‘January – sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me.’

In 1975, Scottish popsters Pilot enjoyed their sole UK No.1 with a song that refers to the month of the year but, as it turns out, was a love song penned about a girl using the name of a character in a book the writer’s wife was reading.

Notwithstanding that, the opening line above is very felicitous when thinking about that time of year as Christmas has come and gone, the days are cold, short and dark, and because many people get paid early in December finances are often stretched.

Of course, in the world of football, January is a month loved by the media and fans because it sees the opening of a transfer window and with it all the rumours, gossip and player moves.

It’s fair to say Watford’s last two January transfer windows have not been very good, although for very different reasons.

In January 2023, the then head coach Slaven Bilic repeatedly spelt out what he felt he needed and wanted – using three fingers in multiple press conferences as he visibly listed ‘midfield leader, winger, striker’.

He even gave the club a set of names, and believed those players were lined up, only to find out that what he was actually getting was something completely different.

In an interview with the Watford Observer, Bilic admitted the thing he should have done differently while at Vicarage Road was to be stronger in January.

An admirable admission, but he’s also probably being hard on himself – after all, a succession of head coaches before him had worked at the club through January and seen a smorgasbord of players arrive.

Sometimes they were what was needed, sometimes they weren’t. Some proved to be good signings, many didn’t.

The common denominator was that the head coach didn’t really have a great deal of say, and the decisions about which players would be signed were being made further along the corridor at the training ground.

A good example would be January 2022, when in the space of three weeks Hassane Kamara, Edo Kayembe, Samir and Samuel Kalu arrived at the club.

I’ll readily admit I’d never heard of any of them – and you can decide for yourselves who was a success and who wasn’t.

So previous January windows had all followed a pattern the incumbent head coach often needing to do a quick search of Soccerbase or Transfermarkt to learn a bit more about the lad who had just arrived at London Colney with his boots and a washbag.

January 2024 was different though.

It was an extension in the change of approach that the club, possibly unwisely in hindsight, tried to underline early in Valerien Ismael’s tenure.

Ismael’s first ten league games delivered two wins, three draws and five defeats and he got an extended contract.

A year earlier Rob Edwards started with three wins, five draws and two defeats and he got a P45.

The new contract was the club’s way of attempting to validate and corroborate the message that things had changed, the club was committed to Ismael and the days of spinning the wheel of managerial fortune at the first hint of a problem were behind them.

That approach then extended into January, during which time Ismael was in charge of transfer dealings.

Fans may choose to believe otherwise or think they know differently, and given the levels of generally understandable contempt for the owner that’s not a surprise.

However, the most recent January transfer window was carried out to Ismael’s instructions, and from 11pm on February 1, when the window shut, the squad, its contents, its depth and its options were what he signed off on.

Way back in late November, I had the chance to talk to him privately, away from a press conference, in his office at the training ground.

A lot of ground was covered, and that included his aims for the upcoming transfer window.

Ismael was very clear: a pacy forward, a left-footed central defender and a holding midfielder. That was the three things he wanted and, unlike Bilic, he had a very clear message that the club would deliver.

Not since perhaps Walter Mazzarri in 2017 had Watford given as much control of transfer dealings to a head coach – and that was the same with pretty much everything else. The Hornets hierarchy were significantly more ‘hands off’ with Ismael than those who came before him.

Ismael seemed very happy with the arrangement too, often referring to enjoying being able to meet with the board weekly at the training ground, having them there if he needed them, but also being distanced enough that he didn’t feel he was being micro-managed.

So coming into January, the club had a precise idea of what Ismael was looking for, and they also had the names of the exact players he wanted for the midfielder and defender.

The striker issue is a little more unclear. He had said when we talked that he felt pace was key in the forward that needed to come in.

He wasn’t looking for a big No.9 type, more somewhere who could play that role but was equally adept on the flanks with the speed and skill to go at teams.

He’d said in the summer that he had declined the opportunity to sign Emmanuel Dennis, and so it did come as a surprise when the Nigerian rocked up amid the sort of fanfare normally reserved for astronauts returning from a space mission.

