Watford fan Kieran Callanan gives his view on what's led to Quique Sanchez Flores' departure as head coach

Who could have foreseen Quique Sanchez Flores’ imminent departure when we were putting Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool to the sword back in December though? Where did it all go wrong?

In fact, did it all go wrong?

The Liverpool match would be the high point of our season, falling almost exactly in the middle of the fixture list. A thumping 3-0 win that genuinely felt like it was coming.

Our improvement in the final third in our previous three straight victories tagged with our ever-resilient defensive line meant such a result didn’t feel outlandish.

We played with urgency and flair, and teams couldn’t handle us. We were exuberant but absolutely solid at the back.

As the referee blew the full time whistle back on December 20, we sat just one point off of the Champions League places. Anything seemed possible.

With Leicester City still hanging in strong at the top, and reigning champions Chelsea still languishing in the bottom half, talk turned to hopeful ‘you never know’s about our chances of a top-half or – say it quietly – Europa League spot finish.

But a little over four months later, as we all made our way to Wembley, ‘you never know’ had an altogether different meaning.

At this point, we had won just one league game in our last eight, and fans were frustrated with Flores’ insistence on the same faces within the same structure, even after consecutive losses.

We weren’t going for it in games anymore. The form of Odion Ighalo and Troy Deeney earlier on in the season ended up blighting our 2016 performances. Flores simply couldn’t drop either one of the two, in case the next match was the one in which things finally clicked again.

It was as if the other players behind the front two were there to defend, and the attacking was solely left to the strike partnership. A reluctance to change this imbalance from the head coach was exasperating, and when we saw the team sheet for the semi-final, I daresay we knew the writing was on the wall.

That trip to Wembley was undoubtedly the low point of our season. And in many ways that’s inexcusable.

We played a Crystal Palace side short of confidence, dropping like a stone in the league. They were, like us perhaps, too preoccupied with the FA Cup, and their only league win of the calendar year by the semi-final was a narrow 1-0 at home to the now-relegated Norwich City.

Nonetheless, we seemed to line up to stifle, rather than to create. Four central midfielders across the middle, with no pace or width to speak of in the entire starting 11.

But look again at that marauding win at Vicarage Road back in December. The team that faced Liverpool was exactly the same bar the goalkeeper.

We set up in a compact 4-4-2 that day, with Jose Manuel Jurado and Almen Abdi on the wings, and the outcome was vastly different. What had changed?

The fact that so little had changed was the issue.

Unlike Flores’ flexibility at the start of the season, when he quickly realised that he couldn’t set up with just one striker when Ighalo and Deeney worked so well together, we were shown every week that the head coach would not adapt.

Whether other teams had worked us out or our players had become fatigued and short of new solutions, we were picked off game after game since the turn of the year.

Flores’ early experiments relating to how the team should fit around Ighalo and Deeney now appear to be a series of one-offs. The Spaniard is nothing if not stubborn in this phase of the season, and I believe this has a large part to play in his departure.

The fact that some players are dropped for apparently poor performances on the pitch, whilst others are not given rewards for impacting a game from the bench, must be hugely disparaging for some of the fringe and younger players at the club.

Jurado has been undroppable all season despite his failure week after week to translate his obvious footballing talent into more than a single assist in the league.

Yet Steven Berghuis’ man-of-the-match-winning half-an-hour against Aston Villa did not result in a long-awaited first league start in a yellow shirt in the following game.

Decisions like these have left supporters scratching their heads, and it is for this reason that although Flores leaves with most fans’ best wishes, his exit will not be mourned.

Of course, Flores has written himself in Hornets history, as he is the first man to steer the club to Premier League survival. But this was not deemed enough in itself to see the Spaniard in charge for a second season.

The important question now is whom we bring in to replace him, and it is imperative that this replacement takes the club forward.

This was the case when Flores came in for the promotion-winning Slavisa Jokanovic, and will be the case once again in the not-too-distant future I am sure. The ambition of the owners of the club demands that this will happen.

In many ways it’s horses for courses. When we needed someone to steady the ship after a huge dip in confidence under Gianfranco Zola, we brought in Beppe Sannino. When we wanted an individual to get the club to the Premier League, we called on Jokanovic. When we got to the top flight, it was deemed that the man to keep us there was Flores.

Once we were safe in the Premier League, those in a position of power turned their thoughts to the next level, and it was decided that Flores was not the man to take us beyond the status of Premier League survivors.

Whether this decision was made too hastily we may never know, but we’ve been lucky enough to have experienced a near enough constant gradual improvement since the Pozzo takeover of 2012, and so we owe it to Gino and the management to back their choice, however unusual it may feel when we look at the league table tomorrow night.

Flores himself now owes the club and its owners nothing, and we should give him the send off he deserves tomorrow. He will forever be the first man to consolidate our Premier League status, and for that we should thank him.

Sing his name loudly before we start thinking about the next chapter. We owe that to Quique at least.