Watford's Season Struggles: A Tough Start and Squad Concerns

Watford’s season is barely a month old and already feels like a grind.

For weeks, the story around Vicarage Road has been the same: a squad stretched to breaking point and a head coach trying to patch things together with what he has. At one stage in August, Watford went into games with just two recognised centre-backs. Two. For a club talking about promotion, it was a remarkable gamble.

Deadline day finally brought reinforcements, but by then the early damage was done.

The board will insist there was a plan. They wanted younger, better-value targets. They did not want to be bounced into panic buys in early August. On paper, with the window now shut, a fully fit Watford squad looks respectable enough in most areas. Midfield remains the obvious weak spot, but across the pitch there is at least competition. In theory.

Some of the early business has been impressive. Iker Bravo has lit up the opening weeks, a rare bright spark in a tiring side. Federico Ravaglia looks a clear upgrade in goal. Jordan Zemura and Omar Traore have given Watford reliable, energetic options at full-back, while Soumaila Coulibaly and Branimir Mlacic have also shown promise.

The issue hasn’t been the quality of the signings. It’s been the timing.

Alessio Dionisi has had to lean on the same core of players game after game. The schedule has bitten hard: two matches a week, limited rotation, and a squad that simply hasn’t had enough bodies. Injuries have stacked up. Legs have gone heavy. Performances in late August bled into September with a familiar pattern – bright spells, then fatigue, then dropped points.

The late arrivals have not been ready to fix it. Several turned up short of full match fitness, nowhere near match sharpness, and yet still found themselves dragged into a depleted squad. Dionisi has been naming benches that tell their own story. Watford have failed to fill the maximum eight substitute spots in each of the past two games. For five straight matches, they have carried two goalkeepers among the replacements. That is not strategy. That is survival.

No wonder the Italian keeps repeating the same phrase around fixtures: “It’s not easy.” It isn’t.

For him, the international break cannot come quickly enough. The irony won’t be lost on Watford supporters. At this club, international breaks have often signalled the end for head coaches, not a chance to breathe. Yet this time, after Bristol City on Friday, Dionisi and his players get three weeks to stop, reset and try to piece together something more coherent.

By then, though, Watford will almost certainly be chasing the pack. The board’s decision to hold their nerve in early August, to wait and wait for the right targets, made sense from a business point of view. On the pitch, the policy has backfired. Points dropped in the opening months count just the same as those in April.

The Hornets should eventually have a squad capable of competing with most in the division. That moment might not arrive until late October. If the ambition is genuinely to push for promotion, they have already handed their rivals a head start and left themselves staring up at a mountain.