Watford’s goalkeeper Ben Foster has said the resumption of football behind closed doors could allow players who struggle with anxiety in front of large crowds to thrive, making matches more unpredictable than ever.
“It’s going to be so topsy-turvy,” he said. “I know for a fact that there are players that do feel massive pressure when they know they have 30-, 40-, 50,000 people watching them. I’ve seen it all through my career. You see a footballer on a Monday or Tuesday and then it’s all free and easy, they’re nice and chatty, but then once you get later on in the week, once you get to Thursday and Friday, especially a Saturday, you see the pressure, you can just see it getting into their head and getting into their body and just see that they just want to go into their own world. You can see that pressure really does play on them a lot. And not having the crowd there will, without doubt, benefit some people.
“You’re going to get players coming into form that haven’t been in form all season or low in confidence and then suddenly thriving. Whereas on the other side of the coin, you’ve got players that need the crowd, you need the buzz, you need the adrenaline and you’re not going to have the same sort of buzz.”
Watford played Brentford at Vicarage Road on Saturday, their second friendly there after another between two Watford XIs last week. At the time of the first game, Premier League clubs were discussing the possibility of playing crowd noise during matches and Watford trialled this – a largely unpopular innovation but one with great comic potential.
“It really annoyed me,” Foster said. “You can only play it at certain times, like when the ball goes out, when it would just come on and be really annoying. Everybody agreed we’d rather not have it. We had one of the coaches refereeing and he was the worst referee ever, so they started playing: ‘The referee’s a wanker.’ Nobody knew it was coming. Even he was laughing.”
The 37-year-old Foster, who joined from West Brom in 2018, signed a two-year contract last week and has declared an ambition to play into his 40s. “Earlier in my career, especially when I turned 30, I would never have said there was any chance of me getting this late on,” he said. “Watford came at a very good time for me. It reignited something in me. I needed to go somewhere else for a new challenge.”
The challenge facing Foster now is to complete Watford’s resurrection from being marooned at the foot of the table in mid-December to survival. “It was easy [during lockdown] to forget almost that we are still in a really precarious situation,” he said. “It’s great to come back to football but we’ve still got a massive battle on our hands.”
