Watford’s midweek defeat to a fairly struggling Southampton was a shock to the system. After flying so high, the Hornets seem to have fallen to Earth a bit. Three points would have taken then just two points off Manchester United and ahead of Stoke and Liverpool. Defeat leaves them in 10th place, looking over their shoulders at the likes of Southampton and Everton just behind.
The fact that the bottom half of the Premier League stares them so firmly in the face after over half of the season already played doesn’t seem like such a bad deal for Watford. After all, this is a club who are not only just newly promoted, but actually contrived to lose their promotion-winning manager before the start of their Premier League adventure.
They even came close to losing talisman Odion Ighalo in the summer too, though quite how close he actually came to making the move to China when the chance to play in the Premier League was beckoning is something we may never know.
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In any case, Watford can very much be pleased with their performances so far this season, and the fact that they do still sit in the top half.
But whether or not they can stay there is another matter. They are, at the moment, victims of an increasingly congested mid table.
The teams from fourth to 13th are separated by just nine points. And whilst Spurs and West Brom are probably worlds apart, they are only three wins apart by Premier League standards. With plenty of games left to play, that’s not a particularly big margin.
Though that will turn into a big margin soon. As the games start to run out, and teams get less and less time to turn the bad form into a meaningful run of good form, those sorts of gaps will grow. And it’s where you are when the gaps start to form that shapes your season. For Watford, defeat in midweek cost them three points and three spaces, but the difference between seventh and tenth is bigger psychologically than it is spatially.
After all, when you find yourself in seventh, you’re looking to Europe, find yourself tenth and you start to look at the bottom half – though Watford are probably not looking as far down as the relegation zone.
But the end of January is all about form and momentum. At this stage of the season, the calendar starts to get a bit monotonous, a little bit like the final stretch of motorway before your exit.
You start to see a seemingly endless run of games every week whilst the big boys play in the Champions League knockout rounds, your best chance of a diversion and a break from the league is an FA Cup run, but even that might come to a premature end. (Having said that, Watford’s Fourth Round opponents are Nottingham Forest, and win that and they might start thinking of a decent run to be proud of).
There’s no worry about Watford staying up this season, they just look good enough – especially defensively – to pick up the points needed to stay up, even if they do suffer a terrible loss of form. And that’s unlikely.
My worry is about what happens if they just lose form a little bit.
The higher you go, the more motivation you have to do something great. If you’re seventh, you up, remember? When you’re tenth, you look down. And the problem there is that you lose the will to kick on. What’s the point in continuing to fight hammer and tong when you’re sitting comfortably in the middle of the table, no chance of Europe and no chance of relegation? The temptation is to conserve your energy and wait for next season.
But the right thing to do is keep battling. And the reason for that is form.
The teams with the worst form at the end of a season are often the teams who start the next season poorly. It’s not always the case – look at Aston Villa and Sunderland, who did well enough to stay up last season, but badly at the start of this season. They, however, look like clubs with bigger problems than a loss of form. But often it is the case that teams suffer nothing but a lack of form, and that’s what brings them into trouble. Newcastle ended last season terribly, and they’re finding that very hard to snap out of. Liverpool are in the same boat.
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The worst offenders of recent years are Hull City. Finding themselves almost safe by January of their first season back in the Premier League – a situation in which Watford find themselves – they threw everything at an FA Cup run at the expense of their league form.
They reached the cup final, lost in extra time to Arsenal and were relegated a season later, never recovering from the poor form at the end of the previous season that spilled over into their next season, losing to Belgian side Lokeren on away goals in the Europa League qualifying round and never recovering.
Watford better beware the dangers of poor form. Their season isn’t over by a long shot, but when defeats start to creep in, motivation starts to dwindle. When a top six finish seems to look out of reach and relegation looks comfortably behind you, poor form can follow.
It’s not this season that will suffer from poor form, it’s next season. It’s why the second season is so often fatal for the newly promoted clubs.
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