Renée Slegers revealed in her pre-Aston Villa press conference that she’s been in touch with a conductor over the past couple of years.
Ahead of Sunday’s Adobe Women’s FA Cup fourth round clash in Borehamwood, our head coach discussed the similarities between leading an orchestra and coaching a football team.
“Since a couple of years, I've been in touch with a conductor at a very high level and it’s really interesting exchanging ideas,” she explained. “There's actually a lot of similarities in the way a conductor needs to lead the orchestra, how you train, how you get everyone working together, executing their roles with confidence and so forth.
“And then in the moment as well, making good decisions and feeling what a musician needs what in what moment in the playing, so that's really interesting. At the end of the day, it needs to all work together.
“I think a conductor is much more active every single moment in a play. That's not the case as a group of coaches down the sideline, but you can sometimes put an analogy of a conductor who plays on a pitch, who plays in the middle of a pitch, who can lead things constantly. So what musician and what part of the play is happening in the box and scoring the goals?
“That's for us the one thing that we've been talking a lot about, how we're going to create more clear-cut chances, get less opportunities and shots blocked and be more composed to find that opening to shoot.”
Read more Every word of Renée’s pre-Villa press conference
In this competition last season, we made it past Bristol City and London City Lionesses before losing to Liverpool in the quarter-finals, so Renée and the players are full of hunger to go further this time.
“I can't recall my reaction exactly, but I remember that game very well,” she said. “I think it wasn't the result we wanted at all, and it wasn't a very clean game, that game. I don't think we played our game very well.
“Obviously, Taylor [Hinds] and Olivia [Smith] played for Liverpool in that game and made huge contributions in that game. So we're happy that they're with us now.
“Like I just said, all competitions for us are very important. The FA Cup in England is a prestigious cup, and there's history to it. It's been ten years, from 2016 to 2026. We are full of fuel, also off the back of the United game, where there were a lot of good things in the way we played, but we didn't win that game. So we've used all these things all together and used it as fuel into the game on Sunday.”
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