Poor defending allowed Watford to earn a point at home to Coventry City, with the visitors leaving Vicarage Road ruing missed opportunities in front of goal for not taking the full three in what should have been their first Championship win on the road this season.
The Sky Blues started in determined mood, clearly desperate to put right the wrongs from their defeat to Norwich last time out, and an early headed goal from Ellis Simms set the tone for a hugely encouraging first half.
However, a reorganised Hornets fought back after the break with a deserved 67th minute equaliser before Mark Robins’ men restored their momentum, only to miss arguably the biggest chance of the day. Here we look at some of the big talking points from the 1-1 draw.
Although ultimately frustrating, fans can take real encouragement from the amount of chances the players created, particularly given that it was away from home and against a side that had previously won five of their six games so far this term in all competitions. City’s stats revealed a total of 17 attempts on the Watford goal, five of which were on target and five of which were blocked, leaving seven off target.
The biggest disappointment, however, was the profligacy in front of goal as Ephron Mason-Clark and Haji Wright passed up gilt-edged opportunities which left Robins fairly annoyed afterwards. Talking about Wright’s close range header onto the post, he admitted: “We took the hardest chance and missed the easiest one. We have to be ruthless, it’s as simple as that.”
Rookie Watford boss Tom Cleverley admitted that he was completely thrown by Mark Robins’ team selection, running around from 2pm when he got the teamsheet until five to three, trying to figure out what the opposition were going to do. He obviously hadn’t done his homework very well because if he’d looked back at last season he’d have seen that Milan Van Ewijk had filled in for Sakamoto on the wing on a number of occasions, as well as Joel Latibeaudiere being deployed at right-back, rather than in a back three with Van Ewijk as a wing-back, as he thought they were going to line-up.
One of the more high profile occasions was the memorable FA Cup comeback win over Wolves which also threw Wanderers’ manager Gary O’Neil, resulting in him getting his goalkeeper to feign injury in order to gather his players around his iPad to reorganise his team’s shape. So it was interesting when Cleverley pulled the same trick, with Daniel Bachmann dropping to the deck for treatment from the physio.
Making no apologies for the tactic, the 35-year-old admitted: “Yeah, that sort of stopped the flow of the momentum, but the main changes were done at half-time.”
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The biggest change he made was to virtually man mark Jack Rudoni, the player he’d identified before the game as the one to stop.
“We matched them up in midfield in the second half and (Yasser) Larouci was doing a job on Rudoni which improved us and then we got a foothold in the game, and that’s generally the case when you dominate the midfield.”
Rudoni, however, also went agonisingly close to snatching glory in stoppage time when he cut inside his marker in the box and hit an angle shot which was denied by a decent reaction save from the goalkeeper. Cleverley spoke in glowing terms about the former Huddersfield forward after the game when, interestingly, Robins said that he thought he had played well, “although probably not as good as he has been.”
City’s opening four league games had left many fans fairly deflated, with early ‘through the roof’ expectations being severely dented by two defeats, a draw and last minute win. So a really decent away display provided the perfect tonic to restore a bit of confidence in the camp. There was a sense of disappointment that they didn’t win the game but any point on the road in a really tough division has to be viewed as a positive, and the performance as a whole, however frustrating the finishing, is a clear step back in the right direction and a platform on which to build.
Of course, that only works if the players back it up in their next Championship match, at home to Swansea, given that Wednesday’s glamorous Carabao Cup tie is a bit of a bonus against Premier League opposition, which City will not necessarily be expected to win but, all the same, is an opportunity to restore a bit of faith in the side.