Watford FC 0-0 AFC Bournemouth - 26/10/2019

I previously thought our defence was the main issue, it’s now looking like our forward line. Why we didn’t try and get Someone like Mitrovic rather than wasting the money on Sarr is beyond me. There is no point in putting crosses in when you have Delefeou and Pereyra as your main forward players. I think QSF is doing the best he can, and can’t really see how he can change things for the better. I think our only hope is to nick a few wins and see whether we can do something in the window; that won’t be easy as quality players won’t want to come to a club that looks cert for the drop.

 

It was a perfectly reasonable answer to your question 25%.

The answer is as previously given; no, it's not a straight calculation of chance therefore there is no basis to assume it's 25%.

 

It wasn't a perfectly reasonable answer as I didn't mention tossing a coin.
Christ you can be a difficult sod can't you .
OK you don't think its "about 25%" but you believe it's "far from being over" and "I'd say all the bottom 4 are rubbish and couldn't choose a winner from amongst them" both of which I'd agree with. If we finish above the other 3 we'll be ok.

 

It was supposed to be TD, Welbeck or Success of course but injuries have robbed us of the first 2 and saved us from the third........

 

I'd bite your arm off

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Well, the thing is, after Arsenal people were saying that sooner or later the chances would start going in. 3 games later and still they are being spurned.

It would suggest that a lot of it is not chance.

Sure, we could do with a lucky bounce or a defensive howler, but really, to show that we can sustainably score goals, we need to create and finish our own chances and there have been shortcomings in those areas for months now.

Our crossing, for example, must be amongst the worst in the division. Our delivery from set plays is very poor. We have no headed goal threat in our attack and very little in the whole side (The Craigs might have a couple of headers here and there).

There are numerous shortcomings that we've failed to address in our recruitment and our stagnant squad is giving us what the recruitment deserves.

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Marco?

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Surely our dreadful set pieces can be improved by basic hard work on the training ground? Seeing as they have been poor for several seasons perhaps this isn’t the case.

 

I'd argue the first has been past his best for more than 2 seasons. The 2nd was a reasonable gamble but came with a huge caveat emptor over his well publicised injury record and the third has never shown more than the occasional flash of even being worthy of a bench spot in this league. Then you add Gray, who can score one in four sitters in the box, but is otherwise completely devoid of footballing ability and you have our strikeforce summed up. Is it any wonder we struggle to score?

It was not hard to see where the main problems of the team were, across defence and centre forward, but the club tried to get band aid solutions for the key problems, whilst splurging on a luxury winger who thus far has proven to be of absolutely no value to us.

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I used the coin toss as an example of chance.
Football isn't chance.
Yes I can be

 

I think the (brief) analysis on MotD last night was correct. If you don’t have strikers in your team don’t expect midfielders to have the same goal scoring instinct. They won’t make the right runs or get in the right positions. Now we don’t have lethal strikers anyway but we are just down to Gray at the moment, on top of which the whole team’s confidence is low due to the run of results, so it’s hardly surprising we are struggling to score.

 

Whatever momentum they had build has stopped. Whether we had a system which has been sussed, they were playing with confidence which has evaporated, or it was all down to Britos pulling the strings, we can debate amongst ourselves, but the run we are on is more than a temporary glitch and so to find a solution, we can't expect cosmetic measures to work.

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Glad to see people are finally beginning to agree with me, I've been saying this all year................

WE NEED ******* STRIKERS​

 

I feel we should put our collective weight around Reids being the next manager.

 

I agree with most of the above.

But I always thought a goalscorer was our top priority, even above a defender. I think a good defensive coach can do better with an average defence, through concentrating on the system, organisation, set-plays, etc, and I think Quique has demonstrated that to a degree. But I dont think a coach can do that much with an average strike force as scoring goals is, in my opinion, more about individual quality.

The final ball was shockingly bad yesterday, but I think that was partly due to the lack of intelligent movement ahead of the ball. It was all too predictable and too often it was easily cut out by their defence - as it was anticipated.

