner. It was another false dawn, and now the rest of the reason doesn't really matter. We've got to use it to experiment and prepare for a promotion push next season. We'll have one good season to do it, with parachute payments and I'd say as long as we keep the majority of the squad intact, we'd have a good chance of coming straight back up.

 

Terry wore a headband for most of his Watford career

 

Can you not think of any other scenarios that might result in us staying up?

 

#snowflake

 

The way we're set up, we're more likely to get results away from home. I suspect that if anything keeps us up it will be our away form. We're already on great run of one in a row away from home, our best run of the season.

 

100% win rate in our current run, not to be sniffed at

 

No.....it's done. The sooner people accept this the better it will be.

Just look at the table. Apart from the three at the bottom, everyone else is capable of picking up points against those clubs around them. I'm expecting the cut off point to be at least 40 points this season. I just cannot see a fourth lame-duck type of team this year.

You can forget chasing down Everton and West Ham. The team's to catch are around the 15 points mark. That's 7 points, or three wins straight for us to catch up, and that's if they all pick up just 1 or 2 points during that time. The gap for a team that cannot win matches is already far too big.

If, for example, Everton sacked Snake, and approached Howe, I could see maybe Bournemouth destabilising. I could also see Newcastle getting caught as they are not all that good, but for us to catch a club like those, they'd really need a massive nose-dive in results. I cannot see us getting much more than 33/34 points this season and that's best case scenario. It won't be enough.

 

I still think Palace can get dragged down. xG has them down as 13 points. They have similar problems as to us in scoring goals, but at least we have Deeney + Sarr coming back whereas their best goalscorer is Jordan Ayew who is absolutely ***** (and will now definitely score against us in a couple of weeks)

 

I really think you ought to let various bookmakers know so they can stop taking bets on Watford going down. If they realised what we have now proven on this forum that it is 100% guaranteed we will go down, they will save themselves a lot of money. You might get a slice of the action to due to tipping them off.

 

You can't argue with his stats though.