What a difference a win makes. Three more points and suddenly we can all breathe easily and genuinely look forward to what comes next.

I admit I found it difficult to get particularly excited about Saturday’s game at West Brom, much like many of us I expect.

A slew of cheerless stats were repeated ad infinitum prior to the match; seemingly an attempt to prove to anyone who dared buy a ticket that they were wrong to expect anything approaching entertainment.

Here are some of the highlights, just in case you’d forgotten: The reverse fixture at Vicarage Road yielded a goalless draw; three of Albion’s preceding four games had been settled by no more than a single goal; Watford had only scored twice since their last victory, away at Crystal Palace back in February.

And so on.

What’s more, the Hawthorns isn’t exactly a happy hunting ground for us Hornets. I personally can only remember drab games and absolute thrashings.

In fact, West Brom have been annoyingly better than us for a long time now.

When we both looked like dominating the second tier a few years back, we were schooled at Vicarage Road by the West Midlanders and shown up as one-dimensional pretenders.

They beat us 3-0. They were the real thing.

Despite their reputation as the Premier League’s cloggers since Tony Pulis’ appointment, they are an established club in the top flight. They are there on merit.

The goalless draw against the Baggies at Vicarage Road this season though made me consider for the first time in a long time that Watford might actually be a better side than West Brom, all things considered.

They didn’t effortlessly inhabit a higher footballing plane this time round. My team is in the Premier League now, and we’re at this level on merit too.

Even so, I had never seen us win at West Brom before, and on Saturday morning winning any league game at all felt like a distant possibility, such has been our disappointing form since the turn of the year.

But, as they say, sometimes you’ve got to win ugly. And win ugly we certainly did.

A 1-0 victory courtesy of a scuffed Adlene Guedioura corner – albeit finished off deftly by Ben Watson – was just what the doctor ordered.

Add to that Heurelho Gomes’ heroics at the other end of the pitch, and it’s hard to see what else the Baggies could have done to stop us from winning. Saturday was just our day.

In saving two penalties, Gomes won us the match and has probably clinched the Player of the Season award, barring a dramatic upturn in form from Odion Ighalo in the final few fixtures.

The timing of this particular victory is vital. With a visit to Wembley at the end of the week, a fresh memory of actually winning a game of football is hugely significant to our chances of reaching the FA Cup Final.

A scrappy win is sometimes more valuable than a dominating victory. It gives the team belief, and puts winning regardless of performance into the players’ psyche.

This particular match was not easy on the eye, but it was necessary. And to be honest, I enjoyed the disjointed nature of the battle.

Pulis always sets his sides up to play a kind of attrition football, and that can be extremely frustrating to watch. Especially if you’re beaten of course.

But Quique Sanchez Flores is more and more just a cooler version of Pulis every passing week this season, and it’s starting to become apparent that the tactics that Pulis is infamous for are an indispensable factor at this level.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see progression. But I understand both sides of the argument regarding defensive pragmatism versus free-flowing football.

Anyway, it wouldn’t have been right to see this game settled by guile or intricacy; Saturday was all about brute will and industry.

Passing was often wayward, luck was ridden, and in the end I don’t think anyone but the Watford fans can truthfully say they enjoyed those 90 minutes.

My brother tells me that one international commentator noted at full-time that the match was ‘probably the worst Premier League game [he’d] ever seen.’ I’m completely fine with that.

Finally, it’s been a longstanding frustration that we haven’t reached the 40-point mark sooner, and even though it’s something of an arbitrary figure, it clearly means something.

Maybe it’s just a psychological thing, but talk since Saturday has been far more upbeat, with Flores now talking about how we are ‘enjoying the experience and the journey’, and saying that we can now all of a sudden play ‘without nerves’.

The celebrations from the travelling supporters at full time at the Hawthorns certainly suggests that the 40-point benchmark means a great deal, and I’m delighted to say that we’re about to move into uncharted territories with our first survival in the Premier League all but confirmed.

We’ve made league history now, and we could yet make cup history too before we pack up for our summer holidays.