Former England goalkeeper Ben Foster spent a significant portion of his playing career alongside Ireland great James McClean at club level.
Something of a journeyman, Foster played for eight different clubs at senior level during his playing career.
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Of those clubs, West Brom was the one where Foster spent the most time, and three of his seven seasons at the Hawthorns saw him count on Derryman McClean as a teammate.
Both men would leave the Baggies in the summer of 2018, but were reunited when McClean arrived at Wrexham in 2023, for what turned out to be Foster’s final season as a player.
The pair are well acquainted with each other, and on this week’s episode of That Wrexham Podcast, Foster revealed a brutal story about McClean’s doomed move to adopt veganism during their shared time at West Brom.
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Ben Foster shares hilarious James McClean pre-season story
Even from late in his playing career, Ben Foster has become just as well known for his storytelling off the pitch on the ‘Cycling Goalkeeper’ podcast as for his exploits between the sticks.
That ability has only grown in retirement, and Foster shared an absolute classic about James McClean this week on That Wrexham Podcast.
@thatwrexhampodcast When James McClean went VEGAN on Pre Season… 😱 #jamesmcclean #Wrexham #vegan #soccer ♬ original sound – thatwrexhampodcast
Foster revealed that McClean briefly took up veganism during his time at West Brom – but an utterly brutal Tony Pulis pre-season regime quickly put an end to that idea.
“We were on West Brom pre-season training,” Foster said.
For some reason, he decided to go vegan. He went vegan before pre-season training started in Austria with Tony Pulis.
Tony Pulis’ pre-seasons are famous. He started veganism a week before pre-season training started.
We were out in Austria, running up the hills, mate nearly collapsed and died. I promise you, ask him about it, collapsed and died, he nearly did. He was in a bad way for a couple of days, it knocked him so hard, right?
End of veganism, that was it, done. Give me the protein, give me the meat! That was it, back on it again.
Vegan athletes are few and far between, though the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Novak Djokovic have made it work.
It says a lot about how brutal Tony Pulis’ pre-season training must have been that even James McClean could not hack it (or, at least, believed that he couldn’t) for more than a few weeks.
Or was the struggle with veganism more of an excuse from the Irish legend…?
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