Benitez rewarded for keeping the faith after first

Rafael Benitez had endured a lot during Newcastle United’s winless start to the season, the stress and strain of coping with disappointment after setback taking its toll on the Spaniard to such an extent that he even began to question himself.

Benitez is not a man who entertains self-doubt. His conviction in his methods is normally unwavering, but after 10 games without a win, he spent his evenings in his Jesmond penthouse flat frantically searching through the notes he has meticulously kept during his career for answers to the problems on Tyneside.

There was a eureka moment, but it was not what he expected. What he learnt was he was doing nothing wrong – and neither, really, were the team. What it told him was that Newcastle were not that far away from ending their dismal run, that if he carried on doing the same things that had brought him success at Valencia, Napoli, Liverpool and Chelsea, the first win of the season would come.

“I think we have stopped the negative momentum,” Benitez said. “I have been using all my experience to think about what we could do to change things. I was reading all my notes from the past, and from psychologists, looking for things you could do.

“We were trying everything, and we were so close, so we decided it was not really a case of having to change this or that because we were doing so well. We needed to win to confirm that everything we were doing was right.”

He was. Watford are one of the Premier League’s in-form teams. Newcastle have played better than they did on Saturday and lost, but this time the result was different.

They clung on in the first half. Watford failed to take the chances they created and paid the price after the break when two substitutes combined, Ki Sung-yueng winning and delivering the free-kick that was glanced in by Ayoze Perez. Newcastle finally had a lead at home to defend this season.

It brought out the best in every-