A truly bizarre, shambolic pre-season. Telling me there's not a single professional football club in England that we could have arranged a friendly with? Tragic.
Wanted to put a bet on Watford getting relegated, but odds are so short it's not worth it ,however might be worth a fiver on staying up! Even Norsk tipping (main norwegian bookies) have realised that Watford are going to struggle . Kind of realising my wife had been right all along that football is a waste of time and money ,it's hard to turn off 50 yrs of following the club . Good luck to all this season. I have a feeling football is going to become secondary for many.
I still enjoy going to football even when we're shyt. The bad times make the good times even better when they happen.
Sorry that was an uncharacteristically positive post from me. I wonder how we got on during the game earlier, the first team probably lost to a mixture of U23s and U18s because we're ******* **** and Munoz is clueless.
Barnsley getting destroy by Man City. 3-0 at HT, should have been 4-0 but one of Cities 14 year olds missed a pen. This is how Man city started
Why are Man City playing so many kids?! They need now to be honing the team to play in a competitive way. They really should be playing near enough their Premier League side by now. This season could be a car crash for them. @hornetboy1
When I googled Watford relegation odds the first thing I got was this from the Telegraph (doesn’t say what bookie these odds are from): In the Premier League relegation odds, the bookies make promoted Norwich City, Watford and Brentford favourites to go straight back down Norwich City @ 5/6. Watford @ 1/1. Brentford @ 11/10. Crystal Palace @ 2/1. Newcastle @ 12/5. Burnley @ 5/2. Not having ever betted on anything, I don’t understand the first two odds. Surely they don’t mean that if you bet on us to get relegated you only get back what you paid if you win, and if you bet £6 on Norwich you only get £5 back?
Because we are two weeks away from the start of the season and we still appear to have no idea who will be making up our match day squad and have we even played the same starting 11 at all yet against any of our mostly woefully inadequate choice of opposition teams yet?
Wouldn’t worry to much about what we’ve seen lining up in these matches. It’s about minutes for certain players and trying out tactics. We don’t see what happens on the training pitch every day Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Betting odds are based, not on their judgement of our abilities to stay up or be relegated but on the amount of money placed by fans and others that play the odds. It bears no resemblance to the real chances of the squad to stay up and I believe we are close to a squad that is capable of staying up. It's an interesting squad and I believe we will be pleasantly surprised by May
I do think the Barnsley situation was far from ideal. I also think the Hughes / Chalobah situation isn't ideal. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call it a farce as quite a bit of it is out of the club hands, but I do think our pre season has been quite disrupted.
None of that is ideal, however it is what it is. One game got postponed for whatever reason Barnsley jumped to city’s requests. The players coming and going is all part of football. Lots of clubs have had disruption from pre season with tours overseas cancelled etc. But as for seeing a starting 11 I don’t think we will, maybe some of Xisco’s plans we will see against Palarse but it won’t be the full 90. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Leicester have drawn 0-0 to burton, lost 1-0 to Wycombe & drawn 3-3 to QPR. They won’t be relegated. Scores mean nothing pre-season. Minutes, systems and assessing the players are what it’s about. Some will take their chance, others will be Andre Gray. Xisco doesn’t choose the players signed for us. It’s his job to look at the 11 or so signed this window and see who’s up for it then put them in where he sees fit.
Exactly. All these dozy pundits have written us off but they underestimate the amount of minutes we will have in the tank.
What happens if wee get an outbreak of muscle imbalance again? Will we end up with players who have less minutes in one leg compared to the other? Will some left legs not turn up until half time?
In that case let's sign this little beauty from the Isle of Man...problem solved. And far more mobile than some of our forward line...
Obviously they won't be, but that's utterly meaningless because no one was suggesting they would be, nor that they were at risk of it, and the situation they are in is worlds away from the one we are in (*I don't mean that in an entirely doom and gloom negative way on our part, just very broad fact). It's true that pre-season is often a poor harbinger for actual league results, but it's also true that Leicester and the shape of their pre-season is utterly irrelevant to us and ours, and ours has been, in several notable ways, haphazard, to say the least. Some of it was out of the club's hands, of course, but we've also seen enough that, from the outside, seems very controllable and has involved some strange decision-making. Leicester are at no real risk of relegation, but our status as a newly-promoted team without a relative pot to piss in means that we firmly are, so it would have been nice/comforting/etc to see a pre-season that ran smoothly, showed us cementing a team/first XI, and wasn't disrupted by the total lack of involvement of several of what currently constitute our best players. Particularly given 'good feelings' and 'momentum' are about the only things we can supposedly boast to give us any kind of fighting chance/advantage going into the first games of this upcoming season. As it is, we will have to hope that having a not particularly decent pre-season has literally no effect on us whatsoever. Maybe it will work out that way; maybe it won't.
Will Hughes is just one player, and is a way below our best players. Chalobah has been involved in first team training, even though he's not been in the matches. I don't think that's even worthy of being described as "several" players ffs. We'll be far from the only club to have 1 or 2 players sidelined awaiting a move either. Xisco will be forming an idea of what his starting XI is likely to be, even if he hasn't already revealed it to us in a friendly yet. Plus, as has been pointed out numerous times now, the vast majority of PL teams still haven't played near enough their first choice XI in any of their friendlies yet, so we're not being slow or doing anything abnormal in that respect. Really, compared to the complete cluster4uck that was last pre-season, and the complacent damp-squib which was the pre-season before, this one has seemed just fine.
Who are all these players of ours who are so streets ahead of Hughes, exactly, other than, presumably Sarr? The vast majority of PL teams aren't in our situation, are they, so again, it's somewhat irrelevant. I was hardly bombastic in my comments, but anyway, I'll outline again that what I'm saying is that there is a difference between what would have been 'ideal' and might have inspired some confidence, and what has actually happened. It's not all 'total', pedantically admittedly, but we've hardly seen our theoretical first choice striker in King, for one, to add to the players who haven't featured, and either way, if the players we've seen the most are the ones we'll be relying on, we're going to have a very weak midfield and potentially not much different a central defence.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AidanJohnson/status/1422610976927518720 Someone message Aidan for the team news.
Holy **** Jaime Alvarado finally makes his Watford debut after 4 years. Not quite sure how he got his work permit but still. Cheap midfield backup option?
If he counted as U21 I would have said he had a decent chance of sticking around. Unfortunately he misses the cut by 6 months I think so I can see him getting another loan. If he's managed to get a work permit then maybe a loan in this country isn't out of the question.
