Sliding doors
Issue 464 | August 26 2016
The accidental footballer Watford striker Troy Deeney and the ghost of another life
Sliding doors Watford striker Troy Deeney tells Sport how his remarkable journey from prison to the Premier League almost didn’t happen Words Amit Katwala Photography Philip Haynes
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I
’m a builder by trade,” says Troy Deeney, in the matter-of-fact tone you might use when making small talk at a barbecue. “It was never my life goal to be a professional footballer. I was more a normal council kid – I liked getting in trouble and chasing girls about.” The Watford striker owes his Premier League career to three things: his mum’s cleaning routines, “an old man in a pub”, and the three months he spent in prison for kicking a student in the head in a brawl outside a nightclub. There’s more than a touch of Sliding Doors about Deeney’s route to the top, and a lesson for us all: the choices you make when you’re hungover could change your life. The 28-year-old grew up in a highrise tower block in a council estate in Chelmsley Wood, a down-at-heel suburb of Birmingham. He had two choices. “In the community that I come from, you can go right and do all the nonsense and make easy fast money that way,” he explains. “Or you can go left. It takes a lot longer, it’s harder, and there’s like five per cent of people that go left instead of going right.” At 18, Deeney’s path seemed set. The Hornets captain was working as an apprentice bricklayer, earning £120 a week. He’d been expelled from school at 14, let back in at 15, and finally left at 16 with no qualifications. He had vague ambitions of being a fireman – “a dream job; four days on, four days off” – and had flunked a trial at Aston Villa after failing to turn up for three of the first four days. But fate intervened. “I was 18, and I’d just started going out with the lads, up to town,” remembers Deeney, who still speaks with a broad Brummie accent. “We went out Friday – I was a little bit worse for wear shall we say – and my mum kicked me out of the house because she wanted to clean up. She still does it to this day, she always cleans up on a Saturday. She says: ‘You’re not staying in bed all day.’ So I went and played football.” Deeney knocked in four goals for local side Chelmsley Town, and Mick Halsall was watching. Halsall was Walsall’s chief scout, but he was only present that day to watch his son – and even then only because the match he was meant to be working at had been called off. “I didn’t really care,” recalls Deeney, of his first interaction with Halsall after that game. “To me he’s just an old man asking me a question in a pub. He’s just said: ‘Do you fancy coming on trial at Walsall?’ I was like: ‘I don’t even know where Walsall is.’ Literally it’s like 10 minutes from my house, but I’d never been outside of Chelmsley Wood. He’s like: ‘Yeah, come in on Monday.’ I kind of shrugged it off.”
Answering the call
Even at this point, Deeney seemed determined not to succeed. “I went out Saturday night, as you do. Went out Sunday night, as you do. Nine o’clock Sunday
“I had a big afro, I was pretty solid up top, and I had a big ankle thing on. So yeah, a lot of the lads were scared of me!” morning, someone’s banging at the door.” Deeney raps his knuckles on the table, pressing home the point. It was a lifechanging moment. “He didn’t have to take the time. Nothing in his life has changed by improving my life, but he saw something. He saw what I could become. I always give him so much credit – he changed my life – but he’s like: ‘No, all I did was give you an opportunity. The rest you did yourself.’” A one-week trial at Walsall became four weeks, then three months. There were eight goals in 10 games on loan at Halesowen, and eight in eight for Walsall reserves. “Even then it was still like: ‘Yeah this will last for a year and then I’ll go back to play for Chelmsley Town,’” says Deeney with a broad grin. “But if you set me a task to do, I’ll get it done. If you leave me to my own devices, then I won’t do nothing; I’ll just stay in my little rut.”
