And as I said in my original post I also think that the main issue is personel available. But really the performances have been quite bad too. Our team, on paper at least (squad market value, experience at this level, etc) should at least be able to dominate an average team like Preston.
We seem to be struggling in the one area we should be good in - scoring goals. Keeping them out is not an issue so far (although Bachmann cannot keep saving us forever), and we just need to hope Bayo and Manaj click in training and do the same on match day. Our midfield is a lot better than the state it was in, and the introduction of Asprilla, Choudry and a hard working Kayembe means we have some grip on the middle of the park again. We do badly need a natural goal scorer and a proper RWB - Kamara is not ideal, he plays more naturally on the left. Gino has less than two weeks to try and rectify it - but do well really believe he will?
Performances is plural of performance as far as I know. Every performance was poor this season overall. Also that is taken out of contest, as in that post mentioning birthday party, I said by the sound of things, i.e. I got an impression that the lastest performance was poor too from reading comments online.
With the current squad minus Sarr and Pedro I can't see any reason why we should be good at scoring goals. Those two plus Dennis were all the talent we had up front.
I agree - what we don't want to happen is these two to turn into the next Deeney/Gray of a few seasons past. One who cannot control a ball and one who stands on the six yard box waving his arms.
Yes if anyone other than the " decent 3 " scored I always considered it a bonus last season, we are in for bonus's and no basic as things stand this season!
It want poor - we created a decent number of good chances and edged the match, but just couldn't finish. Our performance against Burnley was also alright.
Still doesn't explain why you took a jab at me for no good reason just because I missed the game. You tried to twist my words, by taking one sentence each from two of my posts without any context. As for your view of the game against Preston, many people online, here and on twitter said that the performance was no better than the previous performances. People can have different opinions. The result was poor and they had more shots on target. Spin it anyway you like, the performances this season were poor overall(even if you don't count Preston). Burnley was probably our best performance (unless we played well against Preston which I doubt because of the aforementioned reasons), but in hindsight even that performance seems somewhat less impressive, because inthat game Bachman saved us a couple of times and Burnley are currently in the 16th place and are struggling quite a bit.
Define poor? We’ve conceded two goals in five games. So can you say the defence has been poor? People might not like individual members of it, but have we not generally defended well as a unit? Those who want to criticise might say we’ve been saved time after time by Bachmann, which I wouldn’t disagree with, but isn’t he a part of our defence? We’ve only scored four times. That isn’t great. And you didn’t need to be a brain surgeon before the season started to fear we would be short of goals this year. But two of our goals this season won us the matches. The other two earned us draws.so each of our goals has actually mattered, as opposed to losing 2-4 each week. And let’s look at the quality of those goals. Was our wonderful fast counter attack v Sheff U a poor quality goal? Was Sarr’s strike v Brom poor? Was our lovely flowing move against Burnley resulting in Clev’s very smart finish poor? So in a season where we remain unbeaten, miserly at the back and capable of scoring some beautiful goals, although admittedly not often enough, can we really be described as performing poorly? Inconsistent, yes. Lucky, hmm yes at times. Not dominant, true. Can we do better? Omg yes. But poor? Hmm not in my book. Unless of course that’s what you want to see.
Poor as in no clear attacking plan first and foremost. All of our goals were more a product of individual quality than anything else. Secondly, we have made quite a few errors at the back and you can say that our defence wasn't at its best more than a few times this season. Bachmann is a part of defense yes, but if he is performing well that doesn't mean the whole defence is (although defence is at an okay level, but it was mostly under Ivic too, football was often sh*t than and is mostly sh*t now too). I have only praised Bachmanns performances this season. He really has been exceptional. We were extremely poor in the game against WBA, I can't remember any team playing that poorly ever. Results have been good, but the performances haven't (imo at least) and I think that that isn't sustainable. Even more so if we keep selling our star players. When our luck dries up I have a terrible feeling that we'll keep getting 0-0 results but that these tight 1-0 wins will turn into 1-0 losses. Performances need to be better, more assured, with clearer patterns of play, imo.
Tbf, having seen the Championship over the past 3 seasons, we're not going to concede many goals, I think the league is a little better than it was 2 seasons ago, but not massively so. I thought Preston we did look more positive than we have yet this season (Brum we had more chances perhaps but they are probably poorer than Preston), agree to an extent about individual quality, although we also have Louza to add to this midfield, I think him, Asprilla and Choudhury will be a very exciting trio at this level. We got a point, and we could (perhaps should?) have won, with probably the worst team we'll field this season, even if Sarr and JP are off, I'd like to think we will bring some players in ahead of next weekend!
