Italian is 70 next week but insists he has the spirit, desire and optimism to revive a side facing a tough run of fixtures
It is likely that if most managers found themselves in charge at Vicarage Road at this moment they would glance at Watford’s fixture list – which in their next eight games includes encounters with both Merseyside teams and both Manchester sides as well as Chelsea, Arsenal and Leicester – look at the average lifespan of their recent head coaches and then book in a removals company and a flight home.
But to arrive at this moment, with Xisco Muñoz having been sacked for collecting seven points from seven relatively gentle opening games, something of an injury crisis brewing in central defence and the gates about to open on the raging fires of footballing hell, takes an unusual level of optimism. The kind of optimism generally found either in young men, eager, cocksure and yet to learn the meaning of failure, or by those burned by it so often they no longer notice the scars.