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Halsall had devised one more test of Deeney’s attitude. He had three young footballers out on loan at Halesowen, and one professional contract to offer. “It’s my favourite story, this,” says Deeney. “These two were better than me. We played Merthyr Tydfill away. Bearing in mind Halesowen have no money, so you travelled on the day on a coach, this is to south Wales from the Midlands. It’s like five hours to get there. It was raining, it was horrible. We won 3-2, I scored three. We got back to Walsall at 2.30am, got back from Walsall to our houses at about 3am or 4am. “Mick Halsall phoned up all three of us at eight in the morning and said: ‘You’ve got to get in.’ Them two didn’t answer the phone; I got in and he gave me my contract there and then. I got in at 9am and he said: ‘You can go home now.’ It was just a test – just to see if I wanted it.” k
on Saturday 22nd. The following Saturday he scored the winner in a Championship game at Huddersfield. It was the first of 20 goals that season, the last a frantic winner in the final minutes of the playoff semi final, after Leicester’s Anthony Knockeart had a penalty saved seconds earlier at the other end. He scored 25 goals the following season and 21 the next, as Watford won promotion to the Premier League, and then 15 goals in his first season in the top flight, forming a potent partnership with Odion Ighalo, who Deeney calls ‘Iggy’. It’s been a rapid rise, and Deeney credits a change in mentality after his spell behind bars: “There are much better football players than me. There are six I can think of from my area who are better than me. It’s a mindset. The power of the mind is frightening. If you put your mind to something – you set me a challenge, I will do it. Once you get older you realise it’s like you’ve been given an opportunity. If you and me are on the same team, am I gonna let you have my opportunity? No. Fuck no. I don’t know you; I don’t owe you. That’s the way I think now. It’s a real selfish mentality, but it’s working.”
One wrong move
Paul Anthony Burke, Deeney’s adoptive father and a name to be respected in the high-rises of Chelmsley Wood, died of cancer of the oesophagus in the summer of 2012. Five days later, his son went to prison for his part in a nightclub brawl – he had gone out drinking with his brother and his entourage the day after Burke’s diagnosis. “We had to write to the court to postpone it a week so I could bury my dad,” says the striker, who with 12 goals had finished the 2011/12 season as Watford’s top scorer. “I didn’t have time to grieve, to feel sorry for myself. I just had to sort myself out.” Deeney says prison was the best thing that could have happened to him, and that he wouldn’t be a Premier League player without it. “I’d be playing non-league somewhere, earning like £300 a week and thinking I was the man still.” The experience, and the people he met inside, changed him for the better. “The night out – the incident and the night out – I took 20 people out with me. Of the 200 people I had in my BlackBerry at the time, I had five people send me a letter.” So what does that tell him? “It teaches you that a lot of people are just along for the ride, and the money train. And it’s alright when Troy’s buying the bottles in the clubs and everyone wants to be around Troy. But when Troy is not being paid, and Troy’s bills need to be paid, and my kids are at home and my missus is at home, no one wants to help out with the Sky bill, with the gas and the electric.”
nice pitches, a little clubhouse, photos up on the wall.” He points to the pitch outside: “If someone is playing on that, how is he gonna say: ‘Right, I can make it from here.’ Because he doesn’t see fields, he doesn’t see getting paid £50 a game. We had to pay, had to take our own kit home, had to wash it. I’m doing that at 18, and while I understand the concept, and the idea of it, I’m like: ‘Come on, you can show a bit more than that.’ If you really want to dig deep, then dig deep properly.” Leicester approached Deeney over the summer, when it appeared Vardy might go to Arsenal, but he turned down the lure of Champions League football to sign a new five-year contract with Watford. “I’m trying not to swear when I say this, but there’s no other words… I don’t get caught up in the football bullshit,” he says. “I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, I don’t think because I earn money which is very high compared to the normal working man that I’m better than anybody else. It’s just a job. In five years, Watford fans will have a new player to talk about and Troy will be part of the history like Luther Blissett, like John Barnes. You’ve just got
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, I don’t think because I earn money which is very high compared to the normal working man that I’m better than anybody else. It’s just a job” Looking back, would he do things differently? “No. You obviously have that moment where you go: ‘If I’d sorted my head out when I was 18, where would I be now?’ There are certain things you have to be mentally ready for. Like, I could have left the last three summers and gone to other Premier League clubs, but I wouldn’t have been mentally ready for that.”
