Troy Deeney scored one of the most iconic goals in Football League history just nine months after walking out of prison. The 97th-minute play-off semi-final winner he drove home for Watford in 2013 — seconds after Anthony Knockaert had missed a penalty at the other end that would have sent Leicester City to Wembley — cemented his place in the club's folklore forever.

"In the moment, I was so calm — it felt like everything slowed down, like you see in the movies," Deeney tells FourFourTwo. "I thought, 'Just kick it straight and I'll score.' As soon as it hit the net, it felt like an eruption of noise."

Seven goals while drunk

The road to that moment was anything but straightforward. Deeney grew up a lifelong Birmingham fan and was expelled from school as a teenager. He came close to joining Aston Villa, but attended only the first and last days of a four-day trial, spending the rest of the time with friends during the summer holidays. "I just wasn't in the right headspace for it," he admits.

He dropped into non-league football with Chelmsley Town, playing central midfield alongside men twice his age. It was an environment he credits with shaping his character — though not always in ways a coaching manual would recommend. Scouts from Walsall came to watch him on a day he reportedly netted seven goals. The catch: he was drunk. "I can't tell you if I actually scored seven, but I was definitely drunk!" he laughs. "I went out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday — then I'd figure out getting another job on the Monday."

Walsall scout Mick Halsall took a chance on the teenager regardless. "He saw something in me that I didn't think was possible," Deeney says. "He gave me not only an opportunity, but a lifeline."

From League One to Watford — and chaos in between

After establishing himself as a goalscorer in League One, Deeney joined Watford, then a mid-table Championship side. He would go on to spend 11 years at Vicarage Road, scoring 140 goals and featuring across five full Premier League campaigns. But his first 18 months there were turbulent. "Mentally all over the place, not turning up, not applying myself — I always had impostor syndrome," he says. "I had this big fear of, 'It's going to be over, it's going to be over.'"

In the first half of 2012, two crises hit simultaneously. His father was diagnosed with throat cancer at 47, and Deeney was charged with affray following an early-hours altercation outside a Birmingham nightclub — an attack that left one of the victims with a broken jaw. Manager Sean Dyche continued to push him through it all. "He kept telling me, 'You're going to quit,'" Deeney recalls. "He understood there was not a quitter in me." Deeney responded with ten goals from January to the end of that season.

Prison as a turning point

Three days after burying his father, Deeney received a 10-month sentence. He served just over 13 weeks. He is unambiguous about what that time meant for him. "If I didn't go to jail, I would have been dead," he says, repeating the words deliberately. "I was living too recklessly away from football."

He is equally clear that he does not wish to minimise the harm caused. "There was a family on the other side and I never ever want to glorify what I did — there was a victim." But he describes those weeks in a cell as a necessary reckoning. "I buried my dad on the Friday and went to jail on the Monday. In jail, all you have is time. I wrote down a list: what am I going to do when I get out? I was making good money but going out every week, with a leased car and a rented house. When you get locked up and stop being paid, it's like, 'Oh, actually I haven't got anything.' It was the hard reset I needed."

Released with renewed purpose, Deeney scored the winner on his first start back for Watford — who had since been taken over by the Pozzo family, with Gianfranco Zola installed as manager — and went on to net 20 goals that season. The 2013 play-off moment followed, and the rest is Watford history.