Foster's leap from bit-part player to king of Hearts

IT WAS the perfect prescription for a player in search of a boost, if an unlikely one. Score the winner in a derby cup fixture, and in doing so preserve your team's proud unbeaten record. This was the medicine taken by Wayne Foster on Sunday, 20 February 1994 and he presumably has rarely felt better, either before or since.

Foster was a striker struggling to score goals, and with three minutes remaining of another tight, brutal Scottish Cup fourth-round tie with Hibs found himself running through on goal. Not only did the on-rushing gap-toothed goalkeeper Jim Leighton look like a gargoyle with assault on its mind, but further spooking a player already low on confidence was the thought that this golden opportunity had arrived right beneath the noses of the few thousand Hearts fans he was trying so desperately to impress. It was the recipe for disaster that Foster, heroically, managed to turn into his salvation.

"I can still see it in my head," said former team-mate John Colquhoun this week. "It was kind of slow motion. The more time Fozzie had the less likely he was to score. I kept saying, hit it, hit it, just hit it!" Eventually he did, winning the tie for Hearts at the death and securing a quarter-final berth against Rangers at Ibrox. It was a rare highlight in a grim season, one where relegation had even been an issue.

Without this strike the memory of a bit-part player might already have faded. Instead, and as recently as January at the last Edinburgh derby, he is feted still down Tynecastle way. It's perhaps partly the reason the Englishman has decided to make his home in Edinburgh, even if it does make things tricky whenever he finds himself in the east end of the city. Foster's current employment as a postman took him back into enemy territory, with his last beat coming out of the Brunswick Road sorting office, just another Gary Mackay through ball from Easter Road. But back in 1994 his loyalty was to one postal zone alone - EH11.

This was back in the days when Wayne was a deeply unfashionable name for a footballer. There was no clamour for Foster to sign a multi-million-pound five-book deal, no sign of Manchester United preparing to break the British transfer record to earn his signature. Born in Leigh in Lancashire - not a million miles from the homeland of Wayne Rooney - Foster came to Hearts via unspectacular spells at Bolton and Preston, landing at Tynecastle just after the traumatic 1985-86 season.

It's possible to claim he never left again, even given later spells with Livingston, Falkirk, Partick Thistle, St Mirren and Dunbar United. Of all the goals in this 'cup classics' series, his is arguably the most memorable since it came in the age of live television and benefits also from being reasonably recent. Foster has certainly never been allowed to move on from the moment he sprinted clear of defenders Steven Tweed and Dave Beaumont and planted a winner through the legs of Leighton, before running to the jubilant bank of away fans to celebrate. And what a celebration. Foster ran on as if he couldn't stop, coming to a halt only at the tall, somewhat menacing strip of fencing curiously still permitted at Easter Road.

Not that Foster was intimidated. He clung to the wire meshing like a kid on a climbing frame. He then looked back across one shoulder. This might have been the moment he was struck by a rather sensible urge to check the ball had actually nestled in the back of the Hibs net, and it wasn't all a big, beautiful maroon mirage.

After all, Foster had last scored a goal for the first-team in March 1991, almost three years earlier. And in eight seasons at the club he had never netted in an Edinburgh derby. Given these motivations, it's a wonder he didn't end up surfing across this throb of humanity as the enormity of what he had achieved took hold. The yellow card produced by referee Les Mottram was but a trifling concern.

Whether he likes it or not, the goal is what most people think about whenever his name crops up, and Irvine Welsh, the renowned Hibby author, even included a story with the simple title "Wayne Foster" in his Acid House collection which came out the following year. That it wasn't one of Welsh's best illustrates the dispiriting effect Foster has on those Hibs fans who remember the day they were lulled into an appalling sense of false security.

This being an Edinburgh derby played in the spell when a supreme striker called John Robertson operated, it goes almost without saying that he had scored by the time an injured ankle forced him off in the second half. Hibs had equalised through a Keith Wright header, and were lashing against the Hearts rearguard with an ever greater urgency in search of the winner. The sight of Robertson heading for the dug-out simply made more resounding the feeling among Hibs fans that this was finally to be their day after 20 successive derbies without a victory. This impression was made firmer still by the identity of Robertson's replacement. Foster had been no Hammer of Hibs.

For the player himself, perhaps, the memory of what others assume was his epiphany is soured by the general assumption that this is all he did for the club. Foster is a hard man to get hold of now, possibly bored by the inevitable context in which his name sits. He did, however, emerge into the glare in January, at an Edinburgh derby no less. He came on like a returning hero at half-time, and received the acclaim of three stands as well as the predicted cat-calls from the one housing the away supporters.

It wasn't always thus. Before his late cup contribution even Hearts fans had despaired of Foster, who lacked the clinical precision of striker colleagues such as Robertson and Sandy Clark and who was often ill-served by the unfair comparisons. But Foster was popular with his peers, who appreciated his hard work. They desperately hoped it would come good again for Foster at Tynecastle after a more than decent start to his career. He scored seven goals in each of his first two seasons, and later scored twice in a rousing UEFA Cup win against Bologna. "Even Wayne would admit he was not the most accomplished finisher," said Colquhoun.

"He sometimes got a rough deal because he wasn't as established a player as some of the others in the team. But he was hugely respected and liked by his team-mates. We were delighted for him that he got the goal."

Foster is the supersub who should never have been left on the bench. He had played the full 90 minutes of the last match against Celtic and was primed for another starting berth after Robertson injured an ankle prior to the cup game. "We trained on the morning of the game at Murrayfield," recalled Robertson this week. "I managed to twist my ankle and should probably not have played. I got a couple of injections and managed to go out and score early to put us ahead.

"Sandy Clark [the manager] said to me that if it was any team other than Hibs, I would not have played." It was a psychological ploy on Clark's part. The sight of Foster rather than Robertson lining up at the start might have sent Hibs into the match with a measure of belief, something they were not accustomed to harbouring after an extraordinary sequence of results which finally came to an end after nearly 33 hours of derby football the following season. Hearts sensed they were unbeatable in derbies, and even during a game where they were undoubtedly the poorer side still felt the tie was theirs for the taking.

"Against almost any other team who had dominated us to the extent Hibs did that day we would have settled for a draw and been glad to take them back to Tynecastle," explained Colquhoun. "But we were still confident we'd nick one. We had belief. It didn't matter how much better they were than us on the day, we always knew we had goals in us. Even if that one did come from an unlikely source."

Taken from the Scotsman