The Vicarage Road faithful have sat through nine hours of Championship football since they last saw a win, and that is on the mind of Valerien Ismael.

The Watford head coach made a point of speaking about the need to start winning home league games only minutes after the win at Rotherham on Saturday.

“Our next game is at home and you can see our record at home is not good. So we need to change that as well," he said.

“That becomes our next challenge and we have to concentrate on that this week.

“The big thing for me now is to win the next home game, and give something back to our fans.

“Again today they showed brilliant support for us, and we need to be focussed on that next game and take things one by one.

“We have to be sure we take advantage of our home games.”

This week marks the first since the end of January when the Hornets do not have a midweek fixture.

“The schedule has played a massive part in the situation we were in,” said Ismael.

“The FA Cup replay was not expected and it changed all the schedule for us.

“Then it became a big challenge for me to manage all the players. Playing Southampton, Leicester and Norwich in a short period of time then it can happen that you will lose games.

“But that’s behind us, we learn from it and we have learned for the future.

“We’ve now we have two Saturday games which means we can recover and be ready to push.”

The Watford boss said that the win over Rotherham, though not attractive to watch, will have given his players confidence and belief.

“At some point this is what you will need to do in the Championship,” he reflected.

“You need to have flexibility. It depends on your situation in the table, on the run you are on, and today was just a case of be solid and do the basics right because we know we have the quality to make the difference.

“The purpose was to give the feeling to the guys that we are strong.

“We have conceded a lot of goals in the last few games and this affects our defenders as well because they want to keep clean sheets.

“So at some point we need to give something to the players so they feel strong.

“That worked out today and I am very pleased for Ben and our centre backs because they were superb.”

The selection of Francisco Sierralta over Jake Livermore in the No.6 role was purely based on the anticipated barrage of long and high balls into the box.

“We expected a threat from long balls. We knew it wouldn’t be a press game and tactical, it would be more in the air,” said Ismael.

“We knew the ball would be coming into the box from everywhere, even from throw-ins, from the halfway line to the box.

“To deal with that we needed another body.”