Nonetheless, Dennis certainly fitted what Ismael described and, while playing him out wide hasn’t worked or allowed the player the best chance to showcase what we know he can do, it does tally with what the manager said he wanted.

What isn’t clear is whether Dennis was the name he gave to the club, whether the club gave the name to him, and/or if any other alternatives were considered.

Notwithstanding the answer to any of those questions, taking a punt on a player who looked exceptional for a time in the Premier League, needed to get his career back on track and was willing to take a financial hit to get back to somewhere he felt loved felt like a good move all round.

The fact he clearly wasn’t fit was the only thing that seemed strange – like Bilic before him, Ismael had talked of wanting a player who could arrive today and play tomorrow.

Dennis arrived on January 4 and played just 171 minutes in the next month.

However, Ismael had his forward, now it was a case of waiting for the midfielder and defender to arrive.

And this is where Ismael may live to regret what appears to be a degree of stubbornness, inflexibility and intransigence.

He gave the club two names, they set about trying to get them and they came up against a brick wall.

And that wasn’t just a brick wall in the sense of not being able to get those exact players, it was also that Ismael wouldn’t countenance the signing of anyone else.

He spoke about not wanting to sign a player for the sake of it, that he would prefer no player if he couldn’t get the right player, how even 1% of doubt was too much.

Alternatives to his two preferences were offered to him, players of the same profile as he had outlined – players that were playing first-team football and/or younger players from the Premier League looking to get game time.

But as we know now, nobody else arrived and so with the departures of Rhys Healey, Imran Louza and Jorge Hurtado (who later got injured), Watford ended January with a net loss of numbers and subsequently a thinner squad – something which seemed both unimaginable and unforgivable.

And that ultimately lays at the door of the head coach.

There are many things for which those running club should be scrutinised, analysed and potentially criticised – and there will be many reading this who will not want to cut them even the tiniest degree of slack.

Yet they stood by Ismael’s judgment in January, they gave him control and – ironically – they didn’t sign players for him.

They didn’t want him to fail and, as is shown by the amount of time they gave him during the most of miserable of runs, they didn’t rush to pull the trigger.

Ismael ended up being hung by his own petard.

What made matters worse with a small squad that still had gaps in it come February 1 was that, as I wrote recently, Watford then entered a series of seven games in 21 days, the most matches in the fewest days of any club in the Championship in that period.

The Hornets lost four, drew two and ground out a victory at Rotherham that was turgid in every sense except the result.

The FA Cup replay defeat at Southampton was, I felt at the time, very telling.

Clearly wanting to give some of his players a rest, Ismael shuffled his pack that night at St Mary’s.

Yet seven of the nine players on the bench were those taken out of the firing line to give them a break, five of them ended up coming on anyway and, very oddly, Tom Ince stayed on the bench and played just one minute as a sub when he hadn’t started a game in two and a half months.

Had Ismael agreed to sign anyone in January then they could have played in that cup replay, never mind any of the other seven games in that three-week spell.

Instead, he could only move the deckchairs around while the Titanic slowly listed.

The home defeat to Huddersfield, and particularly the manner of it, would probably have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in seasons gone by, but the club continued to stand by Ismael.

The defeat at Millwall with the owner watching on was similarly abject, the second half against Swansea earned a point and a few more days, but yesterday’s defeat was the denouement for the Frenchman.

Already the media and pundits are gathering above the carcass with their stories and tweets about the number of head coaches Watford have had, and what a despicable club they are.

I’d defy any of them to watch the full 90 minutes of the last 12 games and, at the end, say they still felt the Hornets had made a bad decision.

There have been plenty of head coach decisions, both who to hire and when to fire, that were very fair game for criticism.

But sadly, this time, there wasn’t really much else to be done given the results, performances and lack of absolute certainty that relegation is not something to be worried about.

When the board gave Ismael control of transfer business in January, they did what they thought was right.

When he chose to sign just one player and go into the rest of the season with the thinnest squad in the division, Ismael equally did what he thought was right.

Sadly for him, the club and us fans, Ismael was wrong.