Saturday's Win Wasn't About Luck!

I would have thought that it was really encouraging for you, the fans, to see such a young Watford team on the pitch at the end of Saturday's win against QPR. We had a central midfield of Al Bangura and Adrian Mariappa, a front two of Ashley Young and debutant, Theo Robinson and still found room for Anthony McNamee on the wing.

This made the average age of the line-up that was on the pitch at the final whistle less than 23, with only Malky Mackay over 26 years old and five players aged 21 or under. That's got to be great for the future of this club.

When I first came to Watford last year, I talked about being here for the long term and one of my principle aims is to ensure we have a flow of good young players coming through by investing our time in youth.

People will have also noticed Gavin Mahon's exclusion from team at Loftus Road. I have put a lot of responsibility on Gavin as my captain since I came here and I thought it was right to give him a breather before the play-offs start. I did the same with Matthew Spring for the Ipswich game last week and I'll continue to rest other senior players for this Sunday's game against Hull.

I spoke last week about all the different match situations we had faced against Wolves and Ipswich and I think last Saturday just about completed the set as we had to play for 45 minutes against ten men.

I felt we should have taken more control of the game but with such a young team out there, we found it hard to do so. Gary Waddock played a 4-3-2 formation and tried to win the game rather than the usual 4-4-1 so we need to learn how to take advantage of that for future occasions by working on the training ground.

After the game I read one or two reports saying that we were lucky to win because of the own goal. However, I'm a big believer in making your own luck in this sport. By putting pressure on the opposition, you force free kicks, corners and even own goals like we saw on Saturday.

We did that against Rangers and it was through pressure from Anthony McNamee and Ashley Young that we earned the winning goal. Therefore, I don't put the three points won on Saturday down to luck, just like the previous 77 points we've won this season.

It was fantastic to see that our supporters fill every single seat at Loftus Road and they didn't stop singing from start to finish. That's what we need from now till the end of this season. We've got both the Rookery and Vicarage Road ends for the home leg in the play-offs and we need to take advantage of that once the action starts!

See you on Sunday

Come On!

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