Hector: "As soon as Chelsea came in there was only one team I was going to go to"
At the start of the season, Chelsea were keen to bolster their defensive options following a shaky start to the new Premier League campaign. With the likes of John Stones and Marquinhos linked with the Premier League Champions, it was a surprise they ended the transfer window signing Michael Hector & Papy Djilobodji.
Hector said down with theguardian to discuss how Chelsea snatched him from Crystal Palace, Chelsea’s youth development programme and his time at Reading. "I was with my dad, visiting my relatives in Bromley, and in my head I was going to Palace,” Hector says. “I knew the deal was pretty much done and thought I’d be going there to sort everything out. Then dad went off and took a call, returned and said: ‘You’ll never guess who that was?’ It was one of the Chelsea directors, trying to get a move sorted out. I just thought he was winding me up."
"As soon as Chelsea came in there was only one team I was going to go to,” Hector says. “I’m a fan and it’s one of the biggest clubs in the world. There was a meeting at Stamford Bridge later that night and everything was completed the next day, going through the medical and then signing my contract at Cobham. It was a bit crazy, a bit hectic."
Hector also speaks of a brief meeting between himself and then manager Jose Mourinho – “he just said a few words like: ‘Make sure you go back there, keep your head down and work hard” – and a few handshakes with players.
“That was fine, a no-brainer for me,” he says. “I’ve had plenty of loan spells and the most important thing was guaranteed football. Steve Clarke, the manager at the time, had been a key factor in the move, making me vice-captain last season and giving me a lot of confidence. He was desperate for me to get back and play for him – he phoned and was buzzing for me but said: ‘You’ve got to return here and get us promoted’.”
“They [Eddie Newton, the technical coach of Chelsea’s youth development programme, and his assistant Paulo Ferreira] come to quite a few games and pop into the training ground just to have a chat,” he says. “Chelsea’s match analysis people also put clips of the loanees’ games together and we go through them. I get a lot of feedback, good advice to go with what the Reading staff also tell me, so I’m lucky I have two sets of minds to bounce off.
“There are things I can work on and things they’re happy with. This season I’ve played some games in midfield, which Brian McDermott [the Reading manager] spoke to them about after putting me there. That has improved my distribution and I think they’re interested in that. I’ve just got to keep progressing and I’m getting a lot of help.”
“It’s Chelsea, you know they can buy basically any player they want,” Hector says. “Competing with good centre-backs will only help my progress. I can’t look at it as if they’re forgetting about me. I’ll hopefully be going on tour with them in the summer, and we’ll see what happens from there. You never know how things will work out – I had to go out and bide my time on loan for several years before I got into Reading’s first team, so I know how to deal with this kind of situation.”
“I had to grow up quite quickly, going into non-league quite young,” he says. “But it just gave me a real buzz to play in front of fans. It might have only been a few hundred people but it still geed me up. These games meant something – you were playing with people whose bonuses would pay their mortgages and it was so much more personal than the youth team, where people would try things on the edge of their box that you’d never see in a first-team game. In non-league, and my other loans, if you made a mistake it would be like war in the changing room because it meant so much more.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of the younger players at Reading to try to get them to go on loan at a young age, just to play men’s football. When you come back here you appreciate that you’re quite well looked after in academies nowadays. But nobody knows you when you’re starting out; I’ve tried to show them that sometimes it’s not going to be pretty, and you just need to keep going.”
“Last year’s run is a motivation,” he says. “There are a few different faces around the club and they want to taste that experience and be part of something special. The Arsenal game gave me confidence I can play at the highest level but you have to do it again and again. If we perform well on Friday, you never know what can happen.”
