Watford goalkeeper Ben Foster has admitted he has known team-mates who have purposely missed playing against Liverpool away from home due to worries of the full-time result. The 38-year-old has represented four different sides in the Premier League and is no stranger to trips to Anfield, having made his maiden top-flight appearance back in the 2007/08 campaign.
Ben Foster said: “It is beautiful. I remember playing at Anfield when that comes on [You’ll Never Walk Alone], you’re walking out and it’s on just before the game is about to start. I am in my goal, the whole stadium is singing, and I find myself singing it. It is so iconic and it’s like, ‘wow, this means something’. The Liverpool fans are really decent. I do love those old-school stadiums. Do you know what makes it really special when you play away at Anfield? When you’re on the coach, some of the players you get coming over from Spain and Italy see Anfield and think, ‘this is beautiful and incredible’. But I guarantee you when they’re on the coach, arriving at the stadium and driving through the streets where the fans are just fanatical about it, it must get under their skin a little bit.”
Asked to clarify if he has come across professional footballers who have avoided away meetings with the big-hitters of the division out of sheer panic,
Ben Foster continued: “100 per cent. I cannot name names but, for a fact, I know that if we’ve got Man City on Saturday certain players would have got a little niggle. I would be joking with other players going, ‘guaranteed he will get a niggle this week’. He might have come off the back of a bad performance and is then playing Liverpool, Man City or Man United. I know for a fact they will get a little niggle on Wednesday or Thursday. It has happened so many times.”
The first club the experienced shot-stopper represented in the Premier League was Manchester United, during the days of Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign. On the books at Old Trafford between 2005 and 2010, Foster was working under the stewardship of Sir Alex Ferguson as back-up to Edwin van der Sar and has acknowledged that ‘Fergie time’ was certainly not a myth.
Ben Foster said: “It was a genuine thing, but it wasn’t necessarily all just about the referee. It was a complete mixture of everything. Alex Ferguson was such an intimidating guy anyway and it got to the point where Man United would always win and score last-minute goals. That, in turn, would get in the heads of teams. It was almost inevitable. They knew what was coming, they knew they were going to let a 93rd or 94th-minute goal in. Couple that with the fans going absolutely bonkers and the referee would, 100 per cent, get influenced by that. It was almost a force of nature.”
