Five things from Watford (a)

Here’s our regular five things from yesterday’s game…

Wrong game plan part 1
Heurelho Gomes is one of the dodgiest goalkeepers I’ve seen at this level over a period of time. I’ve lost count of how many mistakes I saw him make whilst at Spurs. A lot of these mistakes were on crosses so why didn’t we put the ball down his throat more often? He punched nearly everything that came in and was hardly convincing. We didn’t exploit this anywhere near enough and when we attempted to the crossing from the likes of Montero was dire

Wrong game plan part 2
Another Gomes point. He struggles with long shots. We have Gylfi Sigurdsson and Jonjo Shelvey in the side who love to shoot from long range so it would have been the perfect opportunity for them to put the keeper under pressure. This didn’t happen until the 89th minute when Shelvey tested him from outside the box and predictably the keeper spilled it. Again, we should have exploited this and failure to do so cost us.

Gomis needs to stay onside
He’s had a great start to the campaign but yesterday wasn’t a great day for Bafetimbi Gomis. He had one good turn and shot in the first half but other than that all he did was get caught offside. Credit to Watford, they were very good as a defensive unit and for what it’s worth deserved the win, but Gomis was caught offside about five times which is ridiculous.

Poor defending
The goal we gave away was pretty shocking and when Ashley Williams is culpable you know it’s a bad day. He should have left Fernandez deal with Deeney and watched Ighalo behind him. As a result of not doing this Ighalo was free to tap the ball home for the games decisive moment.

It’s just one game
In spite of my criticism above, we have made a good start to the campaign and i have no reason to believe it was anything other than a bad day at the office. So dust yourselves down lads, learn from your mistakes and put it right next week against Everton.