Last chances
On the right track
Deeney was released from prison on Monday September 10 2012. He was, by his own admission, an intimidating sight. “All I could do was lift heavy weights, so I was bigger than I am now. I had a big afro, was pretty solid up top, had a big ankle thing on. A lot of the lads were scared of me!” He swiftly returned to training – meeting then Watford manager Gianfranco Zola for the first time. “He said: ‘Yeah, I know who are, I know what you’re about. I’ve just got to let you know we’ve got seven strikers, you’ve got to earn your way back in.’ I started laughing. He said: ‘What’s funny?’ I said: ‘You think I’ve got to earn it – I’ll be in the team within a week.’” Deeney played 45 minutes in a friendly on the 20th, and returned to league action
There’s a five-a-side pitch opposite Sport’s office in Southwark. It’s caged on all sides with a loose net hanging down to stop wayward shots landing in the road. There’s a lull in the game when Troy Deeney pulls up and parks outside in his Lamborghini – an £180,000 birthday present to himself. He’s come a long way from Chelmsley Wood, and he gestures through the window to the pitch when he makes his next point. On the surface, there are similarities between Deeney’s story and that of Jamie Vardy – the rise from non-league; the ankle tag – but the Watford striker is not buying it. “Have you seen where Jamie Vardy was playing?” he asks. “It was nice – they had
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to keep yourself grounded. If not, the universe has a way of grounding you.” For Deeney, who remembers his mum working four jobs to get through Christmas and the debt collectors banging on the door, his career is not about medals or trophies. It’s about financial security. “I bought my mum a house,” he continues. “If you’re from where I’m from, that’s heaven. Seeing my mum with tears from happiness when I saw her crying for all she’d fought for is priceless. Priceless.” It comes back to those two paths. A Saturday morning lie-in, a missed call, or a less determined Mick Halsall, and it could all have been very different for Deeney. The ghosts of another life threatened to drag him back on to the wrong path, but eventually he seized his opportunity and made the most of his good fortune. “I’m just a normal kid from a council estate that’s happy to provide for his family,” he insists. “That’s my main aim. My kids are going to have a much better start in life than I would have ever dreamed of. That’s enough for me. I don’t need the celebrity, I don’t need the fame. Just leave me to do my work.” @amitkatwala
35
On Walter Mazzarri
“I knew of him. I wouldn’t say I could tell you how he got on in his last job or anything like that, but I knew of him from playing Football Manager and what have you. He’s generally Italian in the sense that he knows what he wants tactically, and you have to get with the programme quickly.”
On Football Manager
“I’m 4-2-3-1 – that’s me. I’m just like everybody else now; I’m just trying to find a big man up front. Can’t buy myself, unfortunately. I like going with the lower teams, so like Solihull Moors or Tamworth or something like that. It’s too easy when you’re the big teams.”
On Euro 2016
“If you’re trying to boost an England squad to do well – you’ve got Danny Drinkwater who has just won the league. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing. I think if you asked Jack Wilshere, obviously he wants to play for his country and he’s a very good footballer. But if you ask him, did he deserve to go? Hand on heart he’d have to say no. And that’s not his fault – he’s not injured because he wants to be. But what message are you sending to everybody else?”
Michael Regan/Getty Images
Even if you have been nudged, or dragged, on to the right path, it can be hard to stay there. “It’s a lot harder to go left than it is to go right,” says Deeney. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made my mistakes – we all have – but it’s easier to make a mistake and keep doing the same mistakes and blaming everybody else than to go: ‘Right, I fucked up, but let’s keep going this way.’ “It only takes one wrong move to mess up 100 right moves. I found that out first-hand.”
