Watford signalled a change in direction in hiring Rob Edwards earlier this year, but mixed early results are already putting the pressure on.
Summer is over and autumn has begun, so naturally talk must turn to the annual replacement of the Watford manager.
The Hornets have made a spluttering and contradictory start to life back in the Championship, and the inevitable reaction to all of this is to wonder when the revolving door policy will come back into play under the Pozzos.
As football broke up for its last international break before the World Cup, Watford were 10th in the Championship table. But their form so far this season has been contradictory. They’ve only won three of their 10 games so far, but those victories came against Sheffield United, Burnley and Middlesbrough – three of the teams expected to compete at the top end.
While they’ve only won three out of 10 in the league, they’ve also only lost twice: to Queen’s Park Rangers and Blackburn Rovers. With 11 goals scored and 11 conceded, it’s not that they’ve been bad, more that they’ve been unable to kill games off. The for and against columns tell a story of their own.
Even their league position is a riddle wrapped in a mystery. On the one hand, with almost a quarter of the season played 10th place is a little on the low side for a club just relegated from the Premier League. But on the other, the Championship is the Jeux Sans Frontieres of leagues, and even now there are just five points between Sunderland in 5th and Middlesbrough in 22nd.
When Rob Edwards was appointed as the club’s manager at the start of the summer, it didn’t come without controversy. Having taken Forest Green Rovers to the League Two title at the end of last season, his former club issued a statement expressing their disappointment in the way the move was conducted: ‘We’re disappointed that our support, loyalty and honesty towards Rob has been repaid in this way – with negotiations taking place behind our backs.’
Of course, all this talk of skulduggery belongs in the past, but questions were raised at the time over whether Watford would be softening their previous policy on managers with a young coach from the lower divisions coming in. After all, three managers weren’t able to keep them in the Premier League last season, and bringing Edwards in felt like a shift in direction. This wasn’t the sort of manager that a club with a hire ’em & fire ’em policy would usually go for.
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