Remember those old fairground tombolas? You’d pay to take some lucky dips and won a prize if the tickets you pulled out ended in a five or a zero.
Effectively, you had a two in 10 chance of winning a prize given the numbers ending with the eight other digits were also in the barrel.
Turning up to watch Watford so far this season has felt very much like playing the tombola.
You could pull out five tickets and get no wins, one win or multiple wins. You can’t guarantee any success and you never know what the next ticket will bring.
If Saturday’s second half was a winning ticket, then last night was a loser, even if the final half an hour offered faint hope that the ticket might have been smudged and it could end in a zero and not an eight.
Of course that points towards inconsistency, and there is certainly a degree of that characteristic dogging the Hornets.
And it’s not just from game to game, it’s from half to half, and even minutes to minutes.
Saturday’s first half was poor, the second half was stunning.
The first half last night was bad, the start of the second half was no better but the final 30 minutes were okay.
But as well as inconsistency, there is also an element of something that was touched upon earlier in the season – Watford are very good flat-track bullies.
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As much as they played Sheffield Wednesday off the park in the second half at the weekend, the Owls came out after half-time and fell apart with the Hornets fully capitalising.
Too often it’s been hard to tell if Watford are playing so well the opposition can’t cope, or if the Hornets are preying on the weak moments of others.
Whatever the cause, even though the Hornets could still be in the top six after this midweek round of fixtures, it’s unlikely they can stay there with this pattern of chucking in a howler every two or three games.
Having played so well in a back four on Saturday, few could have argued against staying with that last night – but it didn’t take long after kick-off at Swansea to see it wasn’t working anywhere near as well.
Tom Cleverley suggested following the game that he showed the hosts too much respect and maybe went for the wrong shape.
Perhaps the bigger criticism is that given he was watching what the rest of us were watching, he didn’t switch to a back three during the game.
Watford have transitioned from three at the back to a four during matches, so there is no reason why they couldn’t do the reverse.
It felt like they needed another body or two in the middle of the park as they simply couldn’t get hold of the ball, and when they did they appeared to be treating it like a jacket potato just taken out of the oven.
You have it, no you have it, I don’t want it . . . now look, we’ve dropped it.
The warning signs were there from the outset as Dan Bachmann made a very smart save at the base of his post and then saw the ball go past him, only for the linesman to correctly flag for offside.
So it was no surprise when Swansea did finally break through and there was also a sense of ‘we’ve been here before’ in the manner of the goal.
A player given too much time and space to control a ball 25 yards out and deliver a cross, another in even greater isolation at the back post to head back across goal and opponents forming an orderly queue in the six-yard box to prod it over the line.
Yes, the gap at the back post was horrific, but look at how easy it was to get the cross in. Far better to deal with the cause of the problem – not shutting down – than later trying to manage the symptoms.
The home side could have been ahead by more at half-time, which is when Kwadwo Baah was thrown on in an attempt to wrestle back the attacking supremacy.
It is always difficult, as an outsider, to fathom how a player can be fit enough to be on the bench, but not to start – Cleverley explained Baah was carrying a knock and was really only fit enough for half an hour.
That he played 45 minutes was a sign of just how much he was missed, and hopefully it will not cause him to be unavailable for the game with Oxford on Friday.
Undoubtedly his introduction caused Swansea to have a rethink, such is his ability to run past and through people – if he doesn’t manage to retain possession, he causes enough havoc that it creates loose balls and space for others to capitalise on.
Nonetheless, even Baah couldn’t help Watford manage an on-target goal attempt, and there is the biggest problem: if clean sheets don’t come easily (and Watford have only kept two in the league all season), then you need to be battering down the door at the other end.
Last night, the Hornets didn’t even open the gate, let alone walk down the path and try the knocker.
Set pieces were generally back to the low standards of last season and what efforts at goal were attempted were so high and/or wide that keeper Lawrence Vigouroux did not make a save all night.
It would have been a disappointing performance anyway, but coming on the back of that second half in Sheffield it was as surprising as it was soporific.
Often we are told that footballers are creatures that live or die on confidence.
If scoring six away from home cannot lay the foundations for a good performance only three days later, then what can?
There were few positives, though a second very solid and tidy display from Pierre Dwomoh was one.
The young midfielder impressed at Hillsborough and was in a very small minority of players who maintained their form last night.
It would be good to get a sight of what Dwomoh can do in 3-4-2-1 shape as we’ve not seen him in that formation yet, but he has more than filled the gap left by the injury to Tom Dele-Bashiru and the suspension of Moussa Sissoko.
Giorgi Chakvetadze was, not for the first time, the best chance of creating something and once again the opposition media were effusive in their admiration of his ball carrying.
He cannot do it alone though. Last night he would drift or accelerate past one, two, three opponents, and then find he had no options around him.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for Chakvetadze to become the new Joao Pedro, who was so often given the ball in the hope he could magic something up while his teammates piled into the box with their fingers crossed.
Chakvetadze and Baah both have the armoury to rip teams apart, but they need help and will also have off-days – Watford have to be able to pose a threat even if one or both isn’t able to do the groundwork.
The fact remains, though, that unless when the season started you thought anything less than a play-off place this season would be a failure, then Watford are currently exceeding expectations.
They have seven league wins and 22 goals, figures only bettered by two other teams in the Championship – there are, as things stands, many sides not doing as well as the Hornets.
Similarly, though, only three teams have lost more than the six games Watford have, and only four have conceded more than the 22 goals they have shipped.
Whether it’s attributed to inconsistency, the failings of other teams or something else, those bare statistics are unlikely to support a play-off place if continued through until May.
While it may not be a path to promotion though, it’s also not a route to relegation.
If the former is within reach there is ample time to do something about that and, with the January transfer window looming, the debate around whether the owner will back the head coach will be reignited.
It would be sheer folly if, come January 1, the Hornets are still in and around the top six and Cleverley is not given the opportunity to add what he feels he needs to his squad.
That, though, may be applying general football logic to a club that has made a habit of illogical choices in recent years.
For now, the up and down, topsy-turvy, good cop bad cop unpredictability of the 24/25 season has been encapsulated in the last two games.
It’s quite possible this may be how things unfold for the next six months. Unless the bottom three becomes uncomfortably close, take a deep breath, buckle up, enjoy the days like Saturday and hold your nose through performances like last night.
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