Murphy: marked man forgotten one
Jamie Murphy is enjoying being a marked man again. He knows he will receive stick this weekend when he returns to Motherwell with Rangers. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
The alternative is obscurity. It’s what he was enduring in England. Out of sight and out of mind. Murphy managed the impressive feat of disappearing in the most-hyped league in the world.
After only four Premier League appearances this season for Brighton & Hove Albion, the last of which was in September, Murphy is back in the public eye for boyhood club Rangers and, as of last Friday, Scotland. The winger earned his first cap as a late substitute in the 1-0 defeat by Costa Rica and could feature again tonight in Budapest against Hungary.
He is enjoying his new status and the fact he is being stopped in the street again. It is how it should be after being in danger of becoming a forgotten man in cosmopolitan Brighton, where football must jostle for attention. Murphy is savouring being back among football obsessives in Glasgow.
He is happy to pay the sacrifice – if that is what it is – of being stopped in the street again at regular intervals and pestered for selfies. “As long as they are nice about it, it’s not a problem,” he said. “It comes with it.
“To be honest, down south, sometimes you can walk down the middle of the street and its fine,” he added. “Nobody really cares. Nobody knows who you are. It’s certainly not the case up here. There is much more passion about football and that’s the way I grew up. That’s the way it should be.
“When you play for Rangers, you know what comes with it. I was a fan for long enough. It used to be me looking at players that were walking down the street. You know what comes with it. I’m just delighted to be back up and playing football.”
He feels vindicated. Just a few weeks after leaving England for Rangers – a temporary arrangement as it stands, although the Ibrox club claim they will pay a “guaranteed fixed fee” for the player in the summer – Murphy has earned a first Scotland cap at the relatively late age of 28. The wish to enhance his international prospects was a major factor why he jumped at the chance to return north, along with the fact he was joining the team he supported in boyhood.
“It was a big reason