Villa Park is no longer the place it used to be. In our last two forays into the Premier League we managed only one point from the four matches we played against the Villains.

We earned no points at all at Villa Park in those two seasons and until Saturday we hadn’t won a match there since 1969.

That aforementioned single point came at Vicarage Road in a goalless draw early into Aidy Boothroyd’s first season in the top flight.

It was a topsy-turvy game, with a full strength Hornets side failing to score against man-of-the-match Thomas Sorensen, who was in fine form between the Villa sticks.

Marlon King came close, as did Hameur Bouazza. Ashley Young and Tommy Smith charged up and down the wings and Darius Henderson had not by this point felt the disappointment of a prolonged goal drought. It was a decent result.

Four months after that nil-nil draw came the return leg about a hundred miles up the road. The fixture came right in the middle of the Ashley Young transfer saga – two days after a record-breaking bid of £9.75 million was accepted, and three days before pen was actually put to paper. On the day, the then-21-year-old was rested.

Then, much like now, Villa were on a torrid run of form having gone 11 league games without a win. This season it’s now been 13 games since they’ve secured all three points in a game.

Unlike this season though, by January 2007 the Hornets were relegation fodder without much hope of improvement.

Young, one of our best players, was switching the South East for the West Midlands. King, another of our best players, was out with a long-term injury. Henderson, expected to pick up where King left off, was a man short of confidence.

We were plucky but there was a severe lack of quality in the squad. Our front pairing for this visit to Villa Park consisted of Tamas Priskin and Will Hoskins.

Moses Ashikodi provided backup for the front line on the day and replaced Hoskins with 10 minutes to go.

Ashikodi is now 28-years-old, an age many strikers hit their prime. Hunting for his whereabouts online yields very few results. The last recorded sighting of the striker on a football pitch is a scoring performance in a 2-1 win for Walton Casuals back in September.

Walton Casuals, however, don’t list the Nigerian-born frontman in their squad online. So it’s not entirely clear where the one-time Premier League forward plies his trade these days.

We duly lost that match in early 2007 in unfortunate circumstances. A Gavin McCann shot ricocheted off Gavin Mahon and Malky Mackay, beating a bewildered Ben Foster to open the scoring, and Gabriel Agbonlahor made it 2-0 in injury time.

Par for the course at a place like Villa Park back then. But not any more.

It’s a different story for the Golden Boys in 2015. Experienced internationals are now sat on our bench itching for their chance in a yellow shirt.

And Aston Villa are this year’s lost cause. Sunderland may have started the season as if they were going to go down without a fight, but Sam Allardyce has galvanised the Black Cats. Two straight wins have seen them move out of the relegation spots.

Villa on the other hand have won just once. This was on the opening day of the season, away at newly-promoted Bournemouth.

Their current run of results could be described as worse than relegation form. They are in dire straits and this is the case even after a change in management.

Nevertheless, the last time we came here to play Aston Villa, we faced a side with a similar record and we came unstuck.

This game won’t have been treated as a gimme by Quique Sanchez Flores and certainly won’t have been by any Watford fan with a memory that goes back further than a season or two.

Despite a few scares at the back and a sub-par performance though, it felt like a win was inevitable after we scored our first.

Don’t get me wrong, I was gritting my teeth during those ten minutes of added time but that was injury time muscle memory rather than a reaction to the team’s exploits on the pitch. We saw the game out well and looked the more likely side to score again.

Apart from the very impressive Adama Traoré - whose performance in the final stages suggests he shouldn’t have been sat on the bench for the majority of the game - I wouldn’t at this moment take a single Villa player from their matchday squad in place of one of our own.

In truth, we were better than Villa all over the park despite putting in a very average performance.

The headlines that followed were all about Troy Deeney’s goal at the Holte End fulfilling his boyhood dream, but the conversations I was a part of and overheard on the train home were all about just how good we have it right now.

(Well, if I’m completely honest, there was also talk of a Lithuanian fellow who seemed to struggle to catch a football. But we’ll cut him some slack.) Every week we are reminded of just how far we’ve come. We’re managing to get results in a very tough league even when we’re not at our best.

The BBC report for the 2-0 loss at Villa in 2007 names Watford as ‘the Premiership’s basement club’. This year that title goes to Villa.

We should have no worries about losing our best players to the likes of Villa in January and it’ll be the Midlanders that need to strengthen in order to survive, not the Hornets.

It’s a sign of the times and we’ve got the look of a club that deserves to be 11th in the top tier.