EXCLUSIVE: Dan Gosling gives androofrench a frank and scathing assessment of what went wrong at Vicarage Road last season and why he wants to prove a few things to himself this season watfordfc
'You had players on the pitch that actually cared'. Dan Gosling in action against Everton. Pictures: Action Images unless stated
“I was working with the first-team squad but we had so many players that it was overcrowded. If they were doing a drill that needed 20 players, I was the first player to be told I wasn’t needed and so I’d end up training on my own. “I felt like I was being unfairly treated so I dug my heels in. The loan options were for clubs in the north, I’d just moved my pregnant wife and kids to this area and I couldn’t consider a loan that wasn’t commutable. I wasn’t going to uproot them to a new area and then move up north for three months.
“When Roy came in I wasn’t in the 25, but then Ashley Fletcher went out on loan and that opened up a place,” he explained. “I prepared as well as usual, warmed up well, came on for the last 20 minutes and we won the game. I was due to start the next game at Brighton as Kucka had got injured, but I got Covid and that sidelined me for four games.
“They signed Tufan from a Turkish club. He was here on loan: is he going to really care if the club goes down? He knew that whatever happened, he could go back to wherever he came from. He’d never played English football at all, never played here, never played in the Premier League. He wasn’t bothered and he wasn’t that fit either.“They signed Kucka. He’d played at the top level in Italy but had never played in England, didn’t know any of the players but goes straight into the team.
“I got picked to play against Stoke in the Carabao Cup, and I was told to go out there and show us what you can do,” he said. “We lost the game but I played 80 minutes and gave it my all. Then I was back out of the picture again.”“I spoke to the manager two or three times,” he said. “I remember I wasn’t even on the bench for the game at Norwich, and Xisco just said that we had a lot of players in the same position and I needed to bide my time.
There were stories of training sessions often being long periods of five-a-side football. Was that true? “To be fair to Roy, what he did in training was very repetitive, but at least it was game-like situations. You do need to freshen it up a bit though. This is 2022,” said Gosling. “I thought that attitude was a disgrace. There were a lot of disgraceful attitudes here last season and that’s ultimately the reason we went down. It wasn’t a question of ability. Maybe some players didn’t always hit the levels they are capable of, but it was the attitude of individuals that did for us.
“In those last three games you had people on the pitch that cared about Watford and wanted to play with a bit of pride. Before that you had people who didn’t really want to go out there and run around.” Rob Edwards gets his message across during the Hornets' pre-season trip to Austria. Picture: Alan Cozzi/Watford FC
From a player’s perspective, what has the new head coach done differently in training that is making a positive impact? “We had so many players here last season that we ended up in a queue to train. You’d have three sets of defenders waiting behind the goal to come on every ten minutes. You'd be doing a warm-up and then you’d have to stand still for ten minutes because it wasn’t your turn. In the middle of winter you’d be freezing and thinking ‘I really don’t want to be doing this’.Dan Gosling in pre-season training.
“We’re trying to be a pressing team this season, last year we just sat off every single team. That isn’t a good look, it brings criticism from the fans. It looks like a lazy attitude. You can sit off teams and not be lazy, but the way we were doing it was just not right. The fans had every right to be calling us out.
“As a player you’re thinking ‘okay, we’ve worked on doing this for a couple of weeks, and now we’ve got to disregard that and do something else?’ “The message from Rob has clear and consistent. We know what we’re doing and that we’ll be sticking to it. The players have to adapt to that. “Being in the middle of the pitch I can see certain things and I’m in a good position to communicate. I feel like I understand the system and the game of football.
“If you look back at that game, we won so many second balls that night. It was just helping people to know when to tuck around, when people needed to get inside, when the strikers should drop, so that when the ball drops we have players in the best position to get it. Then you have possession, and you can play your game.
“Age is just a number. Robert Lewandowski has just signed a long-term deal at Barcelona, and he’s 33. Christian Eriksen has just signed a three-year deal at Man Utd and he’s 30. Players today can go on playing to a high level well into their late 30s. “They encourage two-way discussions with us. Sometimes they might come to us with a clip of a something, sometimes we’ll go to them and ask to look at clips of games or training. They love working with us.”
“The new coaching staff are winners who want to succeed, and the players here now also want to succeed. We want to win the league. “I’d not long been here when we had that very feisty game down there. We lost the game and that was a big moment for them. But some of the things that went on, and are still going on in social media, weren’t pleasant.
“I wasn’t due to start at Norwich, and then before the pre-match meal Xisco pulled me to one side and said I was starting. I didn’t feel I had to go out and prove a point, I just went out to play my game and do my job within the team.
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