Best summary I've read so far:
Watford stay perfect and dent Tottenham Hotspur’s title credentials
Watford 2 Tottenham Hotspur 1
new
James Gheerbrant
September 2 2018, 6:00pm, The Sunday Times
Most pre-season predictions had Watford flirting with relegation. Instead, after four games, they occupy a position in the top three and are yet to drop a point.
For an hour here, it looked as if the magic was about to wear off – instead, they claimed their biggest scalp of the season so far, knocking off one of their fellow 100% starters and dealing the first setback of Tottenham’s Premier League campaign.
Deeney levelled things up for Watford in the second halfFran Augstein/AP
This was a triumph for the management of Javi Gracia, who arrived to no great fanfare at the end of last season and after an ominously poor end to last season, has defied lowly expectations. He was expected to walk the plank; turns out he was standing on a springboard. His influence was discernible in Watford’s resolute rearguard and two well-worked set-piece goals.
For Tottenham, this was a result to evaporate the optimism generated by their three opening wins. There were some familiar failings here, both in their inability to break down a well-organised defence despite an abundance of creators, and in the absence of any real game-changing options off the bench.
The desperate addition of Fernando Llorente, a 33-year-old with one goal in 16 appearances for Tottenham, felt like a glaring sign of a weakness unaddressed. Teams with genuine title aspirations do not get to lose too many games like this.
This was, in one particular way, a genuinely extraordinary Premier League game. As the clock struck four and the game kicked off at a Vicarage Road stadium still bathed in late summer sunshine, all 20 outfield players arrayed on the pitch – and the two managers in the dugout – had been at their respective club last season.
Watford were naming an unchanged starting XI for the fourth league game in a row; nine of the Spurs XI, meanwhile, played in the 2015-16 campaign. In a volatile, relentlessly acquisitive Premier League, then, it was possible to see this meeting between two teams with a 100% record as an advert for the virtues of stability; for the idea that chemistry and cohesion, cultivated over time, can trump the ideology of incessant addition.
Watford, of course, have come relatively late to this logic. For much of their current stay in the top flight, they have been the league’s great reshufflers, reasoning that personnel turnover is a fundamental part of being a mid-table Premier League club, so they might as well embrace it though.
Perhaps they have realised lately though, that in order to truly thrive in the Premier League, rather than just survive, you have to practise evolution as well as revolution. Incredibly, this is the first time since 2013 that they have entered September under the same manager who oversaw the end of the previous season – it seems emphatically to be paying off.
One of the benefits of having a manager in situ for more than the usual ephemeral life cycle of the Premier League boss is that they can institute not just their idea of football, but their ideas, plural.
Here, Tottenham reverted to a back-three system that Mauricio Pochettino has favoured from time to time; a formation they are comfortable with, but not constrained by.
Javi Gracia has guided Watford to four wins in a row to open up the Premier League seasonOlly Greenwood/AFP
And it was Tottenham, playing a sort of diamond midfield of Christian Eriksen, Dele Alli and Lucas Moura ahead of Mousa Dembélé, who created more of the early chances, with Alli sliding in Moura and looping a header over from Toby Alderweireld’s long pass.
Moura at times was playing so high he looked like Harry Kane’s strike partner. Watford carried a sting of their own, with Daryl Janmaat precisely intuiting the penalty-box co-ordinates of Troy Deeney’s meaty forehead for a cross that was headed over the bar.
Alli’s role was particularly interesting. Once he would have been the one at the tip of the diamond, playing in Kane’s orbit, but over the last 12 months he has been remodelled as a number 8 rather than a number 10, with his role subtly shifting towards more engine-room creativity, perhaps at the expense of a certain penalty-box sharpness. Here it was noticeable how deep he and Eriksen were willing to drop to forage for openings and try to draw Watford out of their defensive block.
At first glance, this season’s Premier League is full of competent attacking teams with dreadful, dysfunctional defences: Arsenal, Fulham, perhaps even Everton if you were being harsh. And what might elevate Watford above the fray is their superior organisation at the back. Janmaat, Craig Cathcart, Christian Kabasele and José Holebas are not elite individuals but under Gracia the unit as a whole looks rigorously well-drilled. For 50 minutes they were largely successful in thwarting Tottenham’s attempts to create clear chances.
These close, claustrophobic matches are often the ones on which title challenges stand and fall, and to get through them teams usually need a virtuoso moment of lock-picking individual skill, an irresistible piece of training-ground choreography, or a fat slice of luck. In this instance, Tottenham were served a steaming portion of the latter.
First, ten minutes into the second half, Ben Foster wandered indecisively off his line to claim a cross that eventually dropped to Lucas Moura. The Brazilian’s swinging boot smashed the ball back into the heart of the penalty box, and Abdoulaye Doucouré, rushing back to cover, inadvertently chested the ball in at the near post. His attempted shot might have been inexact, but it was no coincidence that Moura was in the right position to take it – he has now been directly involved in four goals in his last three matches. Son Heung-min might have avoided military service, but he may be subsisting off rations when he returns.
But Tottenham did not make their luck count. Ten minutes later, Alderweireld clattered the angle of post and bar with a miscued defensive header. Then Dembélé, who has looked a touch off the pace in recent games, conceded a free kick on the right, Holebas’s flat, fizzing delivery was perfect and Deeney met it with a skidding header that lodged in the bottom corner of Vorm’s net.
Finally, Tottenham’s inability to defend set pieces extracted a further cost. Holebas produced another superb set-piece delivery from the corner flag and Cathcart shrugged off Dembélé to plant a firm header past Vorm. In the final minutes, Kane headed over the top as Watford held on to preserve their 100% record.
Match stats
4-2-2-2
Watford2-1Tottenham Hotspur
3-1-4-2
English Premier League16:00 Sunday September 2 2018
Possession 34.5%
34.5%
65.5%
65.5%
Shots 7
7
11
11
Shots on target 3
3
2
2
Corners 3
3
10
10
Fouls conceded 9
9
8
8
Ratings
Watford (4-4-2): B Foster 6; D Janmaat 8, C Kabasele 7, C Cathcart 8, J Holebas 8; W Hughes 7 (N Chalobah 86), A Doucouré 6, E Capoue 7, R Pereyra 6 (A Mariappa 90); T Deeney 7, A Gray 6 (I Success 70).
Booked: Capoue, Success.
Substitutes not used: H Gomes, A Masina, K Sema, K Femenia.
Tottenham Hotspur (3-1-4-1-1): M Vorm 6; T Alderweireld 5 (F Llorente 81), D Sanchez 5, J Vertonghen 6; M Dembélé 4 (H Winks 86); K Trippier 5, C Eriksen 6, D Alli 6, B Davies 5 (D Rose 89); L Moura 7; H Kane 6.
Booked: Dembélé.
Substitutes not used: P Gazzaniga, V Wanyama, E Dier, K Walker-Peters.