Billy Paynter ⭑ From A-Z since '92
It took 243 days from signing for Billy Paynter to get his first goal. "Hopefully my luck has turned," he said. 403 days later...
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Partnerships are key in football. Who a player plays with and how is an integral building block in a strong team. The pairings along the spine are often most important: the centre-backs, the central-midfielders, the centre-forwards. At Leeds United, in League One, it was the joy and strength of two seasons to watch Jermaine Beckford and Luciano Becchio play up front together, for just short of 5,000 combined minutes, scoring 82 goals between them while both were on the pitch.
Meanwhile, in Swindon, another prolific strike partnership was coming together and doing damage to Leeds. In around 2,100 minutes on the pitch together in 2009/10, young striker Charlie Austin scored seventeen goals, while his more experienced partner Billy Paynter scored 24. The damage to Leeds was done in two 3-0 wins over the Peacocks in the second half of the season that severely dented confidence in Beeston about a promotion that had looked done by Christmas. Both times, Austin scored one and Paynter scored two. Those games, perhaps, had ramifications beyond the promotion race.
When it was time to replace Beckford after just about going up at the end of the season, Leeds United signed the Swindon striker who had scored four against them, not the striker with two who went on to score another 91 goals in the Championship and 34 in the Premier League. It also helped, from chairman Ken Bates' perspective, that while Charlie Austin went to Burnley for around £2m, Billy Paynter signed for Leeds for free.
The problem wasn't only that Leeds failed to pick up the player with more potential, but that Austin was probably better suited to the job at hand. Paynter was a good strike partner not only to Austin but, before him, Simon Cox. He was also useful in right midfield and helped Cox and Austin prosper by combining their pace with his ability to get them on the ball with passes and headers. It's likely he would have played well for Leeds with Beckford. But alongside Becchio, Leeds had two strikers each looking to supply another, Becchio with flick-ons and Paynter adding through balls, each trying to find a striker who didn't have the pace or instinct to get on the end of what they were doing.
Leeds United's Championship winning season, game by game, as written at Leedsista.com.
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It wasn't so much a sliding doors moment as, particularly for Paynter, doors slamming shut. He might have had more chance of working things out with Becchio if his shin hadn't suffered a stress fracture in pre-season that kept him out until October. "I always remember it was in Slovakia," he told the Loathed Strangers podcast in 2020. "We were out training and my shin just shattered. It was just blue." Before that, Paynter's main setback had been joining Leeds United's oldest enemy, Port Vale, the club who had connived behind the scenes to have Leeds City closed down and taken over their league place, in 1919. Paynter wasn't born when that happened, though, and was only ten when he signed at Vale Park. Then he was only sixteen when he broke into their first team in the third tier, and only twenty when he was their top scorer and player of the year after forming his first successful partnerships, first with Stephen McPhee, then with former Leeds youth striker Lee Matthews. Paynter was soon looking for higher levels than Port Vale, almost downing tools to take a move to Tony Pulis' Plymouth Argyle, eventually getting the 'bigger stage' he wanted — "Playing in front of something like 18,000 fans will be a lot different to what I'm used to" — at Hull City.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
The headline on this old article is Stephen McPhail, but it's as much about Lee Matthews scoring in the youth team for fun
Paynter only scored three Championship goals for Hull, and none on loan for Southend, but did get four from a loan move down to League One with Bradford City. That got Paul Sturrock interested in taking him to Swindon, where the interview was reportedly one question long: "Can you score goals?" "Yes." He was still only 23, and despite only playing thirty-odd games in the previous two seasons, he was soon proving that his answer was honest, in League One at least. Over the next three seasons Paynter was key to Swindon's transformation from relegation candidates to almost pipping Leeds to promotion. Only United's win over Bristol Rovers on the final day of 2009/10 meant that the goals Steve Morison, for Millwall, and Billy Paynter were trading elsewhere didn't matter at Elland Road. Millwall beat Swindon 3-2 that day, and again 1-0 at Wembley in the play-off final. A year later, after Paynter and Austin had left, Swindon were relegated.