Prolific Murray is Hibs’ shooting star (2024)

Simon Murray has come a long way in a short space of time, but he can still smell his past. If the Hibs striker is now in something pretty close to his dream job, being part of the family plumbing firm was altogether dirtier work. Once they were helping with a luxury housing development when it emerged — and emerged is definitely the word – that another contractor had made a mistake connecting the sewage pipes. S*** happened, all over the place, and it was Murray’s job to deal with the mess.

“Covered head to toe,” he says, not sparing us the detail. “It was all right at the time, but coming here and doing this, you wouldn’t want to go back to something like that. Those days are long gone.”

But not all that far away. It was only two and a half years ago that Murray put down his tools, after an explosive first four months in senior football with Arbroath won a move to Dundee United. He was loaned back to the Gayfield Park side for the second half of that season, then on his return struggled to find favour with Mixu Paatelainen before becoming a much more significant figure under Ray McKinnon.

Murray’s displays in last year’s playoffs added to the impression he had already outgrown the Championship, but there was still a certain sniffiness among the Hibs support when Neil Lennon pounced this summer. Eight games and ten goals later, the doubters have been put on their backsides as emphatically as Fabio Cardoso was for that composed equaliser in the win at Ibrox last Saturday.

That strike also helped challenge the thought the 25-year-old might be a flat-track bully, eight of the previous nine goals having come in the Betfred Cup against lower division teams. By any measure his has been a flying start, Murray having taken till the middle of January to hit double figures last year.

While he never saw himself as a direct replacement for Jason Cummings — Hibs’ top scorer in the previous three campaigns — his strike rate has started to invite the comparison.

“He obviously did great here, scored 20-plus goals every season for a good few years. But I was always just coming to do my best and see where it took me. Hopefully I can score as many as he did, if not more.

“The way we play, I know I’ll always get two or three chances in a game. Sometimes you’ll put them all away, but [even] if you can put one away a game you’re laughing. The one at Ibrox was pleasing, because that [composure] is something I’ve worked on. I’ve always known I can finish, but in the past I was lashing at things and maybe just too eager to score. God knows where the defender [Cardoso] was going: I’m just happy he went the other way and I could slot it home.”

Lennon has been busy chiselling away at Murray’s rough edges. At Tannadice, there was a sense his all-action style and extreme workrate had become both blessing and curse, the best intentions often taking him to the wrong areas. In more than one respect, Lennon has sought to channel this energy, telling him to use it more strategically. The player is already seeing and acknowledging the benefits, but offers a little context too.

“When I was with United, they didn’t have as much possession, so I was maybe having to get cleared balls up the line, and that found me in places where you weren’t really going to score goals from.

“Right from the first couple of friendlies, he [Lennon] said to me ‘I’m not wanting you to run out in these wider areas, just stay between the sticks’. It’s not working out too bad so far, so I’m not going to argue with him.

“He’s the sort of manager who works well with me. You could score five goals on the Saturday and on the Monday he’s still wanting to go again 100%. He never gives you a minute to just chill out, which is a good thing if the team are wanting that winning mentality.”

Murray, for one, doesn’t plan to take his foot off the gas. He has come the long way round to reach the top flight, having still been playing junior football this time four years ago. At Tayport, he was prolific, but no senior club took a chance on him, perhaps mindful of how an earlier spell with Montrose had ended after a single appearance.

Not minded to cry into his boiler suit, Murray took himself off travelling. He spent six months in Sydney, another couple in Thailand, and visited Adelaide, Brisbane, and Darwin in between, paying his way through casual plumbing work and labouring. He trained with Hakoah — the Sydney club where Gavin Rae is now head coach — but otherwise stayed away from the game to see if he missed it. The answer was he did. “Maybe that’s what needed to happen. I came back hungry for football again,” he says.

The next step was finding someone to trust him. Paatelainen clearly wasn’t convinced, only starting him seven times the year United went down, but McKinnon saw more merit and Lennon didn’t hold back on the love-bombs. For perhaps the first time in his brief professional career, Murray feels truly wanted, and the affection is two-way.

“You need someone to believe in you, someone who’s willing to give you that chance, and I feel I’ve got that here now. I had a few other options, but this was always the one place — even last season — where I wanted to come. We couldn’t work it out that time, but I’m just glad we got there in the end. It’s all happened very quickly, but hopefully it’s not stopping there.”

Murray says it would be pushing it to state he grew up a Hibs fan, but an affinity with the club has existed ever since his father, Gary, spent four years there as a forward in the 1980s. It hasn’t escaped junior’s notice that he’s now only six goals off his old man’s cumulative tally, and eight short of the 18 he managed last year at United. He scored 24 for Arbroath in 2014/15.

“You always have a wee target in your head and I’m on my way nicely to that, I would say.”

It’s a different kind of cleaning up he’s doing these days. For opposition defences, Murray himself is the hazard.