Troy Deeney had been out of prison for just nine months when he scored the goal he’s most remembered for. The frontman would later find the net nearly 50 times in the Premier League, but he’ll forever be associated with Sky commentator Bill Leslie and his iconic cry of “DEEEEEENEY!”, as he slammed home a 97th-minute play-off semi-final winner for Watford in 2013, 20 seconds after Anthony Knockaert had missed a penalty that would have clinched it for Leicester at the other end. It’s one of the great Football League moments.
“You can call it that, I can’t!” Deeney laughs, attempting to remain modest as he sits down with FourFourTwo. “In the moment, I was so calm – it felt like everything slowed down, like you see in the movies. I thought, ‘Just kick it straight and I’ll score’. As soon as it hit the net, it felt like an eruption of noise. The celebration was wild.”
Plenty of other things had been wild about Deeney’s life until that point, too – in his younger days, he admits he was a very different person.
“God, you wouldn’t have been having this conversation with me, let’s put it that way!” he says. A lifelong Birmingham fan, he was expelled from school but could have joined rivals Aston Villa, had he turned up for all of the four-day trial. “At 15, yeah,” he explains. “I was trying to be the cool kid. My mates were down at the local park playing football, a few of them smoked. I knew all of the birds were there and it was summer holidays, so I didn’t want to go to Villa. I knew on the last day of the trial that there was a match, so I turned up on the first day and the last day, that was it. My brother was already at Villa so it wouldn’t have been that bad playing for them – I didn’t have a Blues tattoo at that point! I just wasn’t in the right headspace for it.” Instead, Deeney was soon playing for non-league Chelmsley Town. “I played central midfield at first, I loved a tackle, had loads of energy and enjoyed passing the ball, hitting big diagonals,” he says. “I was 16 playing with lads who were 34, so I instantly knew how to look after myself and learned the dark arts – the pulling of the shirt, things like that.
“I loved my time at Chelmsley, it shaped who I am. If I’d gone straight from getting kicked out of school to joining Walsall, I would have struggled, but at Chelmsley Town there were so many different ethnicities and ages. Some had families, some were going out straight after games, some were turning up drunk to games…”
The latter group included Deeney himself – Walsall spotted him on a day when he reportedly scored seven goals in a game while intoxicated. “I can’t tell you if I actually scored seven, but I was definitely drunk!” he laughs. “I was 18 – my job on a construction site finished on the Friday, I got my last pay packet, paid my mum what she needed, then I went out, had a few too many with the lads, then played on the Saturday and Sunday. I went out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday – then I’d figure out getting another job on the Monday.”
What was it like playing while drunk? “It was normal, that was the problem, we were doing it quite a lot!” he says. “At 18 you don’t get hangovers, you go again. I grew up in a community where when you’re drunk, you have one more to level yourself. So I had a Jack Daniel’s before the game and was good to go. “Walsall just happened to come to the game. Mick Halsall – a legend, I’ll always give him the credit – saw something in me that I didn’t think was possible. He gave me not only an opportunity, but a lifeline, and thought, ‘Do you know what? If I push this kid…’ I didn’t realise how much of a listener and a learner I was – he was just trying to punch things in all the time, ‘Do this, do that’.”
Deeney went from a raw youngster to a regular goalscorer in League One before joining Watford, who were then a mid-table Championship outfit. The forward says he couldn’t have imagined the journey he’d go on while at Vicarage Road, scoring 140 goals across 11 years, including five full campaigns in the top flight. “No, not at all,” he says. “The first 18 months were representative of where I was at – mentally all over the place, not turning up, not applying myself in the right way, and not realising what an opportunity I actually had.
“I always had impostor syndrome – ‘this will end soon, they’ll kick me back out and I’ll go back and play with my mates’. I had this big fear of, ‘Oh God, it’s going to be over, it’s going to be over’. Unfortunately, it took my dad getting sick and me getting arrested to make me realise I needed to liven up.”
During the first half of 2012, Deeney’s father battled throat cancer aged only 47, while the striker became embroiled in an early-hours brawl outside a club in Birmingham. Deeney, his brother and two other men were charged with affray, after an attack on a group of students left one with a broken jaw.
