Former Watford head coach Xisco Munoz has spoken candidly about his time at Vicarage Road, doubting himself due to his inexperience and the surprise he felt at his sacking.

The Spaniard was brought in midway through last season and breathed new life into an underperforming squad to guide them back to the Premier League via the automatic promotion spots.

However, the club opted to cut ties after just seven league matches of this campaign citing "a negative trend" in performances as their reasoning.

Munoz is now at Huesca in the Spanish second tier where expectations are different. However, his time in England helped him learn to adapt to new challenges, whether others felt he was ready for them or not.

"At Watford, the challenge was to take them to the Premier League," he told The Coaches' Voice. "Of course, the first days were not easy. At Watford, it is usual for the coaches to be familiar faces to the fans. But now they had me: a coach unknown to most of them, and who had been a manager for only a short time.

"That made them have doubts, and it was understandable. In football, experience is often used as a reason to justify a hiring. But what is experience? Is it 10 years of doing the same thing, even if you’re doing it badly?

"Facing the doubts at Watford, we opted for something that never fails: hard work. And quickly, because the situation was tight if we wanted to get promoted. The margin of error we had in which to achieve it was almost zero. In other words, we couldn’t fail in anything.

"I will always be very grateful to the Watford players for everything they did during that season, under such pressure. They did a spectacular job in understanding what I explained to them. It was about getting them out of their comfort zone, and from there admitting mistakes."

Everything good must come to an end, though and Watford pulled the plug on the boss after less than 10 months in the job, following a disappointing defeat away at Leeds United.

Munoz still feels that he was on course to keep the Hornets in the Premier League.

"The bad thing was the end," he said. "Not so much that I left; as a coach you must know that, one day, you will have to go through it. More, the way it happened. It caught me by surprise. We were okay in the table, with the points I had more or less in my head to achieve our goal of staying up.

“We think the team is going downhill.” That was the club’s explanation in making their decision. I couldn’t understand it.

"That was the end of my Watford adventure. When we told the players afterwards, they didn’t expect it either."