Craig Cathcart admitted that Watford could have few complaints after their relegation to the Championship was confirmed with a 1-0 defeat to Crystal Palace on Saturday.
Speaking to the club website, the centre back said that the Hornets had been punished for both poor performances and a lack of consistency throughout the season.
“I don’t think we can have too many complaints,” he said. “We’ve had ups and downs throughout the season, but we haven’t been consistent enough, we are where we are, and as a result we deserve to go down.
“We always knew it was going to be difficult coming up as one of the newly-promoted teams, and we’ve done well in some games and in parts of others, but we’ve paid the price for poor performances at other times.
“Roy came in in January, he’s been good and tried to bring us together. But we have to take responsibility as players, and we have to try and pick ourselves up now to perform well in the few games we’ve got left to play.”
The final nail in the coffin came courtesy of a Wilfried Zaha penalty, which Cathcart felt was harshly awarded for a handball by Hassane Kamara.
Nevertheless, there are now three games for Watford to focus on before they can start thinking about their push for promotion next season.
“We gave it a good go today. We’re disappointed with the penalty – we thought it was a bit harsh – and we were in the game until the end but just came up short," he continued.
“We have to finish as strongly as we can, and we have three big games to come now, starting on Wednesday. When the time comes we’ll look back and reflect, and then go again next year.”
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