Just when the door had opened for West Ham United to glide smoothly through and regain their place at the top of the Championship, it slammed shut again. A weak-willed display against lowly Watford left them with a single frustrating point to show for their tame efforts – and the hard-to-please natives seriously restless.
Victory would have taken West Ham above Southampton. Instead, they remain one point below the leaders from the south coast and two points clear of Reading in third place.
But for an 87th-minute equaliser from Ricardo Vaz Tê, a substitute, they would have been embarrassed further. The Portuguese forward drove home through a crowd of bodies, the ball going in off a post, but West Ham could not find a winner in the nine minutes of stoppage time added by the referee following a double injury. A chorus of boos from their fans followed.
Home-not-so-sweet home has been the main headache this season, with West Ham dropping 19 points on their own turf. "We just can't find our cutting edge at Upton Park," said Sam Allardyce, their manager. "Basically, we've got to do the same at home as we've been doing away. We've got to be more clinical. We're just not showing enough quality here and we nearly paid the price for that. But at least we showed the desire and the ability to claw our way back into it."
West Ham under Allardyce might not please the East End purists – only rarely are the club now referred to as the "Academy of Football" – but their style, if not easy on the eye, is normally effective. They beat Watford 4-0 at Vicarage Road back in August and went into the return encounter on a five-match unbeaten run, which appeared to have been sparked by their 5-1 hammering by Ipswich Town at Portman Road at the end of January.
They could have been in front with less than a minute on the clock. Matt Taylor, returning from a three-match suspension, took aim from 30 yards and sent a shot thundering against the crossbar. Tomasz Kuszczak, the Watford goalkeeper, barely saw it.
Julien Faubert should have done better when miscuing a Taylor cross and Kuszczak had to work minor miracles to keep out efforts from Mark Noble, after a clever back-heel from Carlton Cole, and James Tomkins. But for all their earnest endeavours, West Ham could not break through, and what little rhythm they had was disrupted soon after the interval.
A clash of heads between John Eustace and Dale Bennett, Watford team-mates, forced a seven-minute delay. Eustace left the pitch, returning with a large bandage on his head, but Bennett, his neck in a brace, was taken off on a stretcher and then to hospital. "We suspect it's not as serious as it looked," Sean Dyche, the Watford manager, said. "We're waiting on the doctors to see if he'll be kept in overnight."
Watford responded better after the resumption, and Sean Murray drilled home a cross-shot via the far post and a deflection off Abdoulaye Faye. Vaz Tê's late intervention just about prevented open rebellion among the home crowd. Failure to beat Doncaster Rovers at the same venue on Saturday, though, and the mood could get ugly.