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Based on their form and tactics, Watford are a team ripe for the picking by Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool.

Watford’s recent run of form has been awful. Draws against Brighton and Tottenham have been standout performances. But those have been wrapped around defeats to Aston Villa, Everton, Tranmere in the FA Cup and a hammering from Manchester United last week.

Still: Watford remains 14th in expected points table this season, a measure of how they should be performing given their underlying numbers, rather than where they actually are -- 19th in the Premier League table.

Nigel Pearson’s appointment in December brought with it a stylistic change, on and off the pitch. Out has gone any desire to play the ball out from the back, all the fancy stuff that got the team in trouble earlier in the year. In is the firefighting spirit, quick transitions, and bluster we typically associate with teams trying to avoid the drop.

When Pearson was first appointed, Watford improved seemingly overnight. But that early run of good form has come crashing back down in recent weeks. They’ve recorded just two points from their past five games and have started to look stodgy in possession, unable to carve out the kind of chances that make playing an ugly style of football worth it.

Pearson reformatted the team as soon as he arrived. He moved into a pseudo 4-2-3-1 look that morphed between a 4-2-4 and a 4-4-1-1 depending on the opponent and game situation. He unlocked the attacking potential of Abdoulaye Doucouré, the most talented player in Watford’s team. Under the previous regime, Doucouré was playing as either a holding midfielder or box-to-box shuffler. He had, unfortunately, fallen into a stereotype of his body shape and size.

But Doucouré has always been more than a gifted athlete who reads the game well. He has excellent feet and vision, and a PhD-level understanding of the geometry of the pitch: how his body shape and movement corresponds to everyone else’s. Together with Troy Deeney, he’s formed a delightful two-man tandem, full of skill and power and understanding.

How? The old-fashioned way: bypassing the defence, lumping the ball up to Troy Deeney, letting the striker attack the ball aerially, and hoping knockdowns and flick-ons could bring Doucouré onto the ball at pace. From there, he has the skill and savvy to bring others into play.

Watford are almost entirely bypassing their backline. Check out their passing radar from their 3-2 defeat against Everton:

This is from the last game they earned a positive result: Brighton away.

You can see the team goes whole games without their goalkeeper, Ben Foster, rolling the ball out to either of the centre-backs. Instead, he’s driving the ball forwards to Deeney or quickly releasing the ball to a fullback, who then shuffles the ball and so that it can work its way up to Deeney in a more rounded way.

Perhaps the most telling chart as it relates to today’s game is the one against United:

Clearly, Watford had no intent on playing the ball around at the back or dithering with it in midfield. They condensed the space, peeled Deeney and midfielder onto United’s supposed weak link -- Victor Lindelof and Aaron Wan-Bissaka in the air -- and tried to create some carnage in quick transitions.

It didn’t work. United’s back line was just about up to the task. For Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and the rest of Liverpool’s defensive line, that's would be easy work. And it would completely play into Liverpool’s hands, allowing them to initiate some quick transitions of their own, rather than having to slowly and methodically break an opponent down.

Something else interesting with Pearson’s current set-up: As noted it’s called a 4-2-3-1 but often takes up different shapes, most notably with Deeney dropping off and Doucouré pushing up to create a kind of front two, but both playing deeper roles than a traditional striker, along the same horizontal line as the wide midfielders.

That front four allows Watford to get a little wonky in possession. They get super, duper narrow in the final third, with Deeney and Doucouré tacking up deep positions and the two wide men — two of Gerard Gerard Deulofeu, Roberto Pereyra, and Ismaila Sarr — knifing in behind.

But the system is most interesting due to its knock-on effects out of possession. Having one long line of four front players allows Pearson to press higher up the pitch while maintaining a solid line.

High press teams haven’t given Liverpool much bother this year, so it will be interesting to see if Pearson opts to drop into a deeper-lying four or if he opts for a Ralph Hasenhüttl-style staggered pressing system, which gave Liverpool some bother in the first-half against Southampton back. We’ve seen Pearson do a little of that, with a four-man line of the wide-men, Doucouré and one of the central midfielders shifting forward together, with the other central midfielder covering in-behind and Deeney acting as a one-man roving force. It was mighty effective against Brighton:

Interestingly, unlike most modern coaches, Pearson vacates the middle zone of the pitch by pairing his high press with a deeper defensive line. Behind that front-four, things typically become a deep-lying 6-2. It’s Pearson’s way of trying to have his cake and eat it too: to put some push on the ball in a bid to force mistakes while maintaining defensive rigour at the most important part of the pitch.

It’s discordant and odd and not something that would not work on your Football Manager save. At times, as you can imagine, Watford get strung out. Big spaces pop open. Opponent’s with quality in midfield can punish them, which is pretty much every team in the Premier League. It’s the kind of setup that should get Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain all sorts of excited. Give Liverpool that kind of space in the midfield zone and they will blitz anyone in world football.

Run through Pearson’s options and there’s not much the manager can do with his set-up to stop or pose threats to Liverpool. The things Watford have done well during his tenure are the kinds of things Klopp’s men happily exploit. And the counter moves Pearson has opted for when Plan A doesn’t work play even more so into Liverpool’s hands.

Unless he’s able to manufacture a brand-new approach within a week (sitting in like West Ham and Atlético and being smart on the break), Watford has no chance. Worse, they’re set-up for a complete mauling, the kind that can break a time fighting for its top-flight survival.