Chris Wood was a massive baby at Brighton - I told him to toughen up

Much like Nottingham Forest‘s goal machine Chris Wood, Glenn Murray knows.

Murray knows how to graft his way to the Premier League, knows the golden feeling of being your manager’s first-choice striker, and knows the sacrifices required to play into your mid-30s at the highest level.

Handily, Murray also knows Wood from their time together at Brighton, now 14 years ago – a lifetime in football terms.

Murray was 27 when an 18-year-old Wood arrived from West Brom on loan in November 2010. With the former having worked his own way up from the Conference North, he saw a rough diamond that required polishing – or more specifically, a shy softie that had to learn to use his size.

“Well Chris was only a baby, but he was massive!” Murray tells The i Paper. “He’s always had that stature. He was such a nice kid.

“As someone that came up the lower leagues, I’m not overly big or strong but I was clever with my body to the best of my ability, whereas Chris was just huge.

“He was for want of a better word, a little bit soft, he didn’t quite know how to use it, and I was like, ‘Honestly, with your attributes and your size, you could be bullying people, I’d love to have your stature because people would just bounce off me and I’d throw them around.’

“I would tell him. ‘Come on, you’re big, strong, if you engage no one can live with you. It’s a real attribute you’re lucky to have.’

“He kind of got it. He understood, but he was quite shy and timid at that age which is totally understandable.”

Murray, who ended his career at Nottingham Forest in 2021, has since spoken to Wood about these interactions at Brighton, where together they helped the Seagulls win League One at a canter in 2010-11.

Now like the rest of us, Murray sees a striker evolved, one that is spearheading Nottingham Forest’s push for Champions League football.

Wood has 18 Premier League goals already this campaign, which makes for his best return in the top tier with 13 games still to go, and puts him one ahead of Alexander Isak going into Sunday’s showdown at St James’ Park.

Isak and Wood briefly crossed career paths at Newcastle, but they hardly played together, owing to Isak’s thigh injury at the start of the 2022-23 season and Wood’s eventual departure on loan to Forest in January.

A hamstring injury then cut Wood’s season short, but Forest still made the move permanent in summer 2023 – which has proven £15m well spent.

This was a transfer that suited all parties, giving Wood the room to flourish as the undisputed first-choice striker at Forest and his teammates an obvious, 6ft 3ins target to find in the middle – a scenario Murray likens to the Rickie Lambert days at Southampton.

“It isn’t surprising,” Murray says of Wood’s form. “Like myself he’s developed into a Premier League striker and feels confident at that level, and when a chance comes he’s got that ability to put it away. And he believes in that ability now.

“I think those around in him believe in him too. That takes time to build those connections. I also feel the team at Forest are really set-up to play to his strengths.

“I look at a Southampton team back in the day with Lambert, if you put the ball down the channel for Lambert it wouldn’t work, whereas they played the diagonal to him, everything stuck to him, and they’d cross balls and he’d be on the end of them.

“It’s knowing your striker and playing to those strengths. With Anthony Elanga and Callum Hudson-Odoi, Chris is that platform, he helps them get up the pitch and once they do he has flying wingers on either side. Their first thought is ‘Where’s Chris Wood?’”

To say Wood is taking his chances is an understatement. He is outperforming his xG more than any other player in the Premier League: 10.37 xG compared to 18 goals.

He is outside the top 20 for shots, with 46 in total making for a conversion rate of 39 per cent. By comparison, Isak has 17 goals from 65 shots (26 per cent) and Erling Haaland 19 goals from 94 shots (20 per cent).

Wood is in the form of his life, on the kind of hot streak where Murray says taking chances becomes “second nature”.

“Rather than thinking, when that chance comes, you know you’ll take it and gobble it up. You can see that with Chris, we saw that against Brighton,” adds Murray, referencing Wood’s hat-trick earlier this month.

“He’s in that flow and that moment where anywhere he chooses to be in the box, the ball is going to fall, and that’s something you develop over time.”

What is more remarkable is that Wood is finding his stride at 33, playing in his eighth straight Premier League campaign and now only behind his best league tally scored in the Championship with Leeds in 2016-17 – 27 goals in 44 games.

He could yet eclipse that, but either way it is proof that reaching mid-30s does not mean it’s too late. If anything, it’s an age where you are aware of what the body can do, and you play to that accordingly – as do your teammates.

Murray was similar in that vein. His best Premier League haul came when he was 35 for most of the 2018-19 season, scoring 13 goals to help Brighton stay up. He was also their top scorer the season prior, their first ever Premier League campaign, and did what he could to stay fit given his importance to the team.

“I was just lucky my body was robust. I got to the Premier League at an age where I understood my body. I knew how far I could push it and what it could tolerate,” he recalls.

“I looked up to Bruno Saltor, who was a few years older than me. I watched what he did every day and how he looked after his body, and after himself away from the field. I learned from him. He was a direct example of how to play into your latter years.”

Murray was eager to explore methods that could help him. Ice baths, salt baths, saunas, massages, and also the practice of dry needling – “A lot of people don’t believe it works but I was open to anything.”

He adds: “As I got older, the harder I pushed my body, because it’s an internal mental game. If a 21-year-old skips by you at 34, you think, if it had happened at 29 you wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but at 34 you’re thinking, ‘Did that happen five years ago? Or am I slowing down?’ You’ve got this constant internal monologue as an older pro.

“There was a part of my career where I was in auto-pilot, I didn’t really realise the opportunity and blessings I had to be a professional footballer. But definitely as you get older, when you have children, you take that extra second to look around a full Anfield or Old Trafford and soak those moments in when you do score.”