There are seemingly three certainties in life: death, taxes and Watford changing head coach every few months.

When Roy Hodgson takes charge of his first game for the Hornets at Burnley next weekend, it will be 60 Premier League matches under seven different coaches, with an eighth boss thrown in for good measure during the Championship season.

This repeated inability to find a suitable coach to lead the club beyond the short-term suggests that it is the decision makers who are to blame, rather than the people they are bringing in, for the current predicament.

To paraphrase The Thick of It's Malcolm Tucker - if you're sacked after 12 months, it looks like you've messed up, but sacked after a week, it looks like they've messed up. While Watford's head coaches are lasting a bit longer than seven days, the sentiment is nonetheless apt.

That's not to say that Hodgson isn't a good appointment, per se. But it's clearly one made out of necessity from a position of weakness, rather than one intended to inspire excitement in the club's future and for that, the people behind the scenes have only themselves to blame.

Since Javi Gracia's sacking in 2019, the hiring of head coaches has been done almost entirely on a reactionary basis, with any sense of a plan extending no further than the end of a given season.

Such an unsustainable way of operating has merely exacerbated the Spinal Tap drummer scenario that continues to play out in the managerial hotseat, while time after time, opportunities to build have been wasted and any half-baked notions of identity and style have been jettisoned, leaving square peg coaches to be wedged into the round holes left over by their departing predecessors.

While there is often justification for the departures, two head coach sackings this season, one last season and three the campaign before that show that it has now reached a point where, justified or not, a big part of the system just isn't working. Simply put, Watford are good at knowing when to sack people, but when it comes to bringing in the right replacements, they are at best short-sighted and at worst completely incapable of addressing any genuine issues.

For instance, Hodgson could go on to save Watford this season, but then what? Do you stick with him and try and build a squad for a man who had for all intents and purposes retired at the end of last season? Or do the club then have to start back at square one and expect a new head coach to get a tune out a mishmash group of players, assembled with innumerable styles and purposes in mind and with no discernible philosophy?

The latter is much more likely and, all things considered, the club might even consider themselves fortunate to find themselves in that position come the summer, with relegation now an increasingly-distinct possibility.

What is needed is a thread of consistency in the club's approach, including a solid idea around how they want their team to play, and exactly what it is they want from a head coach.

Lurching back and forth between iron-fisted authoritarians keen on camping on the goalline and chummy 'arm around the shoulder' types happy for their centre backs to pitch in up front, all with their own unique brands of football, serves only to provide the squad with confusing and contradictory suggestions about exactly what it is they are supposed to be doing when they take to the field.

Whereas identifying a clear philosophy takes away some of the reactionary decisions while allowing for extensive pre-planning with both squad and head coach acquisitions and providing the team with a platform upon which they can grow and develop, instead of constantly having to hit the refresh button.

The concept of development is simple enough to grasp: each new head coach should leave the club in a stronger position that they found it, by building upon what was left over.

At Watford that has not been allowed to happen, simply because what is often left after a departure is little more than rubble and chaos and this untenable situation will be doomed to repeat itself, so long as this culture of on-the-hoof decision making is not properly addressed.

This summer, be it in the Premier League or the Championship, there will be an opportunity to put in place the beginnings of a club, working as it should, towards constant improvement, with a central identity in place.

Whether or not that opportunity will be grasped depends on how much the club is willing to learn from their growing list of mistakes.