‘I bluffed being Watford captain for two years. For the first game of the season, the armband was on my seat, no-one had said, “You’re going to be captain”’ Troy Deeney on his personal turnaround with the Hornets

Troy Deeney’s career has seen more highs and lows than most.

During 20 years as a player, he turned out more than 700 times, netting 217 career goals, the majority of which came during his 11-year stint with Watford before he turned his hand to management with Forest Green Rovers.

Deeney was able to achieve this despite serving three months in prison after pleading guilty to affray in 2012. Within two years of this, he was appointed Watford captain at the start of their promotion season - but he’s not even sure how or why this happened.

Troy Deeney on being appointed Watford skipper

“F**k knows!” he smiles when asked by FourFourTwo how he ended up as Hornets skipper. “For the first game of the season, the armband was on my seat, no-one had said, ‘You’re going to be captain’, it was just there. I thought, ‘Oh, OK’.

“I bluffed it for two years, remembering what Tommy Mooney, Michael Ricketts and Michael Dobson did for me when I was at Walsall, and John Eustace at Watford. I thought ‘OK, let’s try to blag it’.

“I knew the whole thing about ‘work hard, be in first’, but never really believed in that. I was like, ‘You get in when you get in, but you leave when the job’s done’. I’ve always outworked people.”

After winning top-flight promotion, Deeney would be rewarded with his first Premier League goal, even if it required 10 games to find the net.

“That meant everything to me,” he says. “It was at Stoke away – I’d been playing really well but hadn’t scored yet. Thierry Henry was working as a pundit for Sky and against Newcastle, I’d brought the ball down on my chest, turned and played a pass for Odion Ighalo to score.

“Henry was saying, ‘If any of the big players did that, we’d be talking about it all the time – he’s a great player, but he has to start scoring in the Premier League for us to see that’. You listen when people say that, and I was like, ‘F**king hell, can I do it?’

“Then we played Stoke, and there was the joke of, ‘But can you do it on a cold, wet night in Stoke?’ I remember thinking ‘Well, it’s actually a beautiful day, but we’re in Stoke, it’s cold and I’m going to do it today’.

“The ball came to me and the defender dived in to make a slide tackle, which gave me the time to take a touch and pass it into the far corner. As soon as I hit it, I was like, ‘Goal’. I got 13 in the Premier League that season.”