NIGHT OUT IN PHILLY? NOT UNTIL I’VE WATCHED THE KILLIE

For one United States resident, the Championship decider’s Friday evening kick off made for perfect lunchtime viewing. But why was Stuart Findlay watching at all, never mind kicking every ball from his Pennsylvania home?

The career path for a player who succeeds at a provincial Scottish club tends to be well defined: get your chance, impress, move to a bigger club, never look back. So when this international defender jetted off to Philadelphia last year, it would not have been unreasonable to think that the Killie fans would never hear from him again.

Yet on a visit home in December, there he was in the Frank Beattie Stand, one of the three and a half thousand witnessing the grey skies and blue mood of Killie’s winter, in the to-be-abandoned match with Dunfermline.

The bond, soldered by crucial goals and clean-sheet-saving challenges, endures.

“Football is my life. To come to America - the life that it’s given me and Megan over here - it’s something that I would recommend to anybody. It’s something that I never in my wildest dreams thought I would have done.

“Judging by how well the fans took the information that I was leaving - and how happy they were for me - I think they realised it was probably the right time for me to try something new. I’d given so much to Kilmarnock. Obviously, in an ideal world, you’d maybe stay at one club for fifteen years. But lifestyle, financially, it was a life-changing move for me. It was something that I think I just had to take at that time. I’m glad that I did. I might not have played as much as I would have wanted to, but I think I’m a better player now. Any time I have played, I’ve shown that I can play out here. And I don’t think my time out here is finished. I think I’ve still got a point to prove.

“It was a case of, when this came up, it was just too good to knock back. It was one of the best teams in an up-and-coming league, living in an amazing environment, and experiencing new things that I would maybe never get to again in my life.”

But is it ‘Hasta la vista’ or ‘I’ll be back’?

“I’d happily go out there and say, before I came to Kilmarnock, it was just another a move. It was a football move to progress my career. But you don’t grow a bond like that with supporters, with the people who work at the club, with your teammates, over the four years of my second spell, you’re not there for that long without growing fond of a club.

“When I moved to Kilmarnock, I didn’t have a team that I really supported. Now I can say for certain that I am a Kilmarnock fan and I’d be lying if I said one day I didn’t want to go back. I don’t know when; I don’t know how. There’s a lot of football left to get played in my career but whether it’s one year, five years, ten years, twenty years as a manager, I don’t know. But there’s a part of me I want to be back at Rugby Park one day. I don’t need to hide that. I don’t need to keep that a secret because people who know me know that I want to be back there one day.

“You don’t enjoy a place that much and want to wash your hands of it.

“It’s impossible for me to feel the adoration of, I’d say, one hundred percent of the Kilmarnock fans, it’s impossible to feel that rapport and not feel it back. I don’t know any Kilmarnock fans who ever personally gave me any criticism. And anybody who did give me any criticism at the start, I think I changed their minds towards the end. Very few players have got the privilege to say they have that good a rapport with the fans. To feel so welcome, to feel so loved at a club, it’s very difficult not to feel that in return.”

Of the many highs Stuart Findlay experienced in Ayrshire, it is his late winner at Tynecastle in the successful challenge for European football that remains at the forefront of his mind. A moment when the role of player and supporter combined. Well, almost.

“We played well in the Hearts game. We had a couple of chances and I thought it was going to be a nil-nil. We knew we had to win three games to get third place because we knew Aberdeen were going to win a game and beat us to it.

“And then, that moment of the ball falling and me scoring….

“I think, for Kilmarnock, the Tynecastle away end is the best end to see our supporters. We get a really good section; we always take a good crowd. My biggest regret of my life is not running right into the middle of them and jumping in. I did some sort of pathetic high five thing along the side.”

Yee-haw!

“Just to see that reaction when the ball went in, to know what that game meant and, after the game, to hear the Europe songs, it’s an outrageously special game. It was one of the very few times in football you feel full contentment. I was in the bus, and I thought: ‘I can retire tomorrow, and I’d be happy to finish on that.’ That Hearts game, it was true elation. And to be the guy who scores the goal, and it was a nice goal as well, it was just an unbelievable moment.”

Words by Gordon Gillen

This article first appeared in Issue 10 of the Kilmarnock Football Club official magazine of May 2022.