Watford head coach Renee Hector is hopeful that her team can bounce back from what she calls “the manager of the month curse”.
The 29-year-old picked up September’s award for the FA Women’s National League Premier Division – and her side, unbeaten in the league so far this season, lost 3-0 at home to Plymouth Argyle in the FAWNL Cup.
So she’s calling for them to bounce back in style as they travel to fourth-tier Actonians in the first round proper of the Women’s FA Cup this weekend.
“At the moment, we’re the team to beat,” she admits. “We’ve got a little bit of a target on our backs in that sense. Especially in this league, people see us as a really strong side, considering we’ve been yo-yoing between tier 2 and tier 3 for quite some time now.
“We know that people are going to come to us and they want to be the team that beats us. Every week, even if teams are maybe not achieving what they want to be achieving at this point, we find that, more often than not, teams turn up when it’s against us.
“We thrive off that. We thrive off the competition. It’s just really important that we focus on ourselves because we know the quality that we possess, and really important that we just stay humble and keep pushing and keep plugging away, really, because it’s a very long season. There’s a lot of games.
“The cup games present something different in terms of that psychological aspect. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the result last weekend, but I’m hoping it’s one of those days where actually it could be the best thing that happened to us this season.
“I’m sure it will just give us that extra edge and that extra focus to keep our standards high and understand that every game is going to be super difficult that we go into and we need to make sure we’re performing at a really high level to get results every week.”
Renee Hector: Managing Watford is my dream job
As a local girl, Hector has always said that managing Watford was her dream job. It has, however, come early in her coaching career – she took over the hot seat last summer following some time with the club’s youth set-up, and honing her skills with the England under-17s. Four years after her retirement from playing due to injury at the age of 26, she is close to completing her UEFA A LIcence.
“There’s been a lot of learning on the job,” she says. “Last year, the start we had in the first half of the season, we as a new coaching team together learnt a lot. It takes time for the team to gel and really get the whole environment and the whole team to buy into that.
“The fact that I haven’t been out of the game too long in terms of as a player has really helped me when it comes to understanding the players and being able to communicate with them effectively. Having those open and honest conversations has come quite naturally to me and normally that’s quite a difficult part of the job.
“It’s been interesting and a real learning curve. I find that literally week by week I’m becoming more comfortable learning more about myself and the group. It’s been a really, really positive experience and obviously that’s starting to show on the pitch as well, which is nice.”
