Gracia’s subs are ****ing ****. Just below Wally for worst Pozzo appointment. Least we’ve blagged another season in the Prem.
Even if Saints win their 3 remaining games, Swansea would still finish below us because they themselves are playing Southampton. We will be a Prem team 2018-19
Talk about a game of two halves. Scored early with a Peyera tap in with good work from Gray and Deeney. Nice second and Deeney Had one eye on the ice cream van so the keeper read it. 3-0 at half time would of deflated Newcastle and sat in the EJ stand I was pleased with the effort from the team despite the penalty miss and the second half looked promising. What the hell did the goblin say? Sit back get your trunks on for the beach? What a shambolic second half. They score really early and we begin to panic, invite pressure and Newcastle enjoy the half and we look like a side terrified. No composure on the ball and in all seriousness Newcastle could of drawn or even won that game. Subs were dire Gracia had no clue and it was battle royole last 10 mins. Game that summed up our season. Glad we won and secured our safety but we are going to be in serious trouble next season with the attitude of the second half showing and a clueless manager who cannot drill a side to keep shape and sit on the lead. Not going to old Trafford no point. Finally @wfcmoog I hope yourself.and your girls enjoyed the ice cream and the game despite a woeful second half.
Very Watford that performance. All that was missing was a late goal or 2 to draw or lose. GD was abysmal when he came on. Gray and Capoue were 2 of our better players.
I think the only mistake was bringing on Deulofeu for Pereyra. Pereyra was obviously not 100%, but Deulofeu is not a player to bring on when you are under pressure. Bringing Mapps on? I think if he had a recognised centre mid on the bench he'd have come on, but the only option was to bring on a defender. Deeney was doing nothing, and bringing Richarlison on for him wouldn't have helped us. In the end Mapps ended up saving us the 3 points so it worked to some extent. I don't really care what happens to Javi, but I do think he deserves praise for getting us out of the situation we were in back in January
we should never of been in that situation to begin with. That back stabbing Python messed up what was a great season at the time by having his head turned. Make no mistake had he stayed we would of gone down. I’m glad Gracia saved us but he is not our leader off the pitch. Deeney is certainly not a leader on it. Not anymore.
Watford fans are lolz. Gracia gets criticised for: not being tactically flexible, for failing to turn attractive football into points, for failing to score goals. Watford: play a different formation, play brilliantly first half scoring two and missing a penalty then tough it out in the second. After Gracia's much derided tactical change, Newcastle didn't have another shot on target. He's got us 15 points from 13 games since he arrived. In the 11 games before he arrived, we won 5 points. Some of the people calling for him to be sacked in the summer should reflect on that.
First half absolutely superb, kept it neat and tidy. Second half truly awful. Whilst I don't like Gray, him and Deeney worked well together and created chances. However taking Deeney off removed any threat at all. The ball could not stick up front and bought Newcastle undeservadly back into the game. It's such a shame that naivety ruined a good game. If Deeney was injured fair enough if not it back fired . Capoue looks a far different player than under Silva and Pereryra is growing into a good player. I know we are safe, but I hate feeling like we have failed at the end of the season. We will look back on this as the season that could have been rather than what it is.
Gray deserves praise for today. Same issues crop up with him for basic control and passing, but I thought he battled well and got us a crucial goal. He seems to have no trouble with difficult passes yet for some reason struggles with the easy ones. 4 in 7 starts for him which isn't bad
Great first half but game as a whole summed up the season. Conceded from nothing then didn't know what to do. Richie was a waste upfront and we have some players that just don't put in a shift when they need to stand up. Deeney needs to go, him being injured at start of season was a major blessing imo
Great first half but what the hell was that 2nd half? When a manager continually makes substitutions most fans don't call for or see then he's normally not the right fit. Gray still an utterly terrible footballer who seems to think he's a playmaker? Just run behind bro why do you want the ball to feet to play a through ball. However he still scores more regularly than any of other our forwards so well done to him for that, should've been a 4-4-2 with Deeney more often this season. Pereyra lovely. Kabasele is so good. Capoue was excellent again, can't believe what I'm seeing! He played like the £40 million man wanted by Liverpool & Tottenham Which brings me on to Doucs who was awful Holebas good Starting to look less and less like Rich is tired and more that he's just a bit headless. What was that ball to Gerard? Tried our best to give it away, didn't really care if we did or didn't to be honest, didn't bother staying for the awards and tributes, not much to celebrate apart from Newcastle staying up which is another 6 points next season! PS what's with the foreign language advertising boards? Bit much..
The problem with judging how good a coach is that there are so any other factors involved. There is a coach v coach battle going on out there as well as all the other stuff. Benitez, whether you like the man or not, is an enormously experienced coach with a fair amount of success at absolutely top clubs. He has won the European Cup, for goodness sake. Yet his tactics were completely flummoxed by Gracia's tactics in the first half. Benitez was never going to leave it at that. Newcastle changed their play second half, knocking the ball about faster and longer and giving Watford the run around. Not for nothing were so many of the Watford players flat out on the ground at the end. Gracia might be criticised, on the other hand, for not seeing this coming and changing things in anticipation. In reaction, rather than anticipation, he did change things midway through the half and opted for a defensive, time-wasting, 'game management' end, which was, just, good enough. Yet again we see that several Watford players do not seem to have a full 90 minutes in them, either mentally or physically. Should Gracia be blamed for that? As Steve points out, Gracia's statistics show up well against the run Silva was having. And, as Malteser points out several posts back, Gracia has done the job he was brought in to do and should be warmly recognised and thanked for it.
