IT WILL ALL COME WRIGHT IN THE END
Paul Wright, the 1997 Scottish Cup Final goalscorer, showed reliance to overcome a difficult start with his new club. Without that strength of character, his story might have been very different. Killie’s too.
Over to Jock Brown:
“Now the moment the town of Falkirk has been waiting for. Just listen to the crescendo of noise as Paul Wright goes forward to lift the trophy. The matchwinner. 29 years old. A moment I’m sure he thought he would never savour…”
Kilmarnock manager Alex Totten’s past success with Wright suggests that had ‘Bunion’ failed to adapt successfully to life in Ayrshire in 1995 then reuniting with the gaffer at his next destination, Brockville, and scoring the winning goal at Ibrox for ‘the Bairns’, rather than against them, is not such a far-fetched scenario.
“You get managers that are players’ managers. He seemed to know how to work me – what right buttons to press. He was one of the first people on the phone to me when I did my cruciate at St. Johnstone. And it’s a relationship like that that installs confidence in you. Alec was on the phone to me, ‘We’re looking for a striker. Are you back fit?’ I knew when a manager had that much faith, I had to go and play for the man. It’s trust: trust in your ability and trust in you as a person.”
In the early nineties, Paul was making a big impression at St. Johnstone, starting to realise the bright promise from his early career with Aberdeen, Queens Park Rangers, and Hibernian, his game a lethal mix of match intelligence and ruthless finishing. But things were to change dramatically.
“I did my cruciate ligament in 1994. I had been doing well; I’d scored that many goals. A lot of clubs were coming in chasing me. All of a sudden, when a football player is doing well, these sorts of things creep up. I’d never had an injury in my life and now I was out for nearly a year.
“I got my operation on February the 4th 1994, in Murrayfield Hospital in Edinburgh. The nurse came in the night before and said, ‘Have you anything to fall back on if it doesn’t work?’ So then the reality kicks in because all I knew was football. Your mind is racing the night before. After the operation was done, I said to myself, ‘There’s only one way back and you’ve got to get yourself back,’ because I had a young family at the time.
“I felt I came back to ninety percent of the player I was at St. Johnstone, but I was never back one hundred percent. It’s just the length of time that you’re out and the matches that you lose and the match fitness you’ve got to get back. And the injury itself and the toll it takes on you. I was finding it tough to get back in the St. Johnstone side.”
Alex Totten, in need of a number nine to boost Killie’s ambling 1994/95 campaign, bidding to maintain the club’s topflight status for a third year, made the call to his former star striker. For goal-shy Kilmarnock, it was hoped that the £340,000 club record transfer would help to secure their place in the Premier Division. But the immediate impact was far from explosive. A combination of a desperate lack of fitness and not quite getting the rub of the green – rattling the frame in a scoreless draw against Partick Thistle, for example – meant that Paul Wright’s start in blue and white was a troubled one.
“As a football player, when you are brought in for big money, the fans are expecting an instant reaction. I’d hardly played any games in a year and a half. Even though Kilmarnock had shelled out big money for me, and Alec’s faith in me, I had a really, really slow start, because I wasn’t fit enough.
“I played in the last six games of the ‘95 season. It was very, very tough for me. I’d been used to moving from team to team, but I was always fit enough whenever I’d signed for a team. This was the first time I wasn’t fit enough.
“I remember the debut up in Aberdeen when Mark Skilling scored, and we won one-nil. On that day, that was another game that passed me by. I remember giving the ball away and it was the team that rallied round me and got through and got the result.
“The next five games after that was about building up match fitness. It got to the stage that I was getting in the right positions, but the luck wasn’t with me at the time. I was getting fitter, and I was getting better. Just at the end of the season, I managed to get my first goal in the very last game against Hibs.”
The blue touch paper was lit in the season’s finale in front of a crowd of over 12,000, a not-very-Paul-Wright goal – a flicked header from a corner – getting him started.
“That took a wee bit of weight off my shoulders.”
His big moment in May ‘97 was everyone’s big moment, as the modest marksman is eager to emphasise. But Paul Wright was about far more than that one goal. Perhaps, in fact, it was his first strike, the largely unheralded header in a meaningless home defeat to Hibs, that was the most significant.
Words by Gordon Gillen
This article first appeared in Issue 6 of the Kilmarnock Football Club official magazine of January 2022.