Gianfranco Zola admits his players have "a long way to go" but is hoping Watford can take their renewed confidence into Saturday's game and repeat their away form at Vicarage Road.

After losing four games on the bounce, the Hornets are now three games unbeaten including impressive away victories at Huddersfield Town and most recently, against Charlton Athletic.

The Hornets coach is certainly keeping his feet firmly on the ground and while he hopes his players will have drawn confidence from recent success, he recognises there is a long way to go.

He said: "It is good news, very good news, but we need to keep going because it is a tough league.

"The victory we had the other day at Charlton is a massive confidence boost for everyone, it is huge, but that is only one part – we need to make sure we maintain the confidence and that we are focused on a tough game on Saturday.

"It is getting better but we can’t say everything is perfect. The situation is better because we were playing good football and we were not getting the results but now we’ve found a bit more solidity at the back and the results have come.

"It’s very, very early, we just want to improve, we have made a good step forward but there’s a lot of things we need to do, a lot of things we need to work on, so it’s getting better but there is still a long way to go."

Watford are now 12th in the Championship and just six points off league leaders Cardiff City, but Zola insists he is not interested in league positions just yet.

He said: "We have so much to work on and we need to improve on many things. We didn’t look at the table before these two games and we won’t start watching it now."

One table Zola has been keeping an eye on though, is the away league which shows Watford sitting joint top.

The Hornets have been impressive on their travels but their form at Vicarage Road has been stuttering and that is something Zola wants to improve, starting against Middlesbrough tomrrow (Saturday).

"I noticed before that in the tables of away games we are top of the league but in the home games we are third or fourth off the bottom so we need to make sure we improve our home performances a little bit,"