You did not need Roy Hodgson's wealth of football knowledge to realise where Watford's biggest problem lay when he returned to management at the age of 74 last month.
A run of eight defeats and one draw in nine games had seen Watford concede 24 goals, and that cost Claudio Ranieri his job at Vicarage Road.
Enter Hodgson. His first task was to plug a leaky defence, and he spent the winter break working tirelessly with his players on the training ground to achieve that goal.
It paid off at Turf Moor as Hodgson's first game also brought Watford's first Premier League clean sheet in 31 matches and for nearly two years — a sequence that, incredibly, spanned six managers employed by the trigger-happy Pozzo family.