After 34 minutes the League One strugglers looked dead and buried after goals from Watford’s Tom Dele-Bashiru, Nathaniel Chalobah and Roberto Pereyra had seemingly put the game to bed. But the team from lower division overcame the deficit in second half to draw with Watford team and force a replay.
Nigel Pearson said “For me the priority has got to be the Premier League. I can’t sit in front of you and try to give you a feeling that everything is equal in terms of how we look at competitions. Unfortunately for us the FA Cup is not the priority. If we were in a more comfortable situation and had more players available, but we don’t at the minute, we have quite a lengthy injury list and I can’t afford as a football club to put ourselves into a situation where we go into the league programme with even fewer players available. It’s relatively simple like that as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got to make decisions based on what’s right for our season. Of course I would have liked to have gone through today and at half-time, coming in as we did, I would have expected us to see it through. But when you have an injury at half-time and then two players come off because they’ve got cramp it just shows you the situation we find ourselves in”
The Hornets were bottom of the Premier League when Pearson took charge in early December, but have improved on their position after a good run. This was an unwelcome jolt for Pearson, who had guided his side to three wins in the past four matches after taking over in early December. It seemed as if his gamble in making wholesale changes to his XI had paid off when two superb strikes from Dele-Bashiru and Chalobah, followed by Pereyra’s side-foot finish, earned his side a three-goal lead going into the break.To compound the hosts’ misery, their two most “senior” players on the day, Chalobah and Pereyra will miss next weekend’s crunch league clash at Bournemouth.
