Not a single league victory in nine games between Boxing Day and February 26, failing to score in six of them.

If you were the owner/chairman of a team going through that run, would you decide it was time for a change of manager?

If that team went on to finish two places and eight points above the relegation zone at the end of the season, with only 39 goals from 42 league games (the joint lowest in the division) and having failed to score in almost half of all games, would you then decide it was time for a new manager?

If you answered yes to one or both of those questions, then you’d have cut short Graham Taylor’s first spell as Watford manager after only three seasons.

The greatest manager in the club’s history, whose success is highly unlikely ever to be repeated at Vicarage Road, took the Hornets from the old Division Four to Division One in less time than he even thought it would take.

But it wasn’t a story of one seamless march from the bottom to the top.

Having won Division Four and then been promoted out of Division Three the following season, the step up to Division Two slowed Watford’s progress.

And at the end of the 1979/80 season they finished 18th of 22, were indeed the joint lowest scorers and also endured a run of six home games without a win.

The following campaign was better (ninth) and then in 81/82 came Watford’s first promotion to the top-flight and we all know the story after that.

However, having been a fan through that time, I remember that first season in the old Division Two – it wasn’t particularly great to watch, we did flirt with the bottom three places and it was a shock to the system after two successive promotions.

What I don’t remember – and maybe that’s because there was much less media coverage and certainly no social media back in those days – was a clamour for GT to be removed.

Of course, Watford were surfing a wave of unprecedented success so stalling in Division Two was as understandable as it was forgivable.

Plus the Hornets had an owner in Elton John who knew that the Yellow Brick Road he and Taylor has set out on was never going to be a straight, flat journey. There would be turns, hills, dips and detours.

Would that be the case with today’s football world though? Would a manager who has won back-to-back promotions survive a run of nine games without a win at the turn of the year, just as the transfer window opens?

If he did, would only just staying up be good enough to let him have another crack the following season?

There is a myriad of things that make modern football less enjoyable than it should be: VAR, stupid kick-off times, diving, blatant timewasting, extortionate salaries . . . we all have our own lists that will have many common denominators and a few outliers.

For me personally, one thing about 21st century football that makes it ugly and unpleasant is short-termism.

You can soften that up by saying it’s a desire to succeed or even a lack of patience, but that’s just attempting to justify some truly ridiculous knee-jerk decisions and reactions.

And that isn’t just aimed at owners and chairman – it’s the whole of football, including the media and the fans.

So many people want success, but they want it yesterday.

In the case of football and the hiring and firing of managers, generally speaking the removal of the man in charge happens because the team hasn’t been doing well. That bit I get. It has always been so.

But then when someone new comes in to try and rectify the wrongs and get things back on track, there seems to be a feeling nowadays that there should be an instant upturn in performance and results. Don’t forget, you sacked the last bloke because things were bad, so whoever comes in isn’t inheriting a good situation.

Yet at the first whiff of the change not working, there comes a clamour for another change.

It doesn’t just apply to managers newly in the role, it’s also the same with those who have had a few seasons at a club but then seem to plateau – similar to GT and that 79/80 season.

If there isn’t a continually upward trajectory, then all sense appears to go out of the window.

The question is, who/what drives that mindset? Is it owners/chairman, who have invested their money, fearful of watching it go up in smoke?

Is it fans expecting their club to keep moving forward and using a change of manager as the most obvious way of showing something is being done to achieve that?

Or has the media become so obsessed with building things up and then knocking them back down again that they can’t help but circle like vultures even when the body they are hoping to peck at is far from dead?

I’ve never been, or am likely to be, an owner or chairman, so I’m not qualified to comment on how their minds work.

As a fan, I like to see Watford win and I would, admittedly, be happy to watch them win ugly than be thoroughly entertaining losers. Of course, utopia is to win playing great football, but having seen a stream of Manchester City fans leaving Wembley well before the end of the 2019 FA Cup Final, maybe even that becomes boring after a while.

The other thing I like is stability. Perhaps that’s because I was brought up on the GT era and bought into what he and the club were trying to do, even if it at times it wasn’t a conveyor belt of success.

There again, being autistic, I have a real issue with change, so I’m probably not the best person to ask!

As a member of the media, I readily accept that the industry does play its part in both putting pressure on clubs to succeed, and whipping up fans into often unnecessary frenzies.