Aged 23, Deeney responded on the pitch with the best form of his Watford career so far over the remaining weeks of the 2011-12 campaign. “I’ll give him the credit every time, Sean Dyche was brilliant for me,” he says. “For his first six months as manager, I hardly played or played on the left wing, but he kept challenging me and telling me, ‘You’re going to quit’. He understood there was not a quitter in me, so he kept trying to go, ‘You’re going to quit, you’re going to go back to doing this or that’.
“Then he handed me an opportunity when Marvin Sordell moved on. I took it – we were playing Millwall away and I scored. I got 10 goals from January through to the end of that season, but then ended up going to jail.”
“In jail, all you have is time”
Three days after attending his father’s funeral that June, Deeney was given a 10-month prison sentence. He served just over three months of it, and admits that he wouldn’t have hit the heights he later reached as a footballer had it not been for that time in jail. “No, I would have been dead – if I didn’t go to jail, I would have been dead,” he emphasises, repeating his words to make clear that he really means it. “I was living too recklessly away from football, but all things happen for a reason.
“There was a family on the other side and I never ever want to glorify what I did, there was a victim so I don’t ever want it to come across as that. On the flip side, it was like a hard reset for me. I had to sit for 13 weeks in jail and figure out who I was – ‘My dad’s dead now, what’s going to happen?’
“I buried my dad on the Friday and went to jail on the Monday, so I had to figure out what was going on and why I was being like that. All while surviving, while not knowing how my career was. In jail, all you have is time. You’ve got nothing but time, you’re just sat there. “I write a lot, I still do to this day. I’ll write and write, and I think. I remember writing down a list. What am I going to do when I get out of here? It was like, ‘I’m going to have a career, I’m going to buy a house, I’m going to buy a car’. I was making good money, sure, but I was also going out every week, and had a leased car and a rented house. Then when you get locked up and stop being paid, it’s like, ‘Oh s**t, actually I haven’t got anything’. It was the hard reset that I needed and hopefully from that, I’ve made my dad and my grandad, the people who passed away, really proud of me. I certainly hope so.”
Watford were taken over by the Pozzo family that summer, with Gianfranco Zola appointed as manager. Deeney scored the winner on his first start after his release from prison, and went on to bag 20 goals for the first time that term. The last of those was his famous strike against Leicester in the play-offs.
“I didn’t appreciate that goal for a long time – we lost in the play-off final,” he says, remembering defeat to Crystal Palace at Wembley. “But with TikTok, my five-year-old recreates it around the house and celebrates it. I went to the Club World Cup with Talksport and my wife said she’d been mobbed by people going, ‘Oh my god, that goal’. They can tell you where they were and what they were doing when it happened. I’m very fortunate – there are people who had much better careers than me, but they haven’t got a moment like that, while I managed to have one.”
I’m very fortunate – there are people who had much better careers than me, but they haven’t got a moment like that play-off goal.
Leicester were so irritated by that play-off defeat that they responded by winning the Championship a year later, then the Premier League within three years. “I take all the credit for that!” Deeney laughs. “I tell big Wes Morgan all the time that he owes me a watch or something. My kids are at the age now where they like to watch YouTube, and my daughter managed to find the whole game, so we watched it when we were on holiday recently. Harry Kane was on the bench for Leicester, Jamie Vardy was on the bench. It was two teams attacking, we both just went for it. My goal came from that.”
Given Kane’s penalty prowess since then, and the fact that he was on the pitch at the time, Deeney’s moment might never have happened at all if Knockaert had passed the ball over to Leicester’s teenage loanee.
A year later, Deeney was appointed Watford captain, at the beginning of their own promotion season – it was quite the turnaround for him, although asked how he ended up as skipper, he’s none the wiser. “F**k knows!” he smiles. “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.”
