Thank goodness Gabriele Angella didn’t line up for Watford on Saturday. The obligatory penalty wouldn’t have been all that went against the Hornets if he had.

Angella, referees and Bournemouth have form. There was, of course, last season’s unwarranted red card less than half a minute into the match. A dismissal which was ultimately rescinded. 

And we shouldn’t forget that a year before that, in January 2014, Angella was wrongly sent off for Fitz Hall’s misdemeanour. A very strange case of mistaken identity indeed. 

So if Angella wasn’t currently plying his trade at QPR and had lined up for Watford at Dean Court on Saturday it would have come as no surprise if we’d have seen the following: Angella suffers an injury in the first half due to a heavy challenge. 

The Italian, who had already been booked for Etienne Capoue pulling on Dan Gosling’s shirt, is then given a second yellow for apparent timewasting after the referee deemed the two-footed lunge on the centre-back as fair.

And Angella is taken off in a leg brace as the red card is shown. This scene is outlandish. But yet, if you've watched Watford's visits to the south coast before, believable. 

Right. Back to reality. 

Three penalties conceded at Dean Court – sorry, the Vitality Stadium – in our last three trips to Dorset. Two incorrect red cards given. One red card led to a goal from a penalty. The other set us up for an entire match with 10 men.

It’s fair to say muscle memory took over in the build-up to this match. I simply wondered when the dodgy decision would come. When would one of Eddie Howe’s fairytale heroes hit the deck? When would Michael Oliver choose to deploy the inevitable red card?

As it turned out, concentrating on these possible eventualities was a good distraction from the largely turgid first 45 minutes.

A lacklustre performance from the Hornets was thankfully punished only by a single goal, a routine ball into the box duly nodded in by the charmlessly effective Glenn Murray.

At the other end neither Troy Deeney nor Odion Ighalo got a sniff until a lapse of concentration - or a turn of comedic genius, depending on how you look at it - from Bournemouth’s goalkeeper Artur Boruc.

Not only did Boruc give Ighalo the ball some 20 yards from goal, he was then sold hook, line and sinker by Ighalo’s now-trademark chop. Another Ighalo goal and another opposition player left on his backside.

Level at half time and the cracks were nowhere to be seen. Thanks to all that paper provided by Boruc.

The second half was far more like the Watford we want to see. It will have appeased those who saw the opening period as a negative Quique Sanchez Flores setup.

But for all our newfound inventiveness after the break, the game looked like it would stay level but for a moment of madness or brilliance. Or refereeing ineptitude. We were after all at Bournemouth.

With a few minutes of normal time left to play fate finally bludgeoned its way to Dorset. A soft penalty given and another opportunity for Hornets fans to contemplate the mysterious ways of the universe.

The ‘well, I guess that’s just football,’ I had holstered all the way through the game was ready to be unleashed. But Heurelho Gomes came to the rescue, Manuel Almunia-like.

Gomes saved a penalty. He saved us from dropping a point. And he saved us from the inevitable meltdown should we have lost that game to a contentious refereeing decision.

If that penalty went in, and had the UK’s media once again fawned over Bournemouth’s dominance over the hapless Watford FC, we wouldn’t have heard the end of it from our own fanbase.

Now that the game is over, and we all surely by now realise that a point away from home wherever you get it is a good result in the Premier League, let’s just sit back and laugh at what was at the time a moment of intense frustration, but is now as good as ancient history…

“I was clean through on goal so there was no need to go down because I would have had a tap in,” said Marc Pugh way back in 2014.

Oh, Marc, you are funny…