THERE was bad news waiting for Graeme Murty when he was called into the manager’s office on September 16, 1999. The Reading defender’s efforts to justify a £700,000 fee from York had been undermined by injuries from the moment he had arrived at the club 14 months earlier.

Now the man who had brought to him to the club for that sum, Tommy Burns, had reached the point of departure. Before leaving, there were a few things that the dismissed Burns wanted to say to Murty in the circumstances.

Murty was unsure what to expect that afternoon. He felt he had let Burns down. He would have understood if the manager had a few recriminations. “A lot of managers would have been bitter towards me, but that isn’t in Tommy’s nature,” said Murty. “He informed me they were asking him to leave and then said, ‘If you do one thing for me, make sure you go on and prove that I signed one hell of a player’. That comment has been a major driving force for me ever since.”

Having done as he asked, Burns was able to reward Murty this past week by being instrumental in the right-back’s call-up into the Scotland Future squad to face their Turkish counterparts at Tannadice on Wednesday. Burns telephoned the player in person to inform him, introducing himself as “the guy who signed you from Reading and never saw you play”. Murty’s only response at the quip was to laugh. Behind the joke was a mutual respect. They had not spoken in the intervening years, but neither man had forgotten the other.

“When I joined Reading I thought, ‘that’s me, I’m on my way’, but it took me six months to play my first game after a damaged hamstring on the last day of pre-season training,” added Murty. “When I returned, I promptly dislocated my ankle and was out for another eight months. I only became a right-back by proxy, asked to fill in because of injuries having signed as a winger, but I’m comfortable there now. Over the past couple of years, I’ve played my best football, but featuring for Scotland was something I thought had passed me by.

“You do start to think, ‘if I can’t get into the squad when I’m playing like this, what can I do?’, but the increased exposure that Reading have had since being in Nationwide Division One has helped me. Alan Pardew, my former manager at Reading, always used to say ‘don’t wish for it, work for it’, if it’s there for you, it’ll happen. Now it has, I was bouncing around the training ground all last week. I haven’t stopped smiling.”

Born in Middlesbrough, but qualifying for Scotland through a Glasgow-born father, Murty turned 29 last month, but Burns has assured him that age will be no barrier, pointing to the likes of Paul Devlin and Graham Alexander’s late international debuts. Having coped well against the might of Chelsea in the Carling Cup in midweek, Murty feels as ready as he is ever going to be. “I was directly up against Jesper Gronkjaer and his pace is just ridiculous. I’ve never seen anyone so quick, but I managed to nobble him a couple of times,” he joked.

And as if playing for his personal ambitions was not already enough, there will be family matters at stake in Dundee. “My brother-in-law’s actually Turkish,” laughed Murty, his delight obvious.

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