Four-Month Reign Adds To The Bewildering Madness

This isn’t being wise after the event. It looked a very questionable choice even while the dust was settling on the 2021-22 season and Rob Edwards should have been lapping up the acclaim that came with leading Forest Green to the League Two title.

“It will be different from now on…..there will be much more time……no more knee-jerk reactions,” they told us around the time of his appointment at a club still then in the Premier League. Really? What value do we put on ANY pronouncements coming out of Watford?

Social media cynics were suggesting the former Wolves defender and coach was in trouble as early as mid-summer, when, after all, he still hadn’t won a single match.

They weren’t too far wrong. A matter of three months or so on and he is head coach no more; the latest victim of Vicarage Road’s basket-case impatience.

Ten League games and tenth place in the fledgling Championship table were all it took to convince this particularly dangerous swarm of Hornets that they had erred in their decision in May and should apply the fatal final sting to another of their managerial hopefuls.

Quite what Graham Taylor would have made of all this is not something for us to reproduce on a site like ours but the indecent haste with which Watford’s current rulers demand success bears little comparison with the late manager’s family-club values.

I couldn’t be less interested in what happens down there any more…..my main thoughts all along were with the man Dave Jones brought across the patch from Villa in 2004.

Was I the only one wincing when he jumped from the green calm of Gloucestershire into the Hornets’ nest? It always looked a high-risk move – surely something safer and sounder would have come along in the close season if he had waited.

Taking Forest Green to League One would have earned him a crack at a considerably bigger club at that level or one in the Championship. He didn’t need to challenge himself with rewriting recent ridiculous history.

Good luck to his successor, Slaven Bilic, but the difference is that the gnarled, amiable Croat has been round the block a few times, is 54 and might consider himself to be towards the latter end of his career in the dug-out.

Edwards is new to being in charge and is a builder. He worked well on the development side at Compton and again with the FA in age-group football before opting once more for day-to-day involvement.

He’s not in the quick-fix or ‘Flying Doctor’ category and needs to be more particular when the next big call comes, as it will.

In the meantime, we just hope he has a nice pay-off to soften the blow of this mystifying yet depressingly predictable dismissal.