Before the women’s team was officially brought into City’s professional organisation, things were very different. They trained separately from the academy, which meant I was relatively unaware of the women’s team until 2012. That’s not something I hid from. As I said, my priority was to be completely honest with the players about my starting point.

But, more importantly, I wanted to make it clear that they would be treated the same way as every Manchester City side. As a football team. Not any different because they were women.

That gave us a head start. It meant that the team would follow the methodology shared across the entire club. A methodology I’d spent the last seven and a half years being educated on – including how the club believe the game should be played and the profiles of the players that fit into that. In that sense, it was an easy transition. The foundation of what we wanted to do was already built.

We were realistic, though. We understood that you can’t be successful overnight. That we were going to make some mistakes along the way. That it was going to take time to build.

“We weren’t the best team that year. But we had something else. It was like somebody was telling us, you have the opportunity to be successful here, so don’t mess it up”

Even so, after the first four games of the season all ended in defeat, I started to question myself. Am I really at this level? Is this the right job for me? Am I the person to take this team on?

I’m a realist. I know I won’t have been the only person asking those questions. It’s natural. We were a good team, with England internationals, and we’d lost four games against teams people thought we should beat.

But at no point did anybody at the club take any responsibility away from me. At no point did my role change. I was supported, and given all the experience and resources to become better. But I was also left to succeed or fail.

We ended up finishing fifth in our first WSL season. We won our first major trophy too, beating Arsenal – a team that had dominated women’s football for the previous 15 years – to win the Continental Cup. It gave us massive belief as a group, gave me massive belief as a coach, and it gave the whole club belief that we had something different to everybody else.