Just a thought … has anyone felt the decline in apparent lack of effort with players, owner problems, suddenly the new manager every other week plan doesn’t work… has only really been exposed since a certain Mr Troy Deeney left the club. Yes that last promotion season we think the Hughes chalobah and cleverly midfield 3 plus xisco was the turning point . Of course.. it was but I feel he had a bigger part to play in any success we had under pozzo’s even if he want playing. Every year . He was a constant, a leader, a sense of security for the squad and wouldn’t let them slip below standards potentially?. This isn’t a Troy’s more of a legend than we thought post but I do think the moment he left the club, they lost the continuity and leader that the players needed when getting a different coach every few months, the moment he went home to Birmingham . The Watford household was left with out the man of the house.
Exactly, Troy was here for all of that, but was powerless to resist, and he was largely powerless as we ambled our way through the Championship until his injury. You need the leaders, but most importantly you need leaders who can actually help you out on the pitch, last time out Cleverley and WTE still had something to offer (not that they were as powerful as prime Troy), but now Cleverley is a permacrock and WTE is in Italy
Oh... good... It's now been long enough that we've reached the stage where people are going to act like Deeney wasn't a huge (literally) problem himself. No, our current issues absolutely do not have anything to do with Deeney leaving/no longer being here. At all.
Ironically, Deeney getting injured at Coventry sparked our whole promotion run. Performance wise, the display was terrible, but as @Hogg-DEENEY!!! rightly stated above, WTE ralied the squad, we managed to work out a new formation change and the rest is history. Yes, Sarr more or less carried us to promotion with some very late goals in games and we had a club record defensive unit which also helped. Deeney's time as a player (for us) was up and I think he knew that. Has he excelled as a Blue Nose? Not really, but he is still playing and is playing for his boyhood club. He is seen as a legend here for more than one reason, not quite Luther Blisset/GT status but he is certainly up there. A player nowadays very rarely ties themselves to a single club. Alec Chamberlain and Deeney I would consider as contenders for that role. Thinking back to the 1990's, Southampton had Matthew Le Tissier, who to them, will always be a club legend. Remember we even had a very young talent known as Kevin Philips on our books - certainly a Sunderland folke hero by most accounts. Unpaid bonus (as Diamond said), Owner calamity, a terrible agent algorithm, wasteful trasnfer windows, uninterested players, player power, levels of toxicity, mounting debt and three managers in a season which breeds problems in a squads momentum are the main reasons why we are in such a mess. These last four years have been the worst of it, and although the buck does indeed stop with the owners, a lot of the problems on the field are the squad themselves. Turning up to matches when it suits them and seemingly not caring (although this is a theory only). Hopefully, Manga, Costa, a stable manager and release of a lot of dead wood will begin to show recovery. But we are a long way right now, to even how we used to be in our glory years. Something that is not inpossible to reclaim, but what we do not have on our side right now is time and money.
We miss a leader like him on the pitch, someone that will argue for decisions for us, but he was as much an issue in terms of the decline in his ability and the undue influence he had over managers and we needed rid of him. The simple solution was to recruit a leader in literally any position to replace him which we never did. As usual, things always end up binary on here, so it’s somehow Troy or nothing, when in reality Troy should’ve gone sooner anyway, and we should’ve just replaced what we lost with him with another player.
I don’t think many will agree with you. A lot thought Deeney was one of the main problems at the club and should have been replaced a long time before he left . But certainly the positive aspects of him in terms of leadership and scoring goals when fit and in his prime have bern missed .
Just to add, we have never had a player since him who cared about being a Watford player as much as he did. Talent to play the game is one thing, but doing it because you "want" to play for the club you play for is another level. He lost the ability to play football to the level he had in his declining years, but he never did/has lost his passion for the club. Scoring his first ever goal against Liverpool and his celebration proved that.
We lack leadership and characters in the whole squad. Deeney was a leader but way past his best on the pitch. What we need is leaders who can also play. Porteous is currently the closest we have to that but the squad is infested with utter dross and players who don’t give a damn. A major, major overhaul is required in the summer. Get rid of all but about 6 players and start again. Most people hadn’t heard of Manga a year ago but he’s now being peddled as the messiah - I’ll judge him after seeing how much crap he can move on in the summer. In terms of leadership and passion, it was quite refreshing yesterday after Kamara made yet another error and Porteous absolutely ripped into him. Kamara **** his pants and started doing his silly wave that he does after every error. Get rid of the overhyped crap like Kamara, and work on improving the committed players like Porteous. The real dream is to have a team, and not a collection of overrated mercenaries.
The real shame about Deeney isn’t him leaving - it is that we have regressed so much with replacements that old man, one legged Deeney is out scoring the ‘striker’ that we’ve had to endure this season.
Yep, the fact that we would probably be better off with Deeney & Gray now isn’t in any way a reason to suggest we should’ve kept them, it’s simply a damning indictment of the how the club has been run since.
We never move players on at the right time. We never manage to keep the players we ought to. Magnificent from Pozzo.
It's not that we didn't try to replace Deeney, it's just that we attempted to do so with...Success and Gray, arguably the two worst signings in the history of the club
Deeney had declined massively, but we haven’t replaced his leadership on the pitch. Hopefully players like Porteous will help to bridge that gap
The two ecplanations aren't mutually exclusive. Late Troy may have been a liability on the pitch, but he might still have been a good influence off it. Who knows? I certainly don't
Troy was very much part of the promotion run in the dressing room even though he wasn't playing. We definitely miss that and his captaincy. It certainly isn't the sole reason we are where are but we haven't replaced his leadership skills
We were debating on Saturday who the worst signing in our history is - the final two were Sarr and Ellington.
A challenger for "the worst signing". Back when £1.25m was a lot of money...he was our second most expensive signing ever at the time (second only to HH). In 2000 Baardsen, seeking first-team football, signed for Watford for a fee of £1.25 million. However, towards the end of the 2000–01 season he lost his place in the team to veteran Alec Chamberlain. Although he returned to the side under new manager Gianluca Vialli in 2001–02, and saved a Mark Robins penalty to help his team beat Rotherham United 3-2 in an early season game,[4] he was again displaced by Chamberlain. In 2002, he had a short spell at Everton. In his sole game for the club he conceded 4 goals in a 4–3 loss to his former club Tottenham Hotspur.[5] Claiming to have lost interest in the game, Baardsen retired from football aged only 25.[6]
I think Gray gets a little bit too much flak (though it's obvious why he gets it), Success gets too little (I don't care if it was paper money we got him from Udinese for, he did worse for us with more talent than Gray), but as it stands, I'm not going to disagree with Ellington and Sarr
I remember being really disappointed with Deeney's leadership on the pitch in the last relegation season. His body language was appalling, he moaned at team mates and I don't recall him significantly offering visible encouragement ie. clapping, pats on the back, speaking to younger players. I really wanted him to be rallying the troops to fight in the face of adversity but to me he appeared defeatist. Obviously lots of other great Deeney memories but I just didn't see the leadership from him in the latter stages so don't think it's missed.
Yes, he seemed to completely disappear after the win vs Villa in the first match. Not what you want in a leader.