Less mavericks who are inconsistent, and more players who reliably give you a 7/10 performance every week.
That is what Tom Cleverley says Watford need to consider if they want to get serious about being promoted now or in the future – and he drew on his own Watford success to back that opinion up.
The head coach played 34 times in the Championship in the 2020/21 campaign when the Hornets secured promotion to the Premier League with a couple of games to spare.
Four years later his team sit just outside the play-off places despite a season dogged by inconsistency, and Cleverley said teams who cannot hit a decent level of performance in every game will not get promoted.
“I will say it until I’m blue in the face – I have been promoted from this division and there is absolutely no future in giving a 9/10 performance on Saturday and a 2/10 on Tuesday,” the Watford boss stressed.
“You are better hitting 7/10 every single game.
“The season we were promoted we were a better than average team but our lowest performance was average – 6/10, 7/10.
“We never went below that level.
“That is by doing the basics every single time.
“There is absolutely no future in being a team full of mavericks in this division, so we need more players who can play percentage football and do the basics well.
“It’s what I know. It’s the type of player I was.
“Some of these lads have talent you wouldn’t even believe but are they going to reach their full potential?
“That is my challenge to get that out of them, and I feel like being straight up is sometimes the best way.”
The inference is, then, that the current iteration of Watford squad is going to be inconsistent, and therefore not able to sustain a push for the play-offs and promotion.
“Yeah it is, until the penny drops and until they realise they have some good examples in the dressing room to learn from on how to have an elite mindset,” said Cleverley.
“It’s funny because I’ve said before, when you go up to the Premier League as a club like us, you can afford to have more mavericks because you only need to win nine, maybe 10, games a season to count that as success.
“Now when you’ve got the ambitions that I have in this league – and hopefully everyone else has got – you need to win 20 to 25 games, as well as not getting beat in more than 10.
“That takes a serious level of consistency, making yourselves hard to beat and performing the basics well – a level that we have not got.”
Cleverley admitted because his team did not compete, Preston were able to set the tone for the game to suit their own style.
“Unfortunately we have to accept that if we don’t want roll our sleeves up and fight, compete as hard as the opposition, then the game will play out how they want it to play out,” he said.
“This is not meant to be disrespectful to Preston because they have some very good players and are very organised – but if they want it to be a battle, they will beat us. And that is sad to say.
“You have to match their level of competitiveness, and then if it turns into a football match I think we’ll win more than we lose.
“But if you see the level of competitiveness from us tonight, then we will get beat on a regular basis.”
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