Quique Sanchez Flores: Watford manager is no pushover, says Troy Deeney
Spaniard has Watford in the FA Cup sem-final
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Your support makes all the difference.As the criticism, from within and without, mounted upon Arsene Wenger the manager who defeated him at the Emirates on Sunday enjoyed only praise.
Troy Deeney, Watford’s long-serving striker, led the plaudits for Quique Sanchez Flores.
In the wake of Watford’s dispatch of the FA Cup holders Flores could little more than the repeat a sense that everything was ‘amazing’ but Deeney was more effusive.
“He treats everybody with respect, but he demands from you and he is not a pushover,” he said of the 51-year-old Spaniard. “He is a nice guy, but we have had managers in the past who were nice guys and when it wan crunch-time they didn’t make the decisions.
“He brought Adlene [Guedioura] in today and he got his goal and it looks like a master-stroke. He dropped me a few weeks ago. I got back into the side and scored two – there is no-one safe from being dropped.”
Quique spent a dozen years in at right-back with Valencia, Real Madrid and Real Zaragoza, before turning to coaching. Watford was his eighth job in 11 years, his peripatetic career taking him to Portugal and the United Arab Emirates as well as his native Spain. Having won the Europa League with Atletico Madrid in 2010 (beating Fulham) his career seemed in decline before he joined Watford in the summer.
A matchday squad’s worth of players arrived with him and most anticipated a season of struggle for the newly-promoted side. However, Watford began brightly and have rarely faltered.
They have long been safe from the drop even if Deeney insisted: “We are not safe until we see three other teams with an ‘R’ next to them.”
He added: “At the start of the season we people wrote Watford off, but [Flores] has done a great job. Credit to Leicester, but if it wasn’t for them I suppose everyone would be saying what a great first season he has had.”
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