Javi Gracia played his cards close to his chest on why Marco Silva's Watford went through such a bumpy run of form in the final two months of his tenure.

But make no mistake, the 47-year-old new arrival knows where he thinks the problems have lay, having watched all 26 of their games from this season already.

He may have only met his players for the first time on Monday, but he has already identified where they need to improve, and set about doing it for this Saturday's FA Cup clash at Southampton.

He said: "To get good results, you need to be consistent, work hard and look at what has gone wrong so we haven’t got results in the last 11 games.

"I don’t want to speak about that publicly, because that was under a different coach, and I would like to talk about the future. But it’s our job to evaluate all these things, and look at how we can turn the results around.

"I think the best way to bring confidence into the team is through results. But it’s a circle. You get a good result, you get more confidence, and so on.

"I think I need to practice everything. Defensively of course we need to improve, because we have conceded a lot of goals. We need to find a good balance. But we need to work in attack too."