At Vicarage Road for only five months, Silva’s Watford made an outstanding start to the 2017/18 Premier League season.
Four wins – including the 2-1 success against Arsenal at Vicarage Road where Tom Cleverley scored the late winner – and three draws from the first eight games had the Hornets flying.
However, having only arrived in May his work at Watford attracted the attention of Everton and, when rumours began to surface, the wheels came off for the Hornets.
Silva managed just three more league wins which would have been bad enough, but he declined several opportunities to distance himself from the stories that he wanted to move to Merseyside.
Eventually he was sacked after losing 2-0 at Leicester in mid-January, and he joined Everton that summer, with Watford negotiating a compensation payment for what was clearly some very obvious ‘tapping up’.
Silva has since become known as ‘the snake’ to Watford fans, who brought inflatable versions of the reptile into the ground when Silva brought his Everton team to Vicarage Road in the 2018/19 campaign.
Cleverley played 24 times for Watford under Silva, who named him in his first XI on the opening day of the season and started him 21 times in the Premier League.
The last time Watford played at Craven Cottage was a 1-1 draw in the Premier League on September 22, 2018.
Ironically, the man who suddenly found form to deny the Hornets recently – Andre Gray – scored for the Hornets that day after only two minutes, but Aleksandar Mitrovic netted 12 minutes from time to earn the home side a point.
Recent visits to the Cottage have been few and far between, and the previous one before that game in 2018 was an evening to very much remember: Troy Deeney scored a hat-trick and Almen Abdi grabbed two as Watford romped to a 5-0 win in front of the Sky Sports cameras.
The last FA Cup clash of the sides came in 2005, when the pair met in the third round at Vicarage Road on January 8.
A Heidar Helguson penalty earned Watford a replay after Zat Knight had put Fulham ahead, and then in the replay 11 days later the Cottagers won 2-0 with goals from Moritz Volz and Tomasz Radzinski.
It was at that time Watford had reached the semi-finals of the Carling Cup (where they lost over two legs to Liverpool), and with the addition of the FA Cup replay at Fulham, the Hornets ended up playing six games in 17 days.
Fulham was also the venue for an Associate Members Cup tie in 1997 when Graham Taylor selected a youthful team that included the likes of Daniel Grieves, Per Ola Ljung, Nathan Lowndes, Colin Pluck and Mark Rooney.
Fulham won the game in front of a crowd of just 3,364.
One of Taylor’s more successful cup moments, though, came in 1983 when having drawn 1-1 at home to Fulham in the Fourth Round (Jan Lohman scoring), they went to Craven Cottage and won the replay 2-1 thanks to goals from Lohman and John Barnes.
This will be the fifth time Watford have played away to Fulham in the FA Cup, both sides having won two of the previous four encounters.