Watford have sacked head coach Rob Edwards and his assistant Richie Kyle, and sporting director Cristiano Giaretta has stayed in his post.

In a staggering move that totally contradicts statements in the summer suggesting the club was looking to reset its culture and operate in a different way, owner Gino Pozzo has swung the axe after just 10 games of the new Championship season and dispensed with the services of the young English coach only appointed in May.

He has also reversed a board decision to remove Giaretta. Club staff were informed of the change at the end of the week before last, Edwards met with the players and football staff to explain the new structure and his enhanced role within it, and Giaretta was not at Vicarage Road for the game with Sunderland on September 17.

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However, as has often been the case in the decade that Pozzo has been at the helm, the owner has taken time during the international break to assess things as he sees them, and this morning informed Edwards and Kyle that their services would no longer be required.

Furthermore, Giaretta has returned to work after a ‘holiday’ and has been at the training ground today

Edwards won three of his ten Championship games as head coach, drawing five and losing twice. The Hornets scored 11 league goals and conceded the same amount. They also lost 2-0 to MK Dons and exited the Carabao Cup.

Back in June, when chairman Scott Duxbury was asked whether the days of hiring and firing coaches was over, he said: “What happened last season was almost an epiphany. We had hidden behind relative success, but it wasn’t significant success. What we needed was continuity behind a coach that we believe in and the supporters believe in. We also wanted somebody who could grow with us.

“There are many examples of successful clubs who appoint a young British coach who is then supported as he and the club grow and become successful. That’s the change we have made and it’s what Rob will give us. It will solve communication, it will solve identity, he will become the face of the club and the custodian of the values that Watford Football Club is all about.

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“Gino Pozzo wants the club to be successful and playing sustained Premier League football. That’s always been his only ambition for Watford. I am on exactly the same page.

“However, he accepts that the way we try and work to deliver that had to change. We know that we could not carry on as we were. Watford Football Club needed its culture back.

“In Rob Edwards, we have appointed a manager we all totally believe in, and a manager who will lead and drive that change.

"We will be supporting Rob Edwards come hell or high water. We believe that he will deliver what we all want – sustained and successful Premier League football.”

While there will be supporters who feel Edwards had made an unreasonably poor start to life at Watford, it’s hard it imagine there will be very many who feel the club had gone beyond the point of ‘hell or high water’ after 10 league games and one cup tie.

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Notwithstanding results though, this is a decision which flies totally in the face of the comments that Watford needed “its culture back”.

The Hornets had become the butt of jokes and a vehicle for ridicule for their constant hiring and firing of head coaches/managers. Last season alone the club had three different bosses which only exacerbated the damage done by a truly awful Premier League relegation campaign.

Fans, staff and players had good reason to believe that in Edwards they had the young British coach that it was virtually unanimously agreed upon was what the club needed.

And with the heralded change of culture and reversion back to a way of working more familiar with the Watford FC of the past, there was comfort in the knowledge that even if Edwards endured a rocky start to life at Vicarage Road, senior figures at the club ‘had his back’.

While being 10th in the Championship following some indifferent performances is not the flying start that might have been hoped for, it seems that during the international break Pozzo has had a visit to the gates of Hades or been advised to construct an ark, as “hell or high water” has indeed been reached just 139 days after the club announced Edwards would be their new head coach.

The club are expected to make an official statement later today, and as yet there have been no names linked with the vacant post.

Watford travel to Stoke City on Sunday for their next Championship game, which is also live on Sky Sports.

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