The accidental footballer Watford striker Troy Deeney and the ghost of another life
Sliding doors Watford striker Troy Deeney tells Sport how his remarkable journey from prison to the Premier League almost didn’t happen Words Amit Katwala Photography Philip Haynes
31
I
’m a builder by trade,” says Troy Deeney, in the matter-of-fact tone you might use when making small talk at a barbecue. “It was never my life goal to be a professional footballer. I was more a normal council kid – I liked getting in trouble and chasing girls about.” The Watford striker owes his Premier League career to three things: his mum’s cleaning routines, “an old man in a pub”, and the three months he spent in prison for kicking a student in the head in a brawl outside a nightclub. There’s more than a touch of Sliding Doors about Deeney’s route to the top, and a lesson for us all: the choices you make when you’re hungover could change your life. The 28-year-old grew up in a highrise tower block in a council estate in Chelmsley Wood, a down-at-heel suburb of Birmingham. He had two choices. “In the community that I come from, you can go right and do all the nonsense and make easy fast money that way,” he explains. “Or you can go left. It takes a lot longer, it’s harder, and there’s like five per cent of people that go left instead of going right.” At 18, Deeney’s path seemed set. The Hornets captain was working as an apprentice bricklayer, earning £120 a week. He’d been expelled from school at 14, let back in at 15, and finally left at 16 with no qualifications. He had vague ambitions of being a fireman – “a dream job; four days on, four days off” – and had flunked a trial at Aston Villa after failing to turn up for three of the first four days. But fate intervened. “I was 18, and I’d just started going out with the lads, up to town,” remembers Deeney, who still speaks with a broad Brummie accent. “We went out Friday – I was a little bit worse for wear shall we say – and my mum kicked me out of the house because she wanted to clean up. She still does it to this day, she always cleans up on a Saturday. She says: ‘You’re not staying in bed all day.’ So I went and played football.” Deeney knocked in four goals for local side Chelmsley Town, and Mick Halsall was watching. Halsall was Walsall’s chief scout, but he was only present that day to watch his son – and even then only because the match he was meant to be working at had been called off. “I didn’t really care,” recalls Deeney, of his first interaction with Halsall after that game. “To me he’s just an old man asking me a question in a pub. He’s just said: ‘Do you fancy coming on trial at Walsall?’ I was like: ‘I don’t even know where Walsall is.’ Literally it’s like 10 minutes from my house, but I’d never been outside of Chelmsley Wood. He’s like: ‘Yeah, come in on Monday.’ I kind of shrugged it off.”
Answering the call
Even at this point, Deeney seemed determined not to succeed. “I went out Saturday night, as you do. Went out Sunday night, as you do. Nine o’clock Sunday
“I had a big afro, I was pretty solid up top, and I had a big ankle thing on. So yeah, a lot of the lads were scared of me!” morning, someone’s banging at the door.” Deeney raps his knuckles on the table, pressing home the point. It was a lifechanging moment. “He didn’t have to take the time. Nothing in his life has changed by improving my life, but he saw something. He saw what I could become. I always give him so much credit – he changed my life – but he’s like: ‘No, all I did was give you an opportunity. The rest you did yourself.’” A one-week trial at Walsall became four weeks, then three months. There were eight goals in 10 games on loan at Halesowen, and eight in eight for Walsall reserves. “Even then it was still like: ‘Yeah this will last for a year and then I’ll go back to play for Chelmsley Town,’” says Deeney with a broad grin. “But if you set me a task to do, I’ll get it done. If you leave me to my own devices, then I won’t do nothing; I’ll just stay in my little rut.”
