Billy Brown could have coined the phrase ‘run it off’.
My old Hearts assistant was as tough as they come but also a brilliant man manager and I’ll never forget the day he helped me out of a rut by telling me just to keep running.
It wasn’t a part of my body that had taken a whack, it was my confidence that had hit an all-time low. We played Dundee United one night and no word of a lie I was their best player. I was absolutely rotten. I’d been struggling for a few weeks and the next day at training Billy pulled me because he could see I was in a bad place. I thought he was going to give me pelters. But instead he turned my season around with the simplest but most effective advice I’ve probably ever had. He told me to run harder than ever in that session, shoot on sight in the small-sided games and just fly into tackles.
