PNE beat the Hornets 3-0 on Wednesday night

Watford head coach Tom Cleverley felt his side lost the battle at Deepdale, as Preston North End ran out 3-0 winners on Wednesday night.

It was goalless at half time between PNE and the Hornets, but Milutin Osmajic scored a brace in the space of 13 minutes - before Ali McCann’s piledriver to make it three. Watford had started the season strongly, but their struggles on the road continued.

As for North End, it was a second league win under boss Paul Heckingbottom - and the reaction that was required after defeat at Millwall, last weekend. Cleverley headed into the game with confidence high and therefore cut an extremely frustrated figure, post-match.

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He said: “If you don’t win the battle then you have to absolutely dominate the ball and we didn’t do either of those this evening. It’s going to be a competitive game when you come to Deepdale, we all know, and that’s not being disrespectful to them because they played some good stuff as well.

“But they’re a team that values that side of the game, and I didn’t think we were aggressive enough or intense enough this evening. If you don’t do that you can still win games – you make it difficult for yourself but you can win games by being busy on the ball, and everyone wanting to take the ball.

“We just didn’t show enough character in possession. I am disappointed because Bramall Lane, Carrow Road, we failed in those tests. I really thought tonight was the evening where we make a sort of statement and say to the rest of the league: ‘We’re here, we want to be challenging...’.

“We have failed in that challenge, so I am disappointed. We played within ourselves first half. We were in the game, but we didn’t look like a team desperate to challenge at the business end of the table. We looked like a team happy to be a mid-table team. We’ve come here with a mid-table mindset and we work far too hard to be that.”