Leon Knight, was he alright?

When a striker fires his team to promotion, he can normally expect to be revered by that clubs supporters for the rest of time.

Brighton and Hove Albion have been promoted 11 times in the clubs history. So, what about those strikers that did the deed? Glenn Murray has done it twice, with those feats being enough to wipe out the memory of the fact he also fired Crystal Palace to the Premier League. Bobby Zamora did it twice, becoming one of the Albion’s most popular ever players.

Peter Ward did it twice and he is the clubs most popular player. Dave Sexton is still revered for his 20 goals in Division Three South in 1958. Wally Gould and Bobby Smith sent the club to the Division Four title in 1965. Kit Napier took the Albion into the second tier for a brief one season stay in 1972. Garry Nelson’s popularity is based on his goal scoring feats in the 1987-88 season, although his later criticism of the Archer-Bellotti regime endeared him to supporters even more.

That’s 10 promotions covered, Which means that there is one promotion winning striker that isn’t considered an Albion legend – Leon Knight. Knight scored 27 times in the 2003-04 season including the penalty that won the Division Two play off final against Bristol City. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find any Brighton supporter who would name him in their top 10 favourite Albion players. Where did it all go wrong?

It all started so right as well. Knight was under huge pressure when he arrived on-loan from Chelsea in July 2003. Zamora had just been sold to Tottenham Hotspur for £1.5m and Steve Coppell knew he needed a goal scorer if the Albion were to make an immediate return to the second tier.

And so he turned to Knight. A clearly talented player, he had hit 17 goals in 37 games on a season long loan in the third tier with Huddersfield Town in 2001-02, before struggling in the second tier with Sheffield Wednesday the following season. The thinking went that if Knight could rediscover the form he showed for the Terriers, he could be the man to fire the Albion to promotion. If he played as he had done for Wednesday, we might have a bit of a problem. Especially with the other striking options being Darius Henderson and Chris McPhee.

Any questions about which way things were going to go were answered within two games. Knight scored twice on his debut as the Albion won 3-1 away at Oldham Athletic on the opening day. He then put Queens Park Rangers to the sword on his first appearance at Withdean, scoring both goals in a 2-1 Brighton win.

So impressive was Knight against QPR that the following morning, their manager Ian Holloway submitted a bid for the striker. The Albion knew they’d have to move quickly to ensure Knight didn’t go to Loftus Road and they matched QPR’s £100,000 and offered a better contract than Rangers put on the table. After four goals in two league games, Knight became a permanent Brighton player.

The goals continued to flow, even after Steve Coppell left for Reading in October and was replaced by Mark McGhee. There were plenty of highlights in that first season. There was a brace in McGhee’s first game in charge, a 2-2 draw at Peterborough United. Knight scored both Albion goals in a 2-1 win at Notts County on the day England won the Rugby World Cup. There was a vital strike against Plymouth Argyle at Withdean as the side who would end up being crowed champions at the end of the campaign were vanquished 2-1.

Then of course there was that afternoon at the Millennium Stadium. Not many people recall, but Knight actually came into the play off final on the worst drought of his Albion career at that point. He’d scored just once in his previous eight appearances, and even that came from the penalty spot in a 1-0 win over Peterborough.

It was from 12 yards that he again made his mark and wrote himself into Albion history. 83 minutes had passed and the game was still locked at 0-0. Talk about pressure. But the penalty was as cool as you like. A little run up, a pause, the ball stroked calmly into the bottom left hand corner, just out of the reach of Steven Phillips in the Bristol City goal.

Knight ripped his shirt off and sprinted to the corner to celebrate with the Albion support. McGhee’s side saw out the remaining seven minutes to win 1-0, their place in the Championship confirmed after a one season absence. And surely, with 27 goals and a promotion winning penalty in front of 65,167, Knight’s place in the annals of Albion greats was confirmed too?

It probably would have been had he left that summer on a high. There was interest from both Championship and Premier League clubs, but nothing firm ever came of it. As it was, Knight was suspended for the first three games of the 2004-05 season and he never seemed to recover from not being able to hit the ground running as he had in the previous campaign.

He managed just four goals all season and if his performances on the pitch were disappointing – not helped by some of McGhee’s strange positional selections such as playing Knight as a winger or a lone striker – then off it things were even worse. There were a string of rumoured disciplinary issues, while an attitude problem was there for all to see when Nottingham Forest visited Withdean in January 2005.

The Albion players were wearing black armbands on that day following the tragic death of Adam Virgo’s father following a burglary at his home. In a moment of frustration during the game, Knight ripped off his armband and threw it to the floor right in front of the North Stand. When the Albion supporters who had witnessed the act told Knight exactly what they thought of him, he flicked them a finger.

Knight did apologise and McGhee said it had been dealt with internally, but from that point on Knight’s relationship with both the Albion faithful and McGhee was strained. That reached its nadir when Knight reacted angrily to being substituted in a 1-1 draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers the following season, prompting McGhee to turn to the South Stand and make a handbag gesture.

That incident took place in November. Knight had again struggled for form and goals, scoring just three times by that point in the campaign although McGhee had surprisingly given him the captaincy in a shock League Cup exit away at League Two Shrewsbury Town. He was dropped for the defeat at Stoke City in the Albion’s next game with McGhee taking the rare step of going public to demand an apology. He obviously got one as Knight was recalled for Crystal Palace’s visit to Withdean, scoring both goals in a 3-2 defeat to the Eagles.

For a brief moment, it looked as though the shock of McGhee taking their spat public might rejuvenate Knight. It didn’t. Those were his last goals for the club with the straw that broke the camels back coming six weeks later, before an away game at Southampton.

There are various stories about what happened on route to St Mary’s that day. Some allege that McGhee chucked just Michel Kuipers off the team coach, meaning that Florent Chaigneau had to start in goal. Others say both Kuipers and Knight were expelled. The best rumour is probably that Knight was dumped in the middle of the New Forest. Knight himself told The Argus in a 2016 interview that McGhee tried to throw him off, but he refused to leave and so he was taken to the ground and dropped from the bench.

Whatever happened, it was his last act as a Brighton player. He was sold to Swansea City for £125,000 shortly after. Knight scored a 22 minute hat-trick on his debut for the Swans but again, he soon found himself out of favour due to apparent problems with his attitude and behaviour and a nomadic career followed. Knight managed to take in 10 teams across four different countries in the six years after he departed from Withdean, never managing to last more than a season at any of them.

His departure from Withdean wasn’t the last we heard of him either. When the Albion were relegated from the Championship at the end of the 2005-06 season, Knight said, ““It was terrific to see Brighton go down. I was absolutely delighted they got relegated. You cannot understand how happy I was.”

That last year of his Brighton career transformed his standing among Albion fans. But what about the first year? The stunning goal away at Rushden and Diamonds, the initial feeling that we had a player every bit as good as Zamora, and of course the glorious penalty in South Wales that we could spend all day writing about. There was just as much good as there was bad in Knight’s time at Withdean, but history doesn’t appear to have judged him kindly.

Leon Knight – was he alright? We’ll let you be the judge of that.