Freddie Woodman's Journey from Third Choice to Merseyside Derby Hero

A year ago, Freddie Woodman was watching the fight from the outside, nursing an injury at Preston North End as they scraped their way to Championship safety. On Sunday, he was thrown into a Merseyside derby at Goodison Park with everything on the line and no time to think.

Liverpool’s third-choice goalkeeper, signed quietly on a free last summer, suddenly mattered.

He was on the bench when Giorgi Mamardashvili pulled up injured in the second half of Liverpool’s win at Everton. Alisson is already out with a hamstring problem, Mamardashvili now facing his own spell on the sidelines, and in an instant the man brought in to train, support and wait was sprinting towards the noise.

First Premier League minutes since 2021. First league appearance for Liverpool. First taste of a derby like this.

Woodman has lived most of his career on the margins of the top flight. Eight years at Newcastle brought only four Premier League games, broken up by six loan spells before a permanent move to Preston in 2022. There, he finally settled, playing 138 times in three seasons and becoming a mainstay.

Then his contract ended. Liverpool called. The role was clear: third choice.

“It’s tough,” the 29-year-old has admitted. Not the physical work – he knows how to train – but the psychology of it. The acceptance that weeks and months might pass without a minute of football, that his season could come down to a frantic 10 or 20 minutes when someone else’s muscle tears or ankle twists.

So he trained for those 10 minutes. Built his days around the possibility of a single, high‑pressure cameo. Lived in the what-if.

When Mamardashvili went down at Goodison, the what-if arrived.

Woodman’s job was simple and brutal: come on cold, into a derby, protect a narrow lead, don’t make the mistake everyone remembers. He produced one key save, denying Iliman Ndiaye, did his work cleanly, and walked off with his manager’s praise ringing in his ears.

Arne Slot told him he’d worked all season without much credit. Woodman was fine with that. The handshake at full-time, the knowledge he’d done what he was there to do, was enough.

Life as Liverpool’s third-choice goalkeeper is about more than waiting for disaster. Woodman has had to redraw what it means to contribute. He is there when Dom Szoboszlai wants extra free-kicks, when Mo Salah wants more shooting practice. He builds relationships with Andy Robertson, Curtis Jones, Cody Gakpo, Virgil van Dijk. Last season he watched them as distant stars. Now they’re teammates, “normal blokes” he sees every day.

Being third choice, he has learned, is more important than he imagined. It means serving the starters, sharpening them, being ready if their bodies give way. It means putting himself second, every day.

The irony is that injuries elsewhere have now pushed him back into the foreground.

Alisson’s hamstring issue keeps the Brazilian out. Mamardashvili’s setback at Goodison opens another gap. Suddenly, Woodman is not just a training-ground constant but the likely starter against his boyhood club Crystal Palace at Anfield this weekend.

For him, that possibility is loaded. He grew up a Palace fan, worked as a ball boy at Selhurst Park, and has already faced them this season in the Carabao Cup. Another Premier League game, at Anfield, for Liverpool, against the club he once watched from the touchline as a kid? He calls the idea “unreal, incredible”.

Yet he still frames it through the lens of the pecking order. He wants Mamardashvili to recover. He wants Alisson – “the best goalkeeper in the world” in his eyes – back fit and in goal. Until then, he will prepare this week as if he is playing, because that is what third-choice keepers must do. Always ready, usually unused.

The timing of his chance added another layer to a remarkable family weekend. On Saturday, his father Andy, the former goalkeeper turned manager, led Bromley to promotion to League One for the first time in the club’s history. On Sunday, Freddie stepped off the bench in one of English football’s fiercest derbies and helped Liverpool get over the line, capped by Van Dijk’s 100th-minute winner.

He admits the nerves were there. How could they not be? But they drove him, sharpened his focus. Eight months of unseen work, all funneled into a handful of minutes in a storm.

You don’t get to choose when football calls. You only choose how ready you are when it does.