Preston North End's Freddie Woodman on crazy clean sheet streak: 'It was a joke'

The curious case of Preston North End has been one of the most gripping storylines in the EFL this season – and goalkeeper Freddie Woodman has been right at the heart of it.

Halfway through their Championship campaign, the Lancashire side just outside the play-offs in seventh – having scored the second-fewest goals in the division and conceded the joint second-fewest (22 in both cases).

Extraordinarily, North End kept clean sheets in each of their first seven league outings of 2022/23 – while finding the net just twice themselves.  It wasn't until game number nine that both teams scored; it took 13 matches for them to be involved in a contest which saw more than two goals.

And ex-England U21 international Woodman – who joined Preston from Newcastle in the summer, having had previous Championship spells on loan at Swansea and Bournemouth – could barely believe what he was seeing, as he told FourFourTwo in the latest issue available to buy (opens in new tab):

"I've never known anything like the start of this season...Once I'd equalled the three in a row I achieved at Swansea, I was saying, 'It can't happen again, can it?'. 

"But it just kept happening again and again. It became a joke in the dressing room: 'Crikey, we've got another one'."

Woodman recorded 20 shutouts while with Swansea in 2020/21; he's already up to 11 this term.