On Saturday night, after what was without doubt the worst home performance of this season by a country mile, one well-known radio station tweeted a link to a story on their website that Watford head coach Valerien Ismael was on the ‘brink of the sack’.

I put that last phrase in inverted commas because it makes me chuckle. Don’t all managers, by dint of what we’re talking about here, live on the ‘brink of the sack’ every day of the week?

Last season West Ham won a European trophy. They are currently eighth in the Premier League. They won 4-2 on Sunday but before that had lost three games in a row. Manager David Moyes was, the media said, on the ‘brink of the sack’ before the win over Brentford at the weekend.

It’s an easy phrase to use because you’ll either be proved right, or say that the manager involved came back from the brink.

But on Saturday night Ismael was, the story said, ‘on the brink of the sack’. And with just one win in nine matches, and no league wins at home since November 28, it’s probably fair to say he’s under some pressure. I think he’d admit himself that things have to start getting better, quickly.

The story, though, had him with one foot through the exit door, and has led to an enormous amount of speculation on websites, forums, social media and among fans generally.

At this juncture, let me add the media outlet in question didn’t have anyone at Saturday’s game or in Ismael’s post-match press conference.

The story was pretty thin, but it tapped into the anger, despair and – dare I say it – impatience of supporters. That’s not to say those emotions are without foundation given the recent results and performances – or that all fans feel that way, as there are many who would not countenance a change of head coach currently.

Since then, I’ve seen all sorts of ‘corner flag’ tweets, predictions of announcements within [insert your choice of number] hours, and even had fans asking if I saw Ismael at the Under-21s game at Charlton on Monday.

I’ve not seen any of the head coaches I’ve worked with at an away Under-21 game. Occasionally at a home game, but not an away game.

What I do know is this: the team trained with Ismael on Sunday.

They then had a day off on Monday, except for the likes of Jeremy Ngakia/James Morris/Jack Grieves who travelled with the Under-21s at Charlton and played the first hour of the 3-2 win.

Yesterday they were training at London Colney with the head coach as usual. He wasn’t watching the Under-17 cup semi-final on pitch four at London Colney, although a number of his staff and some senior players were on the other touchline.

It has been, to all intents and purposes, business as usual – just as it was after the 4-2 defeat at Norwich 10 days earlier. The only difference was the one story that appeared on Saturday night.

Of course, things can change very quickly in football. Who knows what might happen should Saturday’s game at Millwall go badly.

The Lions themselves are on their third manager this season (as an aside, why do Sky never make such a big thing about other clubs having multiple managers in a season?!).

I think there have been 15 managerial changes in the Championship this season, so roughly two a month.

Some have been chasing a change in results, others are just utterly bizarre (I’m looking at you, Birmingham).

We know at Watford we have become the benchmark by which many judge whether a club has become too trigger happy.

And as Hornets fans, sometimes we are guilty of demanding and hoping for the very thing we criticise those who run the club for doing too much of in the past.

Of course, perhaps one other thing that is blighting modern-day football is extremely poor decision making by those who run clubs when it comes to choosing and hiring managers.

If you’ve done your homework, gone through due diligence and undertaken an exhaustive selection process, then even having the need to do the whole thing again during the same season is a sad indictment of how thorough the recruitment process actually was.

But back to the overall point I’m making: short-termism is a blight on the game, and all those involved play a part in that.

As Watford supporters, we have almost become indoctrinated in the idea that repeatedly changing head coach will solve things, even though it hasn’t on the last six times we’ve done it.

However, it’s hard as supporters to be critical at the revolving door approach if we then demand the club do exactly that when, only a few months ago, they asked us to buy into giving Ismael time by extending his contract.

And the media have piqued our interest and got everyone guessing by running a story that was, in itself, something of a guess mired in the reasonable assumption that when Watford have struggled before they have generally sacked the manager.

We’re all to blame, is basically what I’m saying. And it’s not just Watford, it’s football in general.

Football has changed, the expectations are totally different and patience is just a card game that players and fans use to kill time on long away trips.

Thankfully, as Watford supporters, we either remember or know of that time when GT did go through a sticky patch and emerged on the other side.

Things are so, so different now that it might be pure whimsy to even compare the two eras.

Short-termism is probably here to stay, and there is no version of VAR that can be used to reverse decisions when it comes to managers.