It was when a teenage Glenn Murray was being asked to play as a makeshift left-back for Carlisle United, ahead of spells at Workington, Wilmington Hammerheads and Barrow, that he thought the game was up. “I seriously considered quitting because I was so disillusioned,” he said. “I grew to hate my time there as a schoolboy. My abiding memories are of car journeys to and from games and training spent in silence, disappointment and frustration.”

A life as a plasterer awaited, except that those setbacks, even those people who had repeatedly told him, “No, you’re not good enough”, could not extinguish a flickering flame of ambition and a roaring fire of love simply for playing football.

Just over a decade on from being rejected by Carlisle – and via also Stockport County, Rochdale, Crystal Palace, Reading and Bournemouth – an unexpected name now has its place on the list of leading Premier League goalscorers. Murray’s brace against Swansea City on Saturday was sufficient not just to take Brighton and Hove Albion a further sizeable step towards safety but to put Murray equal fourth among English strikers in the top-flight this season.

He is level, on 10 goals, with Chelsea record signing Alvaro Morata and ahead of Alexis Sanchez and Alexandre Lacazette. Not bad for a 34-year-old described by Mark Lawrenson as “more of a Championship player” but, in its own way, perhaps also the most inspirational individual story of the season. For in an age where children are repeatedly sold a shiny surface version of football glory amid a race for inclusion in a Premier League academy by the age of 10, it is a reminder that there are different and sometimes even more effective routes to success.

Indeed, it is surely also instructive that the two English players with more Premier League goals than Murray – Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy – were also late developers. Kane was 21 when he had his breakthrough season at Tottenham while Vardy was 28 when his goals propelled Leicester City to the Premier League title. Murray is finally proving that, in the right team, with the right system, he is indeed Premier League class. “I just kept getting up and looking for that one person who said ‘Yes’,” he now says. That manager was Chris Hughton and the message for any youngster could hardly be more important – that setbacks are inevitable, other opinions are often wrong, and situations change.