WATFORD, ENGLAND - Sunday, December 20, 2015: Liverpool's Martin Skrtel shakes hands with Watford's captain Troy Deeney as he goes off injured during the Premier League match at Vicarage Road. (Pic by David Rawcliffe/Propaganda)

“They just didn’t fancy the fight” – Troy Deeney on bullying Liverpool’s weak defence

Watford forward Troy Deeney says Liverpool’s players “didn’t fancy the fight” as his side eased to a 3-0 win over their more illustrious opponents on Sunday.

WATFORD, ENGLAND - Sunday, December 20, 2015: Liverpool's Martin Skrtel shakes hands with Watford's captain Troy Deeney as he goes off injured during the Premier League match at Vicarage Road. (Pic by David Rawcliffe/Propaganda)

Liverpool made it four games without a win in all competitions, weakly falling to the in-form Hornets and never recovering from going a goal behind inside three minutes after Adam Bogdan’s blunder.

Liverpool’s players once again went missing, failing to react to conceding and finding themselves 2-0 down after 15 minutes.

Speaking after the match, Deeney – who alongside two-goal Odion Ighalo bullied Liverpool’s defence – said:

“The most impressive thing about our performance today is that we bullied them. They just didn’t fancy the fight.

“We scored after a few minutes which settled the nerves and then we dominated. Skrtel went off, he didn’t fancy it, and it was a great victory.”

Deeney also highlighted the problem with defences who ‘want to play like Barcelona’:

“Defences don’t like that nowadays, it’s all pretty passing football, they all want to play like Barcelona.”

Klopp clearly sees the issue with Liverpool’s players not fancying it in the more difficult games such as this – away to a newly promoted, in-form team on a difficult pitch – with the manager saying post-match:

“The easy game, everybody wins, the difficult games we have to win much more often than we did up to now.”

“Brendan Rodgers signed a squad of technicians, leaving Liverpool short of physically robust players required to compete over the course of a Premier League season” — read more from Henry Jackson in his post-Watford analysis here.