Is it still called a “new manager bounce” when the manager is not particularly new? Whatever this was, it had Vicarage Road feeling far better about things and Watford looking considerably more akin to their old selves. From the jaws of defeat came what, on the basis of a ferocious assault on Arsenal’s goal in the second half, felt by the end like a 2-2 thrashing. Quique Sánchez Flores came back for afternoons like this and the home support, numbed by the atrophy of late-era Javi Gracia, would happily get used to more of them.
“Calm down, calm down,” Flores gesticulated to his players in added time, which came to an unwelcome close in the throes of a finale packed with barely credible levels of incident. He was concerned Watford were about to let their good work slip, with Joe Willock having failed to spot a fine opportunity to play Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in for the winner.
But he was kidding nobody: this was Premier League football played to its highest octave, in terms of drama and risk if not in quality, and amid the chaos it offered the notion that Watford might have made it second time lucky.
Until Roberto Pereyra’s equaliser there was the fear that, for Watford managers, running into Unai Emery had become akin to steamrollering over a clowder of black cats. In April Arsenal stole away from here with a thoroughly unmerited single-goal win.
Then, on Friday, Emery recounted the tale of a chance encounter with Gracia on a stroll round his home town, Hondarribia, during the international break. Their meeting began with pleasantries anticipating the Premier League battle they thought lay ahead; by the time it ended, Gracia had been told his services would not be required for this fixture or, for that matter, any other.
Flores is not due his second nudge through Watford’s revolving door for a little while yet and, on this evidence, he will make a fine fist of outliving his previous season-long stay. On emerging from the tunnel before kick-off he clasped his hands and bowed, as if conscious of courting too much fuss. But the team he sent out looked anything but humble. He had asked them to be “brave with and without the ball” and in the opening stages they were combative and urgent: all quick transitions from the back, sweeping counterattacks and rapier incursions led by the outstanding Gerard Deulofeu.
It was redolent of the punchy football Watford played when, four years and five managerial appointments ago, Flores first led them into a top-flight campaign. The balance looked sound and Watford, supine off the ball in their previous home defeats to Brighton and West Ham, barely lost a 50/50 challenge until Dani Ceballos nicked the ball off Will Hughes in the buildup to Aubameyang’s opener.
Ceballos ran Deulofeu close in the man-of-the-match stakes during his hour on the pitch; he was to the fore for the rest of the first half, moving the ball around the pitch with a speed and smoothness his teammates could rarely rival. When Mesut Özil did manage something comparable, Aubameyang tapped in and the game seemed up. It was too much to expect that the defensive neuroses that crept in under Gracia might be cured overnight.
But it turned out that only a wide-eyed optimist should have expected Arsenal to see the game out. They crumbled through Deulofeu’s ingenuity, Abdoulaye Doucouré’s insistence and their own capacity for self-immolation.
After they established their lead it was possible to wonder whether, with Emery having taken the away-match shackles off by picking both Özil and Ceballos, the way might have been paved for a silky new phase of his north London project. But by the end it was Flores, shaking every player’s hand as they left the pitch to the strains of Depeche Mode’s “Just can’t get enough”, who looked like the manager ushering in a fresh wind.
