Roy Hodgson - Manager

I was at that Stoke game. I think it was 0 - 3. Watford were about favourites to get relegated! I'd seen perhaps 3 matches at the start of that season and I, who practically never bet on anything, went out and put £100 on promotion at 14/1. The play reminded me of the sort of stuff you'd have seen under Taylor. You're right about the key players, of course.

 

First one is brilliant . Second one is a bit sh1t.

 

Brilliant.

So great to see in the modern age of media fluff that someone actually speaks their mind and shows some emotion.

 

The most tragic thing about the Duxbury interview wasn't the freshness of his sphincter after said A lickin', it was the fact that the CEO of WFC thought the best way to engage with fans after such a tumultuous season was to seek a public A lickin' from a fan rather than try to build a more honest and genuine relationship with the fanbase. It's utterly tragic.

 

This is a screen grab taken exactly at the time Roy says "Wilfred Zaha does not dive for penalties" taken at 50 secs in. Please watch as it is text book psychology.

One doesnt have to be an expert in human body language to infer the truth here.

 

Silly Roy for being positive.

It makes you wonder how much further he could have gone with his life and 45 year career as a top manager, if he'd just seen the light and been relentlessly negative.

 

Because of course the plan Gino and Scott have in place almost certainly involved being on our third manager by January, sitting 19th and without a clean sheet. I don’t blame Roy for admiring it so much, it’s clearly genius at work.

 

Yes and I admire his loyalty , but even a man of his calibre and experience couldn't help but subconsciously reveal the fact which everyone in the football world already knows.

 

Luckily Roy loathes Norwich, Burnley and Newcastle and has joined us purely to put them out of the league and into the waste bin of the Championship.

 

He's likely to be paid 6 months wages for 2 months work. Who wouldn't support that?

 

Yep. Direct and fearless with pace. One of my favourite all time seasons especially since we went off probably favourites for the drop.

 

On top of the tax benefits of rolling over your pension for late retirement , he will be able to keep that gas fire burning all the way through the long winter nights .

 

There was a vociferous campaign within the fanbase to get Aidy sacked at the start of the season he got us promoted. Ian Grant and his cronies were begging for him to be removed. Luckily the club had other ideas. Awesome season to be a hornet. I think that was the season the 'LSD Hornets', a small band of Watford fans who watch every game on acid, was formed.

 

No, they only thought they were at football matches.

 

I think one of the issues we might well have with Louza is the disadvantage of potentially missing a two week block of Hodgson's system being implemented, and as we know from watching his teams and all the deep dives since he's come in, the creation and repetitive drilling of that defensive unit is the fundamental cornerstone of his system. I imagine he'll want every player to know exactly how he fits into that before he considers him for selection.

It would really help us if Salah becomes 'on flames' in half an hour's time and smashes the **** out of Masina et al in the same way he did last time he came up against them. That would still leave us a week up to the next game for him to get integrated.

 

Anything that postpones the possibility of the odious Carraghar shouting “Mo Salah you little dancer” I am 100% behind.

 

Still don’t get it tbh.

 

That’s fine. He’s not trying to appeal to you.

 

It’s so sweet when the junior BWs go round the playground holding hands so as to protect each other from the big kids .

 

You really are quite an odd individual aren’t you? Spend a lot of your time on here complaining about the nature of people’s posts and how you don’t like how ‘toxic’ it is on these threads.

But absolutely zero self-awareness about your own contributions towards it.

 

Perhaps you can take time to reflect on this unprovoked nonsense of a post before the next time you moan about how toxic the forum is? Doubt you will but we live in hope.

 

Sorry you got dragged into this mate. He just loves me that much that I’m pretty sure I’m in his shortcuts. I don’t mind as I’m always respectful to my fans but i am checking my front door is locked more regularly.

 

Just waiting for a certain mod to come storming in to defend it as tongue-in-cheek banter.

 

Not only did we put bags of effort into that game, we had more chances than them and that was without our best starting line-up even in Etebo’s absence (for instance the one against Norwich was better). Still that performance doesn’t look so great when you consider Brighton later got a draw at their place and had 18 shots on goal.

But it can’t be denied that that performance was the blueprint both in skill and battling qualities which we’ve lamentably failed to follow since - and we can’t entirely blame COVID, as we were already crap at Brentford before the long unwanted break and we were supposedly back to fitness by the time we faced Norwich. I hope it’s not a case of the players picking and choosing games to perform in, as that attitude has no chance of keeping us up, and certainly Roy won’t tolerate it.

 

Think the self-classification of himself as a 'big kid' is the most amusing thing, personally #OperationSaveBigKid

 

Like many, I was underwhelmed by Roy’s appointment as realistically it looks like another short-term fix, and his recent record at Palace even if it did comfortably keep them up doesn’t look very inspiring. But persuaded by what others have said, the more I think about it, the more his appointment could make us worth watching again and make us actually care.

I feared that even if we did scrape enough points to survive, it would be a long boring slog with little to look forward to next season, as it might have been with BFS (the appeal of whom I’ve never quite understood, a few seasons at Bolton aside). But despite some Palace fans’ criticism of his brand of football (“Royball”) it seems when he has to win numerous games over a limited period his teams are actually quite good and even entertaining to watch and play with passion and spirit.

After they started 2017/18 with no points and goals in seven games, not only did they beat Chelsea (one of the biggest shocks of 2017), they picked up numerous points after being behind, sometimes through late goals, they won convincingly at Leicester (never an easy place to get a win at for any side) and almost beat Man City who’d been on a Prem record 18-game winning streak. All that is taken from just the 18 games Hodgson had after he took over, the same number of games we have left. Even though the 22 points he picked up in that period will likely not be enough to keep us up, there are grounds for optimism. Plus Roy must have chosen to come here for a good reason, in that he’s passionate about football and couldn’t stay out of management for long, whereas I suspect Ranieri had one eye on retirement and after his last failed stints in the Prem after the Leicester triumph wanted to finish his career on a high but wasn’t fully committed.

 

As far as I'm concerned, the football can be as boring as it needs to be if we can get some clean sheets backed up with eking out enough goals to get some 1-0 wins.

 

If he keeps us up he is nailed on for manager of the season, go get it Roy!!