A good example was the Deulofou opportunity on the half way line near the end of the second half. He had one clear pass option of Hughes to the left who was in acres of space with a clear run in on goal, but Hughes sprinted offside when he should have held back a second or two.

So flipping frustrating.

 

Almost as funny as Albert McLenaghan falling flat on his face whilst taking a throw-in.

 

There's a lot of stuff you can do that doesn't rely on inch-perfect delivery depending on how the opponent sets up. Some of the teams I've done work for or spoken to recently don't have the best quality delivery (think National League, WSL or non MLS America) and I recommend this style of routine quite a lot to them - - this opening routine was one of mine as was this similar routine: https://streamable.com/qgsdg - the first routine created a 0.14 xG chance and the second was a 0.31 xG chance, that generated a total of 0.45 xG after 3 corners for them. So far this season we've got 0.80 xG from 56 corners....

Also a lot of teams defend zonally in the PL which is relatively easy to crack. Zonal marking is really good defending in the first phase (aka when the ball is initially played in) but does have inherent weaknesses like short corners. Play a short corner and the defenders push out, this causes the strength of the zonal system to fall apart, which if you partner with a bunch of players attacking from deep at various angles gives you a great chance at beating the system. Recommended this for the team in America I work for (skip to 1.27) - they scored from it and couldn't even practice it in training beforehand (due to flight complications). We currently lack any real plan from set-pieces at all which is such a waste, especially considering we now have 3 CBs on the pitch to provide height.

 

Your point is taken and you are right: This is going to be a close-run thing.

 

I am agreeing with you. We’ve been very unlucky. We should have had more goals than we’ve had, and nothing seems to be falling for us.

But, in addition, we’ve messed up some brilliant opportunities, where luck doesn’t come into it.

Confidence will help, but I don’t think it’s the answer to all of our problems, far from it.

To be fair, if you believe that bookies are good at their jobs (and making money), you can convert their odds to percentages.

To make it more robust (as different bookies have different exposure amounts), I used a handful of bookies and averaged their odds.

They believe we have about a 20-25% chance of staying up.

So it just happens that one in four seems pretty spot on.

 

Counting down to Jan 1st when a teenage sensation flies in from Brazil to remind us what it’s like to watch the team score goals.

 

Prove the maths

 

The problem is we thought we were buying a young sensation in August and look what’s happened to him, what’s to say the same thing won’t happen with the next one joins?

 

I can understand the frustration of some because we still haven't won a game. I feel more confident of doing this now than I did when we were more attacking though. We didn't score goals then either but now we don't concede so at least we have a chance.
Decent point yesterday but these last 3 games will only be important if we now go in to November and win some games. I'm not going to guess hown many wins we need as it is pure guesswork as is dependant on what other teams do.
I think it's fair to say that we do look a lot more sound at the back but the issue now is that when Delefeou or Pereyra break forward we don't have any support so the options are very limited for whoever has the ball. Two or three times GD had the ball, looked up to find only Pereyra with him making the pass he was going to attempt exceptionally difficult. Yesterday, once Callum Wilson had gone off, I would have sacrificed a centre back to try and give more support to the attack. Sorting the defence was an absolute must but can we find an option we can use in the last quarter if at 0-0. We are 3 points from 17th so no need to panic yet but for me, by the end of the November we need to be out of the bottom 3 or I feel we will be in trouble

 

Right with you on the striker thing. The best ones are hugely expensive but someone gettable like Jay Rodriguez would have been invaluable now.

 

The option coming on in the last quarter was supposed to be Andre Gray.

 

Even if he is able to join us in January there's no way that Quique starts him.

I am looking forward to people calling him sh!t when he hasn't scored from his two sub appearances though. Both times replacing Deulofeu after 89 minutes when we're losing heavily to Man City and Arsenal.

