Tom Cleverley is the first Watford manager to be unbeaten in his opening nine home games for more than 120 years.
Saturday’s draw with Coventry means it’s now five wins and four draws for the head coach since he first took the role on an interim basis in March.
However, the man who holds the record for the best-ever home start by a Watford boss, John Goodall, is unlikely to see his achievements ever be bettered – he won his first 20 home games!
The sequence started on the opening day of the 1903/04 when Goodall’s first game in charge saw a 6-1 win over Portsmouth Reserves on Saturday September 12, 1903, in the Southern League Division Two.
Watford won all 19 home league and cup games they played that season, including a 10-0 romp against Southall and 9-0 wins over Wycombe Wanderers and Hitchin Town.
Having secured promotion to Southern League Division One, they won their first home game of the 1904/05 season, beating Luton 1-0, before the run finally ended in a 1-0 home defeat at the hands of Tottenham on Saturday September 10, 1904.
Graham Taylor lost one of his first nine home games – a 3-1 defeat to York City on August 27, 1977 – but he did win the other eight.
At the other end of the success scale, Roy Hodgson only managed Watford for eight games at Vicarage Road, losing seven of them and drawing the other with a combined aggregate score of 6-21.
Caludio Ranieri fared only slightly better: he won one and lost the other seven of his home games in charge, the aggregated score being 7-20.
Xisco Munoz mirrored GT’s achievement of winning eight of his first nine home games, the one defeat being a 2-1 loss to QPR.
Given the financial issues at the time, Ray Lewington surprisingly managed six wins and two draws from his first nine home games in 2002.
Watford have, in their history, enjoyed 275 runs of nine home games or more without defeat, the longest being 29 matches which started on October 15, 1963, and ended on December 19, 1964, during which time when they won 19 and drew 10.
Saturday was the third season in a row where Watford have drawn their fifth league game, and it was their 200th draw overall in the second tier of English football.
Statistics kindly supplied by the Watford Database at wfc.net
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