Here's a particularly amusing stat for you (one I tweeted earlier in the week)- Billy McKay has scored as many league goals so far this season - eight - as Kilmarnock, Partick Thistle and St. Johnstone, and more than Hearts, Hibs or St. Mirren.
I certainly wouldn't have seen that coming at the end of the 2011-12 season.
In the summer of 2011, Caley Thistle were desperately in need of a goalscorer to replace Adam Rooney, who had just left for Birmingham. Terry Butcher brought in a Northern Irishman whose biggest career achievement before moving to the Highlands from Northampton in 2011 was scoring a goal in a cup win over Roy Hodgson's Liverpool. In that first season, McKay did not look the answer at all. Injury prevented him managing more than 17 minutes of first team action before December - just one name on a long casualty list which, combined with a ropey start to the season, led Butcher to shelve an expansive style of play in favour of using the athletic but clumsy Gregory Tade at centre forward.
When he got to full fitness, McKay scored in his first home start against Dundee United, heading home when unmarked, but the team blew a 2-0 lead and lost 3-2. He didn't score again until the last Saturday of April. Before a double at Rugby Park (in another defeat), he had managed just that solitary goal in 1,422 minutes of first team action for Inverness. So I was as surprised as anyone when we offered him a two year deal in the summer of 2012. Two years! For a forward who wasn't big enough to be a target man and play up front on his own, who didn't score enough goals, and, well, who didn't seem to be good enough even for us! It was crazy, absolutely crazy, a waste of a wage. Or so I thought at least
McKay scored 27 goals last season. This is just the latest example of how Terry Butcher knows much, much more about football than me.
Though he started 2012-13 as a first choice, and scored on opening day at St. Mirren, the goals seemed to dry up again, and Richie Foran's move to centre forward seemed to galvanise the team into form. However, Foran limped off in the Highland derby in October and McKay was restored to the starting lineup for a Friday night game at Dens Park, where he scored twice. He scored in the next league game...and the next...and, like Forrest Gump running from one end of America to the other, he just kept going.
John Maxwell of Tell Him He's Pele once told me - in the pub, mind you - that Caley Thistle's team were entirely set up for McKay's benefit. Last season, ICT established the style of play they'd wanted to bring in a year earlier, and he thrived on balls played into his feet or into the channels for him to race on to. The service he got was excellent, to the point that there were more than a few sceptics who thought his numbers would diminish after his main provider, Andrew Shinnie, moved on at the end of the last campaign. Nine goals in nine games in all competitions suggests they were completely and utterly wrong. Whilst his teammates continue to create plenty of chances for him, a number of his goals have come out of almost nothing; take his lovely individual effort against Dundee United, or his long range strike against Hibernian. He is not only a good scorer of goals, but a scorer of good goals.
His movement off the ball is particularly impressive. It can't always be the defenders' fault when he wanders into a great big gap in the middle of the back four. Both against Motherwell and Hearts he drifted off his marker to the edge of the box to find space before a cross came in, and scored both times with sweeping right-footed finishes. And, if he wasn't already endearing himself enough to his manager, he harrasses defenders, chases lost causes, and just generally makes a nuisance of himself.
And, of course, he keeps scoring. Which helps.
On the down side, his diminutive size means that he is never going to win aerial battles with your typical Scottish league centre half, but he has bulked up a bit and is certainly stronger at holding the ball up with his back to goal. Just don't let him take a penalty kick ever again - he's missed his last three. And questions about how he handles big occasions will remain until he receives an opportunity to avenge his dreadful miss in last season's League Cup semi-final.
Since 19 October last season, he has managed 34 goals in 43 matches, so we're now well beyond what could be called a Purple Patch. This guy is unquestionably one of Scottish football's elite strikers. But, in the greater scheme of things, how good is he? And how much is he worth?
Well, last season, he tied for second in the SPL's top scorer standings with Hibs' Leigh Griffiths, with Michael Higdon of Motherwell ahead of them both. Neither of those players are still playing up here. Griffiths returned to his parent club, Wolves. So far this season he's scored 5 goals in 9 League One appearances. Higdon, meanwhile, eloped to Holland. His new club, NEC Nijmegen, are rock bottom of the Eredivisie, but the big Englishman has managed to score 3 times for them. The latter is so different a player to McKay that you can't compare them, but Griffiths is a bit more similar, in terms of being a small but nippy forward capable of scoring all sorts of goals.
If you asked me to choose between the two, I must admit I'd probably say that Griffiths shades it. But I'd also say that he's certainly a player who would cope in The Championship. It's worth noting that Adam Rooney, McKay's predecessor at Inverness, didn't really succeed at that level. Could McKay? Maybe, maybe not.
As for a potential price tag, it's only a few years since Wigan paid Kilmarnock £600,000 for Connor Sammon. That was following about 6 months of good form, whilst McKay has managed twice that. It's not unreasonable to think that ICT would be looking for a similar figure, especially given he is under contract until the summer of 2015.
Being a pessimist, this is what I think will happen: sometime in the next few months, a Championship side will tempt Butcher back south for one last crack at the big time. And at the first transfer window opportunity, he'll go after McKay. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. However, he can't stay in Inverness for ever; it's inevitable that the Ulsterman will get his crack at a bigger league than the Scottish Premiership. And then we'll know if he's up to it.
But in the meantime, it's great to have him.
L.
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