It’s a small miracle that May is still playing.
After his 27 goals for St Johnstone, the striker was one of the hottest properties in Scottish football.
He was the inspiring spearhead, the local hero of a team that would defeat Robertson’s Dundee United in the Scottish Cup final to secure the trophy for the first time in the Perth club’s history.
“Everything was just perfect,” he remembers. “It was a year that people dream about. Everything I did seemed to work.
“As a team we had great success. It was a great time playing for St Johnstone. It was like a story out of a book.”
He would move south, first to Sheffield Wednesday and then Preston North End.
However, in an away game against Fulham, he suffered a terrible knee injury.
“I tried to steal the ball from him,” he says. “The defender just came in full force. It was ACL, MCL, PCL. So that was pretty much the whole deal.
“And there was also a small fracture there. It was at a 90-degree angle, bent in the wrong direction. I was surprised. When you see the big swell, you know something is really wrong.”
“The physio called me and said ‘look, you could do this. It’s that bad.’
“It’s hard to hear. It’s emotional. But I feel proud of myself when I look back and see how I dealt with it and how I got back to playing. It also helped me grow as a person.”
