IT took just three minutes of Edinburgh derby action on Tuesday night for Simon Murray to acquire the kind of hero status which largely eluded his dad Gary over the course of three injury-ravaged seasons at Easter Road in the early ‘80s.
While 18 goals in 80 starts wasn’t the worst goal record for a man Bertie Auld picked up from Montrose for £50,000, Hibs were in the second tier then and Murray Snr’s career never quite took off after he picked up a serious knee problem in a reserve match.
Notching the winning goal, like young Simon did, in front of your own fans, in the first all Premiership capital grudge match for four years, was a shortcut to a different kind of fame.
“My dad had told me a few things about it and I have watched it on TV but I have never actually been to one before last night,” said Simon. “He just said ‘go and work hard and grab yourself a goal’.”
This Murray did alright, what he called “the most memorable goal of his career so far by a distance” – although it turned out it wasn’t just his father that he was trying to emulate on the night.
Tasked with kicking him out of form slump which had seen him drop out of the team after claiming 10 goals in his first seven starts, Calvin Charlton, the club’s head of performance analysis, spent a few days showing him footage of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, and his capacity to hit the ball early, hard and on target.
He certainly took a page out of that book against Hearts as he turned past John Souttar in the box and lashed in a high right foot shot which was beyond Hearts goalkeeper Jon McLaughlin in a flash.
“I was watching a few videos through the week, seeing how strikers get their head down and lash at it, so that was my first thought, just get it hard an on target,” he said. “I watched a few clips of Vardy and he puts his head down and hits it. So I did that early on in the game and maybe that helped because the keepers aren’t fully switched on yet.
“We haven’t really watched those videos before but when you watch Premier League players, it is good to study what they do and luckily I watched it this week.”
If there was one moment which summed up how far out of the picture Murray was it came at Hampden on Saturday. Searching for a man to get his side a goal, Neil Lennon turned to young Oli Shaw, not Murray, and the 19-year-old obliged with his first Hibs goal. Perhaps it was thoughts of his own mortality which spurred Murray back to his best form too.
“You don’t aim to have a dip but sometimes you are just not getting the bounce of the ball or the bit of luck you need,” he said. “The ball is maybe going behind you or a couple of yards in front of you and it just doesn’t click but if you keep working hard then it does come back.
“I couldn’t have hoped for a better time for that to happen,” he added. “You want to play in every game so I was disappointed [at Hampden], it wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t, but he [Shaw] did brilliant when he went on.
“I couldn’t have hoped for a better derby. I don’t feel like I played unbelievably well, I just got the goal. It was my first experience of the crowd and everything else but it was great and it is something I will always remember.”
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