Inside Scottish football's shock retirement: Hearts regret, real issue, 12in scar and beating Brazil

Of course, that’s not the way it worked out. Handed the responsibility of taking the fifth penalty when Hearts played Celtic in the ‘Covid Scottish Cup final’ of 2019-20, it turned out it was one freighted with jeopardy rather than a potentially cup-winning one. When Wighton’s effort, low to the ‘keeper’s left, was saved by Conor Hazard after Stephen Kingsley’s previous kick for Hearts had met with the same outcome, it left Celtic, for whom only Ryan Christie had missed, on the brink of glory.

A fifth penalty taker did in fact win the cup for his team, but it was Kristoffer Ajer rather than Wighton.

The desolation of the Hearts players felt amplified while surrounded by acres of empty seats. There was no roar of the crowd because there wasn’t one. Similarly, Wighton’s farewell from the senior game, announced last Friday, didn’t take place amid cheers and applause, the way it often happens.

Instead, a post on social media from Montrose FC, the club Wighton only signed for this summer, delivered the bleak news that the player had called it a day just three league games into the season aged 28. His last appearance? As a second-half substitute in a 3-3 draw with Cove Rangers two weekends ago, in front of 431 spectators.

It won’t be etched in his memory and the significance only became clear a few days later. Speaking to Wighton earlier this week, he tells me that, along with his teammates, he was consumed by annoyance at the concession of a late equaliser after playing most of the game with ten men.

The real issue with his knee

It was later, on the bus home, that he began to offload a bit to Michael Tidser, his experienced new teammate who was recently in charge of Dunfermline, Wighton’s previous club. He told him it was getting harder and harder to play the game that had once come so naturally to him. The main problem wasn’t, as I along with many others might have assumed, the ACL injury to the left knee sustained in 2017 in a bounce game against Bristol City while with Dundee.

Rather, a meniscus tear in the other knee while playing for Hearts against Inverness Caledonian Thistle in a testimonial for Angus Beith, who was forced to retire at 23 due to a hip injury, proved more troublesome.

Wighton found it hampered him even when he didn’t have the ball. He couldn’t move into space the way he once could. He was finding that even part-time football, particularly on a synthetic surface, was, if not completely beyond him, now a matter of diminishing returns. Newly married to Bex and with a young daughter Winnie, he didn’t want to be hobbling around in his thirties.

He informed manager Stewart Petrie of his decision to quit on the Tuesday. He then let his teammates know on the Thursday in an emotional team meeting and approved the club’s statement released the following morning and which garnered such a widespread, sympathetic reaction.

Of course, no one has died. News of former SFA president Rod Petrie’s death, which emerged just minutes after the announcement about Wighton started circulating on social media, provided perspective. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of reason to pause and contemplate, to lament as well as salute a career so prematurely cut down.

Such stories do tend to involve a powerful emotional charge. In a misspent youth spent reading obsessively about football in newspapers, magazines and fanzines, a teenager’s shock at the Sunday Post headline relaying news Dundee defender Jim Duffy had been forced to retire following a knee ligament injury remains vivid to this writer now, 38 years later.

‘I won’t kick a ball at any level again’

Like Wighton, Duffy was just 28. Although he did eventually return, he was, by his own admission, only three-quarters the player. Wighton is adamant about one thing. “I won’t kick a ball at any level again,” he says.

Scuffing around the lower divisions was not what was envisaged for him when he broke through at his boyhood club, Dundee. He was talked about as the finest prospect at the club since Alan Gilzean. Take it from someone who saw him score his first senior goal aged 16 against Raith Rovers, becoming Dundee’s club’s youngest-ever goalscorer, he seemed to have it all.

He may have appeared a bit slight but concerns about his physique were dispelled by his footwork and an ability to ghost past defenders. Then came the moment when he established himself as a club legend. Aged just 18, he scored the last-minute winner for the team he supported against Dundee United to put the seal on the fact that, for the first time since 1958, the city rivals would play in a tier below Dundee the following season.

Such a relatively parochial exploit, on the night Leicester City were crowned champions of the Premier League, might even pale next to another claim to fame just over 12 months later.

Alongside the likes of Anthony Ralston, Ollie Burke and Greg Taylor, who scored the winning goal, Wighton was a member of the first and, so far, only Scotland team to beat Brazil, when the Under-20 side beat their South American counterparts at the Toulon tournament. He was on top of the world until he wasn’t. A couple of months later he lay slumped on the turf of St Andrews University’s playing pitches following the first of two serious knee injuries.

He has fought back again and again. In a surprise move, Craig Levein signed him for Hearts on the last day of the transfer window in 2018. It was interpreted as a new lease of life for someone perhaps weighed down by expectation in his own backyard. Tynecastle presented different challenges. The writing seemed on the wall when Daniel Stendel, Levein’s successor, referred to him as “Greg” Wighton while reading out the team for a game against Celtic.

Wighton oozes class

Still, after Stendel left, he became central to Robbie Neilson’s plans – hitting a hat-trick v Raith Rovers, heading in the opener in a 2-1 Scottish Cup semi-final win over Hibs – before being bombed out three games after that cup final penalty miss. Knees hurting, pride a bit bruised, he signed for Dunfermline. He scored again against Hibs in the Scottish Cup while on loan at Arbroath from Dunfermline before returning to East End Park and hitting 20 goals from October onwards as the Pars sealed the League One championship in 2022-23.

There is so much to admire about Wighton. Even when speaking about former managers who might have treated him poorly, he mentions hoping to shake hands with them again. There is little sign of ego in someone whose preference was once for black boots before it became too hard to source them. He initially stayed around the corner from Tynecastle after joining Hearts and would walk to games with his boots in a holdall, like a footballer from the 1950s.

It’s heartening to report that he appears well on the way to processing being on civvy street. Indeed, he’s already begun post-retirement life in partnership with his greenkeeping younger brother, Drew. They’ve started up a landscape gardening firm together. Wighton spent his first weekend as a former footballer building self-assembly furniture and has just booked a holiday to Tenerife with his family for January.

Even this simple act feels novel. Being a professional footballer doesn't usually accommodate such mid-season breaks. That life is over now.

A 12-inch scar runs down one knee. A smooth, hairless head is evidence of him having lost more than just pace in subsequent years. And yet to some, he remains the floppy fringed hero who delighted half of his hometown near the start of a career that was once so flushed with possibilities.