 

True. Though allowing them for some margin to make a profit, they believe we have less chance than that..... which is why they offer those odds.
We're all guessing though and so are they. I don't see us getting the 36 points we will need but there's still hope.

 

Even if he gets a visa (which I doubt he will) , at the current rate of attrition, will there be any fit midfielders left to pass him the ball. We are ****ed.

 

I think it's more about confidence than ability. Lets be honest, Ayoze Perez looked ***** at Newcastle, but scored a hat-trick on Friday. Who would have been excited if we'd signed him in the summer? I certainly wouldn't. Mitrovic is scoring goals, in the Championship. I would fully expect Gray to have a similar impact in that league. It's not necessarily a lack of quality that is hindering us at the moment.

 

Watching that game was astonishingly frustrating. We looked shockingly toothless in attack in all forms, from dead balls, fast breaks or 'organised' play (I say shockingly only in as much as it would be startlingly clear to a neutral observer, as I am in no way surprised by it, though I was disappointed to see just how bad it has become).

I don't necessarily disagree with Quique's approach either, because we've got points on the board (albeit nowhere near enough) and stopped shipping a million goals a game (though even the clean sheets have relied on some serious luck/goalkeeping heroics, such as when no one bothered to stop or cut out the ball they flashed across the box yesterday and had a free shot from 3 yards with thanks to Daryl's utter lack of awareness that a Muff forward was there) but I just can't see at present how we're going to score the goals required to get the points required, and every single game we fail to do so makes the situation even starker and the points even more required the next time around. We're now marooned until January with an almost non-existent strikeforce, praying for the return from injury of a player who has been on the wane for several years so that he can come and save us.

Whatever happened with the Pozzos this summer, it must have been a ******* catastrophe behind the scenes, because it was certainly catastrophic to their decision-making faculties when it came to the club. Given that one of the strikers we decided to be relying on was Danny 'the concept of injury in human form' Welbeck, the decision to fly by the seat of our pants and literally hope that Deeney could just play through an injury that ended up being severe enough to require surgery and therefore render our starting striker and captain out for several months as our form continued to nosedive is inexplicable, and utterly profligate (In terms of those hopes, we shouldn't forget Deeney's own comments about how poor his season under Mazzarri was, and how much of that he put down to being injured at the beginning, not having a proper pre-season as a result and therefore never being able to get up to full fitness over the season as a whole).

On top of that, of course, we also have the decision to spend £30m plus on a rookie winger who has essentially played no part in the opening more-than-a-quarter of the season, whilst fiddling as our strike force and defence burned, which looks almost malevolent in its incompetence when added to the dossier.

 

Interesting that, early in the season the Pozzo recruitment was being criticised for not signing defenders but, now that the defence is playing better, it is being criticised for not signing strikers. For the record, I’ve always been in the ‘we need strikers’ camp because, as others have said, mediocre defenders can always be better organised to be a more effective unit.

 

All it did was create a bigger gap between the defence and attack. I would have sacrificed a defender, not literally, to give us more midfielders to support the attack. I’m fine with being defensive but when the game is at 0-0 with 20 to go maybe we could be more adventurous. Having said that, we still could have won that game in all three games we’ve played with this system, there is an argument to say we should have won all three. Maybe not should yesterday but certainly could

 

TD will help bind the team in the midfield & attack. That is all we can hope for.

The days where our midfielders are in a position to regularly score are now over. That is my concern with QSF. It feels like watching 2016 football again without the points. I would prefer to have had Slav back I think that would have had more chance of keeping us up. Not taking away from QSF as there are plus points, but the football is so limited.

I have accepted maybe a relegation & rebuild is a reality now.

 

I can think of no aspect of football that is not absolutely riddled with chance. It reflects life itself very well. Some of the instances of good or bad luck are so blatant that they get good coverage on MOTD. Of course, skill also plays a big part.

 

When we were conceding bucket loads of goals we all said we needed to sort the defence out to give us a chance. Now we want a more attacking coach like Slav. Make your mind up!