LIFTED BY SLADE
Cardiff finally win outside of Wales to keep up pace
to third place two seasons ago, and the transformation was instant.
Marshall made two splendid saves inside ten minutes. He parried Almen Abdi’s powerful drive, after which John Brayford cleared Deeney's follow-up off the line, then denied Matej Vydra one-on-one.
It became a familiar pattern. Just as they did in Zola’s side, Deeney and Vydra linked up smoothly, Abdi and Gianni Munari joined attacks from midfield and Ikechi Anya was a gnat-like irritant on the left.
One Deeney-to-Vydra pass released the Czech through on goal, but Brayford held him up long enough to allow other defenders to get back. Soon after Vydra slipped behind the defence once more, but this time Matthew Connolly recovered with a sliding tackle to block his shot.
40 seconds into the second-half Marshall brilliantly denied Munari, who later also hit the post.
In the final half-hour Watford faded as Jokanovic tried to shoehorn Vydra, Deeney and substitute Fernando Forestieri into the attack and, as they have done throughout his reign, they contrived to negate much of each other’s threat.
The Watford head coach said: “Probably I made the wrong changes. We didn’t find what we tried to find with the substitutions.
“For 70 minutes we played very well. We had control, we made chances and we made one mistake. We had a problem with long balls, especially with Jones.
“It’s very difficult to explain what’s happened here. We are not in an easy situation.
“It’s normal that after four games without a point we are a little bit nervy. For 60-70 minutes we believed we could change the situation, but then we started to play without power.”