A tepid start at Watford means the knives are already drawn for the new manager

Watford signaled a change of direction in the hiring of Rob Edwards earlier this year, but mixed early results are already putting pressure.

Summer is over and autumn has begun, so naturally we have to talk about the annual Watford manager replacement.

The Hornets have had a sluggish and contradictory start to life in the Championship, and the inevitable reaction to all of this is to wonder when the revolving door policy will come back into play under the Pozzos.

As football parted ways for its final international break before the World Cup, Watford were 10th in the Championship table. But their form so far this season has been contradictory. They have won just three of their 10 games so far, but those victories have come against Sheffield United, Burnley and Middlesbrough - three of the teams expected to compete at the top.

Although they have only won three out of 10 in the league, they have only lost twice: to Queen's Park Rangers and Blackburn Rovers. With 11 goals scored and 11 conceded, it's not that they were bad, but rather that they were unable to kill games. The pros and cons columns tell their own story.

Even their ranking in the league is an enigma shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, with almost a quarter of the season disputed, 10th place is a bit behind for a club just relegated from the Premier League. But on the other, the Championship is the Jeux Sans Frontières of leagues, and even now there are only five points between Sunderland in 5th and Middlesbrough in 22nd.

When Rob Edwards was appointed manager of the club at the start of the summer, it was not without controversy. After taking Forest Green Rovers to the League Two title at the end of last season, his former club issued a statement expressing their disappointment with the way the move was carried out: "We are disappointed that our support, our loyalty and our honesty to Rob have been repaid in this way - with negotiations going on behind our backs.'

Of course, all that talk of shenanigans is a thing of the past, but questions were raised at the time as to whether Watford would soften their previous policy on managers with the arrival of a young coach from the lower divisions . After all, three managers were unable to keep them in the Premier League last season, and bringing in Edwards felt like a change of direction. He was not the sort of manager a club with a hire and fire policy would typically go for.

This was (perhaps a little blithely) presumed, a project.

The cognitive dissonance in all of this is evident, and it's easy to talk about shifts in club culture and other nice talk during the long, hot summer days. But it's over now and the nights are approaching, and it's the first real test of Watford's resolve to move from a policy of treating managers as disposable to treating them as a philosophy to be nurtured.

Since Gino Pozzo became sole owner in 2014, the club has had its ups and downs. Promoted to the Premier League at the end of their first full season, Watford have remained in the top flight for five campaigns, scoring 40 points in each of their first four. In Javi Gracia they even seemed to have found a manager who suited the club.

But Pozzo's interference put an end to this brief...