If I hadn't gone to jail, I'd be dead now. It was the hard reset I needed

After drunkenly stumbling into professional football, Troy Deeney spent 13 weeks in prison, but emerged to become a Watford legend. He still has ambitions for a successful managerial career, too - just don't ask him about Dale Vince...

- Interview Chris Flanagan

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 playoff semifinal 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."

SEVEN GOALS WHILE DRUNK

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."