I’d say the Sarr goal was down to individual quality, the other three were great team play. Lovely flowing moves. I’d say we are a work in progress. A relegated side. A new manager. 23 departures. New signings. More flux coming up this week. Of course, the season could go one of two ways. We can grow better or we can look back at the last few matches as beginners luck and we won’t threaten the promotion places, especially without Sarr and Pedro. Who knows? It’s half the fun, waiting and watching. We all see things differently. People who hate Pozzo or Duxbury or Kabasele or Cleverley or Bayat or whoever else often seem determined to see everything as being terrible. So even though we are unbeaten this season, it’s still not good. Others tend to be more optimistic, maybe too much so when there are clearly so many faults still with aspects of the club. All I caution against is failing to realise the difference between a fact and an opinion. It’s a fact we have 9 points. It’s an opinion that we could/should have more. And to guard against overusing hyperbole. If everything is amazing now or terrible now, where do we then go when things actually are amazing (such as clinching promotion) or terrible (getting relegated). If the West Brom game really was the poorest team performance ever, then heaven help us when we get a thumping this season!
Agreed with most here. If we looked more positive against Preston than fair play to everyone involved. Hopefully our performances will keep improving. Championship is poor, but you still need to play better than we have so far if you want automatic promotion, in my opininion.
That's a very, very long way of trying to gloss over the fact that you simply assumed our performance vs Preston was as "poor" as some of the others despite not having watched the game yourself.
Don't agree on individual quality/team play bit, but people see things differently. Second point agreed completely, just hope that the work in progress will turn into something better than this sooner rather than later, similar to what you said in your 3rd point. I don't think I'm always critical. I try to be quite balanced. I praised Bachmann a lot these season, I defended Kayembe since first game(as he did ok in every game), I often praised players like Pereyra in certain situations in recent seasons when most posters criticised them. I've had quite a lot of positive posts, I really don't think I'm in the group that criticises everything (sorry if you didn't mean that, that's what I got from your post). Re:fact/opinion. I agree. And I'll always say not a good performance, but important thing is we got 3 points/1 point. And I didn't hyperbole the performance against WBA. It really was in my opinion the worst team performance by any team(not only Watford) that I've ever seen in my life. I've seen 6,7 or 8 nill matches in witch the losing team looked better. That's my opinion. As you said, the quality of performance is subjective, and my subjective opinion is that it is the worst performance I've ever seen.
I never said specifically the performance vs Preston was bad. Closest I got to it was saying it sounds like the similar quality performance to the previous one or it seems like another poor performance by the look of things or something of that sort. (I'm sure you can find it, as you're an expert on digging up old posts since this was posted in the last day or so, and you sometimes even find and quote posts that are many months old for no real good reason)
it’s always nice reading your posts don’t ever misread mine as criticism by the way. That’s not my way
The league is full of teams like Preston. If you expect to win every game you will be disappointed . It does seem as though those that went to the game thought we played ok but those on Shoutbox didn’t
One or two people painting themselves into corners here. And others trying to moderate the exaggerations of others. If yesterday's performance (which I listened to, but didn't see, except for brief highlights) was the finished product then we are probably in for a disappointing and frustrating season. But it is surely not, both in terms of personnel (I hope) and in terms of coaching/teamwork: Edwards has had a big job so far, re-starting after a nightmare finish to last season. I don't believe he has finished. At the Championship level Sarr, Pedro and Dennis have/had star quality. Dennis has gone. It currently looks like the other two will go. We shall see. BUT: None of them are out and out, natural-born strikers, particularly (for me) Pedro. Sarr, at his best - which is now and then, can score wonderful goals. Much 'though I enjoy watching him, I don't think we would miss Pedro much. There is probably a need to strengthen the squad because a lot of people have left and the season is long and hard and few players will manage to last the distance without injury. But, above all, we need a striker (or two). A twenty - or -so goals a season striker would almost certainly see us in the top 6 and quite possibly in an automatic position. There probably isn't a team in this league who isn't saying the same thing, these men are the most in-demand of all positions.
This is funny to me because it seems to discount the fact we’re in a completely different division, this same midfield also gets absolutely torn to shreds in The Prem, more so than last years to be honest.
By saying "But really the performances have been quite bad" you were clearly including Preston in that - otherwise you would have said "the performances have been quite bad, except for this game vs Preston".
Apart from Louza who's still with us, Choudhury is an upgrade on anyone we had we had last season, though whether he'd be good enough for the Prem is another matter. Reckon a midfield of Louza, Choudhury and Asprilla cooks in the Championship, and with another year under their belt, might be able to handle the Prem in a year's time?
That's not really how it works, does it? If I said we played poorly last season, that doesn't mean I think we played poorly against for example Man United or Everton. I can't really say "the performances have been quite bad, except for this game vs Preston" as I haven't watched the game. I was making a general point. Also by all means, the performance against can't be definitelly filed as a good performance, as the reviews among our fans have been mixed to say the least.