I didn't like the substitutions at the time, but surely you can see, in hindsight, they were the right call. They scored when Troy and Pereyra were on the pitch and looked like they would score again. It was ugly to watch but with more quality we could have caught them on the break. If he hadn't made us more defensive and we'd have drawn or lost wouldn't you be criticising him for keeping us so open? Play well and lose - Gracia's fault. Play badly, in one half, and perform like Dyche's Burnley (which so many of you seem to admire) - Gracia gets no credit and is heavily criticised instead.
That's what he's achieved with a squad affected by injury and confidence at rock bottom when he took over though. The team were on a run that would have equated to 17 points in 38 games (5 points from 11 games). So improving that to the current level is quite impressive in my view, particularly as the injury problems have for the most part continued. Presumably you'd agree that we probably would have won more points had more players been fit? This is how many games some of the better players in our squad have been available to start for Gracia: Chalobah 0 games out of 13 Cleverley 1 game out of 13 (was clearly unfit for that game too) Kabasele 4 games out of 13 Cathcart 5 games out of 13 Hughes 6 games out of 13 Deulofeu 4 games out 13 So maybe with a fully fit squad he could do significantly better than 44 points?
We played well and got a good win. The players worked really hard and many of them collapsed on the final whistle. Says little for their fitness, but a lot for their commitment. The crowd helped them get across the line too. As for Gracia, when he came in we were sliding towards relegation and he kept us up easily. Changing coach again would be lunacy, but seems most of our fans have got used to lunacy. I hope the fans who booed his substitutions felt pretty embarrassed when Mariappa made a game winning block near the end.
Today was the first time since our opening match of the season v Liverpool that we’ve scored twice in the first half of a home fixture. Or any match. Andre Gray today became our second player this season to score in both fixtures against the same opponent. Pereyra being the other, versus Chelsea. Talking of Pereyra, until Gray’s goal today, he was the only Watford player to have scored in any of our last six fixtures. Our three goals in that time were all scored by him. Newcastle are by far and away our most profitable PL opponents since our promotion, Played 4 won 4 plus a cup victory too. Deeney’s now on his worst penalty run for us with consecutive misses, and this has been our worst PL season for missing spot kicks. That’s 3 now. With today’s win we’ve passed last season’s points tally so this is actually the second best of our five PL seasons. We’ve equalled last season’s wins, and should the unlikely happen and beat United (who aren’t playing great at the mo and likely to be focused on the cup final..we’d probably need one of their players to score an own goal though lol) we would also equal our highest number of wins (12). We could still finish 10th.
Forgot what it felt like to win, it's been so long. Big rebuilding job in the summer now, well done to the fans for raising the noise at the end to help us get over the line.
Thank goodness Newcastle are in the Premier league. These patsies always provide us with 6 points per season. Should have been 5-0 at half time. We were so wasteful. These were really good chances. One for Pereyra, one for Gray with his trademark blast at the keeper, when presented with a 1 v 1 chance, the Deeney penalty and rebound, all should have produced goals. We were so on top, but it's so typical of Watford. They lose their way and end up holding on to a game they should have won by half time. Not sure how their goal came about. I will need to see it again, but it looked like we were completely open on the left. No one was marking. Who was the left back? Oh yes.......now I understand. Holebas was really poor but he shouts a lot so that makes it all ok. Gray, well that's the best you'll ever see him today, and it was still nowhere near good enough. Sure, he's lethal from an inch out, and he did run around a lot. He even played a nice couple of passes, but his touch is so heavy, and his composure in front of goal is on par with Doyley. Credit where is due though. We somehow got the job done, even Mapps tried to score an own goal just to make another hard luck story, but managed to survive. Capoue is really putting in some strong performances. This is the best spell of his Watford career. He's been consistently good for more than 1 match now. We need a big clear out, keep the good ones, and get rid of the deadweight that continually bring us down.
Game of 2 halves as we made it hard for ourselves by sitting back 2nd half after a strong attacking opening 45 minutes . Must be Gracia's tactics or we just lacked fitness. Anyway well done to Gray for getting his goal and time to look forward to next season. Much work is needed I suspect.
The performance against Spurs and today's first half alone makes me excited for next season, ship out the deadwood and get some decent players in up front and defence and we'll be good to go - much rather be in our position than some of the clubs around us. Fortunately we were never really in danger of relegation this season regardless of what others have said, I think the only time I was worried was under snakey Silva. I'd keep Gracia as we're probably going to struggle to attract any other half-decent head coach with our managerial merry-go-round. Preyera is back to his best, Chalobah and Cleverly to return and hopefully we can get Delefou in on loan again, perhaps even a permanent deal with not long on his contract to go. Gray is exactly the sort of striker we need..... hopefully we can find someone of a similar mould over the Summer that has a decent first touch and can actually finish. Cathcart is fantastic, genuinely forgot how good he was. Deeney is probably deeply regretting that cojones comment now - new penalty taker please! Bring on the World Cup!
Burnley play pragmatic football and rarely look like losing when doing so. That is not what we were doing in the second half. Far from it.
Pereyra was in the process of being subbed off and left Holebas completely exposed. If Holebas went to close the crosser down Ritchie would have got in behind him.
No shots on target for Newcastle after the change seems quite pragmatic to me. I'm not convinced about Gracia any more than I have been for any of our coaches, but I'd like to see how we'd do with a bit of stability.
Not at all I use bold letters to highlight the part of a quote I am referring to in my comments, and I said you are being stupid, that is different to actually calling you stupid, but if the cap fits.