Dale Vince: No love lost
Many more goals after that, Deeney departed Watford in 2021 as a club legend. He spent the next two years with his boyhood team Birmingham before making a switch to League Two side Forest Green Rovers, initially as a player-coach. Just four months on, he was appointed as head coach of the West Country outfit at the age of 35. Rovers were fighting to avoid a second successive relegation and Deeney won none of his first six games in charge –after a home loss to Harrogate, he told the media that were “too many babies” in his squad, claiming that he’d rather watch Antiques Roadshow than one of his own team’s matches. Deeney also described right-back Fankaty Dabo’s performance as “awful”.
Days later, he was given a four-game touchline ban for his conduct towards a match official during a previous game, and he was sacked. Rovers owner Dale Vince recently claimed that he hadn’t necessarily wanted to appoint Deeney in the first place, but the club’s director of football had promised to give the frontman a shot at the manager’s job when it next became available, as part of enticing him into the player-coach role. Nobody at the club expected the opportunity would arise so soon.
“Lessons were learned,” is Deeney’s assessment of his time with the club. “Although he tries to give me stick any time he needs to, I appreciate Dale Vince giving me the opportunity – he says he didn’t give me the opportunity, but he did. It’s about the environment there, because they’ve got the talent, they’ve got the ownership with the money, they’ve got all the grand plans,so it’s about having someone pull it all together. We tried to do that in the short time we were there, with Dave Horseman and Louis Carey.
“It’s a great place. Robbie Savage went in as manager recently and I’ve genuinely been wishing them all the best, I just wish Dale would stop talking about me. If Robbie gets them up, I’d like to say I played a tiny percentage in that, like half a per cent. There are lads there that we worked with – some that we brought in are still there.”
Did Deeney almost care too much, hence his emotional outbursts? “My rant was just immaturity,” he admits. “It wasn’t caring too much for myself – since then, I’ve been all right, life is good. It was caring so much for those players who didn’t realise they were letting the opportunity slip through their hands – not to stay in the League, forget that, because people get relegated, it happens. It was the opportunity to be a professional footballer.
“Some of those people don’t have jobs now, so ultimately I was right, but how I said it was wrong, you have to own that. The timing of saying it was wrong as well, but in hindsight I was dropped into a position where I was expected to fail. We were at the bottom of League Two, the director of football was in his first role, the CEO was in his first role and I spoke to Dale once. Then you go, ‘By the way, get that all sorted as quick as you can’. I wasn’t allowed to bring in everybody I wanted, either. We tried to make the best of it and I made some mistakes along the way, but it hasn’t deterred me. If anything, it’s made me more focused to want to do it again.” Indeed, Deeney is very open to making a return to management. “Absolutely,” he says. “But now with the hindsight of that experience, you’d ask so many more questions. The bit of satisfaction for me is that everything I said turned out to be true – like when I made the ‘cojones’ comment about Arsenal.”
The armband was on my seat, no-one had said, ‘You’re going to be captain’, it was just there.
On that occasion in 2017, Deeney implied that the Gunners had lost at Vicarage Road due to a lack of mental fortitude. “It’s not a thing that a player normally says, even though it was right – it was right at that moment and it’s played out to be right for the years since,” he says. “But it’s not the done thing to say it, then people take offence to it. Paul Merson was hammering me, loads of the pundits were hammering me, but you fast forward and they’ve all been saying what I said, they just didn’t want Troy Deeney saying it.
“At Forest Green I could have done so much better, but that hasn’t deterred me, I’ll come again. I’ve just done my LMA manager’s diploma so I’m not sitting here sulking, and when it’s that time, we’ll do what we need to do.” Deeney recently took part in filming for a celebrity version of the TV show SAS: Who Dares Wins, and became a television presenter for the first time, co-hosting BBC reality series Last Pundit Standing. Everything he’s achieved over the past decade and more would have blown the mind of the wild child who started out at Chelmsley Town.
“I would’ve thought, ‘Who did I have to kill to do all that?’” Deeney says now. “I played in the Premier League, I was Watford captain, I had the Leicester moment, I had so many moments that were iconic for me, and I’m really happy to have provided for my family. I don’t like looking back – I’m like, ‘What’s next, what else can I do?’ But I’m so grateful.” Maybe missing half of that Aston Villa trial was the right decision after all.
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