“It’s just like Wembley again!” roared the away fans in the moments after the only goal, and they certainly had a point. When the teams last met, in the 2013 Championship play-off final, Palace had the better of the chances but scored only once, after Wilfried Zaha was tripped in the area by the Watford right-back, winning a penalty that was thumped into the top-left corner. This time, though the Hornets played better than at Wembley, the key moment was uncannily similar.
Allan Nyom was the culprit on this occasion, the only question being whether Zaha was inside the box when contact was made. “It was a penalty,” insisted the Palace manager, Alan Pardew. “The ball was travelling just outside the line, I thought, but the point of impact was inside the box.”
From the spot Yohan Cabaye went the same way as Kevin Phillips had at Wembley, with an identical result. Palace have now lost only one of their last 10 matches at Vicarage Road and sit sixth in the Premier League table, borne upon a tide of victories on the road. Pardew now has 11 wins in 14 away games as Palace manager, and three from four this season.
“We’ve got good players for an away team because we’ve got pace,” he said. “I said to the guys today: ‘Let’s not retreat in any way today. Let’s take the game to Watford.’ It made the game very even in the first half, though not great entertainment. That made us grow in confidence and in the end we found some hot pockets, which we exploited.”
They had to work hard to find those hot pockets, rotating their attacking players with dizzying regularity. Jason Puncheon played on the right in the first half and as a centre-forward in the second; Bakary Sako started on the right, moved to the left, then to the middle and finally settled on the left; Yannick Bolasie spent most of the first half on the left and much of the second on the right.
Only Dwight Gayle, making his first league start of the season at centre-forward in the absence through injury of Marouane Chamakh and Connor Wickham, stayed in the same role, and his pockets were often the hottest of all. He had three excellent chances to score, all in the second half.
The first and finest came from Sako’s low cross from the left which Gayle reached only to somehow prod the ball on to the angle of bar and right-hand post. Heurelho Gomes truly knew his luck was in when the ball rebounded straight into his gloves.
Then in the 78th minute Zaha – who had come on for Sako with half an hour to play – crossed deep from the left, Bolasie headed back to the near post and Gayle sidefooted narrowly wide.
Finally, with six minutes remaining, Puncheon found him running clear on the left but Craig Cathcart got back in time to complicate matters, the eventual shot rolling wide. Palace had also created the finest chance of the first half, Sako winning a free-kick on the left with a comically over-dramatic reaction to Nyom’s touch, Cabaye sending it into the area and Gomes saving spectacularly from Brede Hangeland’s point-blank header.
As Watford’s supporters wonder where to calibrate their expectations for this season, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: they won’t be scoring an enormous number of home goals. The first four home games of their first season in the top flight, 1982-83, finished with an aggregate score of 15-1; this season it is 1-1.
They manufactured little more than half-chances here, with Palace’s centre-back pairing of Scott Dann and Hangeland expertly snuffing them out, and Joe Ledley protecting them from midfield where necessary. As Quique Sánchez Flores put it, when asked about the incident that led to the penalty: “We didn’t lose today because Nyom gave away a penalty, we lost because we didn’t play well and Palace were better than us”.
Watford went close with two near-identical free-kicks either side of half-time, the first, from Almen Abdi, clipping the wall when apparently goalbound, the second from José Manuel Jurado thudding against the bar. The otherwise subdued Troy Deeney stretched to head the rebound over an empty net.
Their finest flurry of attacking play came after 54 minutes when Deeney headed to Odion Ighalo, who laid off to Abdi, whose low shot was well saved by Wayne Hennessey.
Beyond that they did little but give Palace’s defenders opportunities to demonstrate their excellence. Hangeland stretched to clear the impressive Ikechi Anya’s low cross in the first half with Ighalo preparing to tap in, Dann intervened to prevent a certain goal after Ighalo spun on to Deeney’s knockdown moments after the goal and Ledley flung himself at Jurado’s 20-yard drive in stoppage time.
The game petered out amid a flurry of clumsy challenges and yellow cards, seven of which were shown in the last 20 minutes, with the visitors, to Watford’s familiar frustration, dictating the pattern of play.
Man of the match Yannick Bolasie (Crystal Palace)
