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Watford Say Arrivederci To Walter Mazzarri

It perhaps does not come as a big surprise what with the temperature of the Vicarage Road hot seat over the past couple of years but Walter Mazzarri is the latest name to have shown the exit door by the Pozzo family who own the Premier League club.

Those last few words of the previous sentence are most pertinent as Mazzarri did at least to secure a third successive season in the top flight for Watford but just like the previous incumbent Quique Sanchez Flores it is the slide down the table in the second half of the campaign which has ultimately been his undoing.

Mazzarri will at least be allowed to see out the end of the season and take charge of Watford’s final game of the season which is at home to Manchester City but the fact he has been in charge of a club that has lost their last five matches and fallen to low as 16th in the table meant the writing really was on the wall for the former Inter Milan boss.

Watford bar a spell when they were 6th before Christmas have never really been involved in anything at either end of the table. A long way off of the European places and once they hit the hallowed 40 point marker it is fair to say Mazzarri’s players have long since been on the beach.

But it is almost a mirror image of what happened last season under Sanchez Flores, they got off to a great start and were in the top six but at the turn of the year the rot well and truly set in and not even an F.A. Cup Semi Final visit to Wembley was enough to save his job.

Mazzarri has been in charge of something resembling the United Nations this season with at times there being 11 different nationalities on the field of play. Sometimes that has been even without an English player, now without being xenophobic that cannot be good for a clubs identity.

The way the club is owned and operated by the aforementioned Pozzo’s means that there is a very transient workforce at Vicarage Road with a plethora of loan signings from season to season. It has hamstrung both Sanchez Flores and Mazzarri and will no doubt be an issue for how takes charge of the club next.

With that being the case it means that Watford fail to really create an identity for themselves, you watch them and you do not really know what they are about. Obviously the aim is to continue to be a Premier League club but apart from that what do they really stand for.

If you were to ask any Watford at the start of the season then they will have no doubt taken 17th place as a finish but once again the way they started brightly but finished so meekly means that it can only be earmarked as another disappointing season.

Ultimately it is all about perception at this point, if Watford finished strongly then Mazzarri would no doubt be afforded a Summer to at least try and mould something resembling a squad he can really call his own but with the club in a decline once again it seems apparent that the owners were not prepared to let him loose with a budget for the transfer window.

That is two men who have for the sake of a few days here and there lasted just a season into their Watford managerial reigns. Is this perhaps a model that the Watford owners seem to prefer, it seems to be working to a certain degree but can it really work long term..

With Mazzarri departing the obvious question now is who is set to take over, Marco Silva would be a sensible target but after the work he has done with Hull he probably has bigger clubs looking to acquire his services. Whoever does take the helm next will do well to stay in the job for more than a season.

The more things change at Watford, the more they stay the same.

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