Watford even hand out AFCB penalties these days

I was as shocked as anyone when Jose Holebas decided that the best way to defend his goal was to handle the ball out of play before Jordan Ibe got his head to the all. The prior shot from Junior Stanislas had been well enough saved by Karnezis and it looked like Holebas just had to shepherd the ball out of play, but he got things horribly wrong for his team.

AFCB at Vicarage Road.

In games against Watford, it kind of comes as a guarantee that you can expect to see a Bournemouth penalty. Watford fans have become used to it, but now their players seem to go out of their way to give AFCB a helping hand. But if you look at the game in general and the fouls that were committed and the cards that were given out - all the yellow cards were for Watford players. There were four yellow cards in all and it became clear that Watford were trying to play a physical came against the Cherries. When a team uses that aggressive pattern of play in their game there is a fine line at times to be taken if such challenges occur in the box. But Watford managed to make their fouls outside the penalty box apart from Holebas' hands ball which was quite a strange decision by the player. Holebas surely felt that Ibe would score if he did nothing, because to hand the ball away was clearly desperation.

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There were quite a lot of fouls committed in the game from both sides but the ration of 16 Watford fouls to six Bournemouth fouls would indicate that Watford were using a more combative game to try and keep Bournemouth at bay. In such cases it is perhaps not surprising that these games tend to have penalties in them. If anything it is surprising that there wasn't more than one penalty. Watford have conceded the most goals from penalties this season - six in all.

Josh King is the designated penalty taker at AFCB and it seems that Karnezis gambled that King would go the same way, as he did against Kasper Schmeichel up a Leicester, but got it wrong as King went for the left side and it was an emphatic penalty. I suspect the figure of Karnezis is also not as ominous as Gomez in the Watford goal and King is becoming extremely good at keeping his nerve now for penalties. Long may that continue.