Goals from Shane Long and Dusan Tadic ensured all three points for Southampton but Watford were unable to force a save out of goalkeeper Fraser Forster.
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The former Millwall wide-man has found first team appearances few and far between this season following an altercation with a fitness coach after the side’s 3-1 defeat of Aston Villa in November.
“We play with two strikers but it’s hard to take them out of the team, including in the match”.
“Maybe Southampton past year were better than the squad they have”, added the Watford boss.
“We have players in the side who can play intelligent football but we need skill, we need velocity. We feel we weren’t competitive, but in five, six months it’s the first time we have had this feeling”. I apologise to the fans.
“If you are nine months out, and you play just 90 minutes for the under-21s (before returning to the first XI), that’s not easy”, Koeman said.
“It’s football, sometimes it happens. They didn’t start well so they have problems with confidence, but they have an wonderful team, a good manager, so the match will be tough for us”.
“Our spirit is very high, it’s very positive, it’s very energetic, but we didn’t find this spirit, and Southampton played really well”.
In a frank assessment of the defeat, Deeney said: “I am not going to try and gloss over the fact that we were crap”. We were unsafe, we created chances.
“We controlled the game with some good defending, we scored a great first goal and should have scored a second before half-time, not after it. I don’t want to investigate too much what happened, because this is not the level of our players”.
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“I can never be disappointed because I know I will still get more goals”. They are hard to beat.