32
Halsall had devised one more test of Deeney’s attitude. He had three young footballers out on loan at Halesowen, and one professional contract to offer. “It’s my favourite story, this,” says Deeney. “These two were better than me. We played Merthyr Tydfill away. Bearing in mind Halesowen have no money, so you travelled on the day on a coach, this is to south Wales from the Midlands. It’s like five hours to get there. It was raining, it was horrible. We won 3-2, I scored three. We got back to Walsall at 2.30am, got back from Walsall to our houses at about 3am or 4am. “Mick Halsall phoned up all three of us at eight in the morning and said: ‘You’ve got to get in.’ Them two didn’t answer the phone; I got in and he gave me my contract there and then. I got in at 9am and he said: ‘You can go home now.’ It was just a test – just to see if I wanted it.” k
on Saturday 22nd. The following Saturday he scored the winner in a Championship game at Huddersfield. It was the first of 20 goals that season, the last a frantic winner in the final minutes of the playoff semi final, after Leicester’s Anthony Knockeart had a penalty saved seconds earlier at the other end. He scored 25 goals the following season and 21 the next, as Watford won promotion to the Premier League, and then 15 goals in his first season in the top flight, forming a potent partnership with Odion Ighalo, who Deeney calls ‘Iggy’. It’s been a rapid rise, and Deeney credits a change in mentality after his spell behind bars: “There are much better football players than me. There are six I can think of from my area who are better than me. It’s a mindset. The power of the mind is frightening. If you put your mind to something – you set me a challenge, I will do it. Once you get older you realise it’s like you’ve been given an opportunity. If you and me are on the same team, am I gonna let you have my opportunity? No. Fuck no. I don’t know you; I don’t owe you. That’s the way I think now. It’s a real selfish mentality, but it’s working.”
One wrong move
Paul Anthony Burke, Deeney’s adoptive father and a name to be respected in the high-rises of Chelmsley Wood, died of cancer of the oesophagus in the summer of 2012. Five days later, his son went to prison for his part in a nightclub brawl – he had gone out drinking with his brother and his entourage the day after Burke’s diagnosis. “We had to write to the court to postpone it a week so I could bury my dad,” says the striker, who with 12 goals had finished the 2011/12 season as Watford’s top scorer. “I didn’t have time to grieve, to feel sorry for myself. I just had to sort myself out.” Deeney says prison was the best thing that could have happened to him, and that he wouldn’t be a Premier League player without it. “I’d be playing non-league somewhere, earning like £300 a week and thinking I was the man still.” The experience, and the people he met inside, changed him for the better. “The night out – the incident and the night out – I took 20 people out with me. Of the 200 people I had in my BlackBerry at the time, I had five people send me a letter.” So what does that tell him? “It teaches you that a lot of people are just along for the ride, and the money train. And it’s alright when Troy’s buying the bottles in the clubs and everyone wants to be around Troy. But when Troy is not being paid, and Troy’s bills need to be paid, and my kids are at home and my missus is at home, no one wants to help out with the Sky bill, with the gas and the electric.”
nice pitches, a little clubhouse, photos up on the wall.” He points to the pitch outside: “If someone is playing on that, how is he gonna say: ‘Right, I can make it from here.’ Because he doesn’t see fields, he doesn’t see getting paid £50 a game. We had to pay, had to take our own kit home, had to wash it. I’m doing that at 18, and while I understand the concept, and the idea of it, I’m like: ‘Come on, you can show a bit more than that.’ If you really want to dig deep, then dig deep properly.” Leicester approached Deeney over the summer, when it appeared Vardy might go to Arsenal, but he turned down the lure of Champions League football to sign a new five-year contract with Watford. “I’m trying not to swear when I say this, but there’s no other words… I don’t get caught up in the football bullshit,” he says. “I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, I don’t think because I earn money which is very high compared to the normal working man that I’m better than anybody else. It’s just a job. In five years, Watford fans will have a new player to talk about and Troy will be part of the history like Luther Blissett, like John Barnes. You’ve just got
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, I don’t think because I earn money which is very high compared to the normal working man that I’m better than anybody else. It’s just a job” Looking back, would he do things differently? “No. You obviously have that moment where you go: ‘If I’d sorted my head out when I was 18, where would I be now?’ There are certain things you have to be mentally ready for. Like, I could have left the last three summers and gone to other Premier League clubs, but I wouldn’t have been mentally ready for that.”