If you were making a general point it was one clearly in part based on your overly negative assumptions about a game you didn't watch. Perhaps you shouldn't only listen to the usual few misery guts posters on here who'll complain about every game, regardless of what happens.
You think Choudhury is better than Sissoko would’ve been in The Championship? I politely yet strongly disagree.
I don't really know what you're trying to prove here? If we were playing like prime Barcelona against Preston, my general point would still stand, we played poorly. And we obvioisly didn't play that well, because the game had mixed reviews so by logical thinking it can't have been a huge improvement on previous games. We might have played better than before but we should still do a lot better if quite a lot of people say that we played poorly and if the result wasn't very good either(nor stats tbf). I'm not basing my opinion solely on few negative reviews, I carefully read every post in threads like this. Mixed reviews tell you that we can't have improved significantly. Small improvement, yes, probably. Anyways I don't want to spam this thread, I won't have a reply on your next message whatever it is as we have already taken a fair chunk of this thread. Everyone is allowed to have opinions, you don't always have to try to correct people or quote very old posts and other things I've seen you do to many posters. I always enjoy exchanging opinions with people but I don't appreciate what you're sometimes doing. Cheers, and have a nice day! P. S. I often like your posts, you post a lot of sensible and informative things too, I just don't won't to continue this pointless debate.
Sissoko started off last season well, but faded badly, and at his age isn't getting any better or more energetic. Choudhury has made a fantastic start to his Watford career, I think ultimately both the Sissoko of last season and this season's Choudhury could probably handle themselves in the Prem in the right team (which we emphatically did not have last season!)
Other teams in the Championship are beginning to click. We are a long way from that at the moment. It is early days, but the lack of goals and the poor quality of our forward line is a worry. You can be frugal at the back, but it creates pressure when you have forwards who look incapable of scoring. We paid £8m for two players that could have been purchased for £1.4m in early 2022. Not their fault, just a good agent and a desperate club buying them. We have more points than l ever expected at this time in the season, but we have looked uninspiring/dull in a weak Championship. We need 3 or 4 more players, but the window is closing soon. A forward/RWB/CB are a priority.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Right now I have no idea where this season is going. Which makes it kind of interesting I think. I was looking back earlier at our last season in the Championship. The parallels so far are striking. After five matches then we were roughly the same. We’d only scored three times, we’d won both matches at home but hadn’t won away. The football wasn’t particularly exciting but we seemed to be building a base. And of course we had key players linked with moves away and being absent from the match-day squad for mysterious reasons. I’m not saying btw that just because it happened last time, ergo it must happen again. I’m just saying it’s canny how the start of this season mirrors last time, bar the fact that then we lost an away match whereas this time we are unbeaten. I’m actually not especially hopeful of us having a good season tbh. I’m not stupid enough to think everything is rosey right now, nor will it be once the window shuts. My posts on this thread haven’t intended to say that. They’ve merely been expressed to try to caution others against too much hyperbole in either direction, or muddling facts with opinions. I’ve read different people writing the entire season off on the basis of a match they admitted not seeing (and which we got a good point on the road), saying our recruitment has been terrible even though we are only 5 matches into a 46 game season and one of our two new strikers has actually already scored a goal which got us a point, saying a draw away to a potential promotion revival was the worst performance ever and therefore logically worse than horror shows like the 0-8 at the etihad etc. I always think a good yardstick is to imagine how other clubs see us. How will they be looking at us? I had a coffee with my Bristol City friend yesterday. She told me “your lot aren’t involved in many goals but you’re a tough nut to crack. You’re going to be there or thereabouts, especially if you replace your departing stars”. I reckon she’s probably about right, and a bit more detached and unemotional about Watford than we all can’t help ourselves being!
Having only been able to watch a potato quality stream it's hard to make too much of a conclusion and I don't care enough to watch the full 90 minute replay. Aspirilla looks quality, can only imagine how good he'll be in a few seasons. Had Bayo and Manaj taken their chances it would be a completely different post-match feeling, I guess the only positive is that they got into those positions to try and score. Bachmann looks like a brand new keeper, many of us had written him off before the season even started! After getting drenched at Birmingham and having to deal with delayed trains I felt a bit down about it all but a few more signings (ideally non-Mogi) and I think we still have a squad capable of top 6 - I find the football quite dull but I guess that's down to a lack of quality and Edwards style of football but if it continues to get results I can't complain too much. He does need to get 3 points at home on Saturday though......
The best thing to do is ignore LowerRous, he’s a complete spanner. He got called out on his antics a few weeks ago by the majority of the forum. Evidently he’s no less of a **** still.. Shame because he does post some interesting things in between all of the pathetic arguments he gets in.
