Watford players and fans alike will hope a stirring second-half display will provide the platform to kick on from in the Premier League after they battled back from two goals down and went close to beating abject Arsenal at a sun-drenched Vicarage Road.

The early signs were promising in Quique Sanchez Flores' first match since his reappointment, but the familiar questions about the Hornets' defending were soon to rear their heads again as the predatory Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang struck twice to put the Gunners seemingly firmly in command at the break. By the end of the second 45 minutes the visitors were to be grateful to escape with a point.

Watford emerged for the second after with a renewed sense of purpose and the intensity with which they went about the task in hand was to only escalate after a dreadful mistake from Sokratis enabled Tom Cleverley to halve the deficit.

Vicarage Road was rocking and so were Arsenal - in a very different sense of the word. As the number of attempts on the Gunners' goal mounted, so did the belief that the hosts could turn the game around and they duly pulled level when Roberto Pereyra calmly dispatched a penalty after being felled by a clumsy David Luiz challenge.

Sanchez Flores' men were not content to settle for a point though. Gerard Deulofeu and Cleverley both went close before a last-gasp counter-attack saw Ismail Sarr set up Abdoulaye Doucoure, but he was unable to beat Bernd Leno to seal a dramatic victory.

Here are a selection of images from what turned into a thrilling afternoon at Vicarage Road.