Last chances
On the right track
Deeney was released from prison on Monday September 10 2012. He was, by his own admission, an intimidating sight. “All I could do was lift heavy weights, so I was bigger than I am now. I had a big afro, was pretty solid up top, had a big ankle thing on. A lot of the lads were scared of me!” He swiftly returned to training – meeting then Watford manager Gianfranco Zola for the first time. “He said: ‘Yeah, I know who are, I know what you’re about. I’ve just got to let you know we’ve got seven strikers, you’ve got to earn your way back in.’ I started laughing. He said: ‘What’s funny?’ I said: ‘You think I’ve got to earn it – I’ll be in the team within a week.’” Deeney played 45 minutes in a friendly on the 20th, and returned to league action
There’s a five-a-side pitch opposite Sport’s office in Southwark. It’s caged on all sides with a loose net hanging down to stop wayward shots landing in the road. There’s a lull in the game when Troy Deeney pulls up and parks outside in his Lamborghini – an £180,000 birthday present to himself. He’s come a long way from Chelmsley Wood, and he gestures through the window to the pitch when he makes his next point. On the surface, there are similarities between Deeney’s story and that of Jamie Vardy – the rise from non-league; the ankle tag – but the Watford striker is not buying it. “Have you seen where Jamie Vardy was playing?” he asks. “It was nice – they had
34
to keep yourself grounded. If not, the universe has a way of grounding you.” For Deeney, who remembers his mum working four jobs to get through Christmas and the debt collectors banging on the door, his career is not about medals or trophies. It’s about financial security. “I bought my mum a house,” he continues. “If you’re from where I’m from, that’s heaven. Seeing my mum with tears from happiness when I saw her crying for all she’d fought for is priceless. Priceless.” It comes back to those two paths. A Saturday morning lie-in, a missed call, or a less determined Mick Halsall, and it could all have been very different for Deeney. The ghosts of another life threatened to drag him back on to the wrong path, but eventually he seized his opportunity and made the most of his good fortune. “I’m just a normal kid from a council estate that’s happy to provide for his family,” he insists. “That’s my main aim. My kids are going to have a much better start in life than I would have ever dreamed of. That’s enough for me. I don’t need the celebrity, I don’t need the fame. Just leave me to do my work.” @amitkatwala
35
On Walter Mazzarri
“I knew of him. I wouldn’t say I could tell you how he got on in his last job or anything like that, but I knew of him from playing Football Manager and what have you. He’s generally Italian in the sense that he knows what he wants tactically, and you have to get with the programme quickly.”
On Football Manager
“I’m 4-2-3-1 – that’s me. I’m just like everybody else now; I’m just trying to find a big man up front. Can’t buy myself, unfortunately. I like going with the lower teams, so like Solihull Moors or Tamworth or something like that. It’s too easy when you’re the big teams.”
On Euro 2016
“If you’re trying to boost an England squad to do well – you’ve got Danny Drinkwater who has just won the league. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing. I think if you asked Jack Wilshere, obviously he wants to play for his country and he’s a very good footballer. But if you ask him, did he deserve to go? Hand on heart he’d have to say no. And that’s not his fault – he’s not injured because he wants to be. But what message are you sending to everybody else?”
Michael Regan/Getty Images
Even if you have been nudged, or dragged, on to the right path, it can be hard to stay there. “It’s a lot harder to go left than it is to go right,” says Deeney. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made my mistakes – we all have – but it’s easier to make a mistake and keep doing the same mistakes and blaming everybody else than to go: ‘Right, I fucked up, but let’s keep going this way.’ “It only takes one wrong move to mess up 100 right moves. I found that out first-hand.”
