Sixteen months after landing at Dunfermline, the once perennial peripheral figure appreciates the value of considering the bigger picture. Even more so now that he has been hustled to its foreground, charged with touching up the blanch facade of Davie Hay’s team.
The striker began his Upton Park fixation at the age of eight, clambering his way up as far as the youth team, whom he would later captain, and the reserves. There comes a point, however, when a player’s working life has to become just that.
“There were times there when I thought I might get an opportunity,” the 20-year-old recollects. “A first-team player might be injured, but there was always another striker — Paolo di Canio, Jermain Defoe, Freddie Kanoute, Titi Camara. It was hard to get in front of all of them. I was disappointed, but you’ve got to carry on.”
The same could be said of all his current cohorts. Dunfermline are bottom of the table ahead of today’s visit from Hearts, and have scored only twice in five league games. Mehmet, manacled to the substitutes bench under Jimmy Calderwood last season, has started the last two matches and bristled with enough brio against Motherwell eight days ago to see Hay upbraided by fans when he substituted him in the final quarter. Dunfermline went on to lose a last-minute goal and two cherished points.
“It’s not been the best of starts,” says Mehmet, who cites the ugly smear of Uefa Cup defeat by Icelandic part-timers FH Hafnarfjordur, when Dunfermline’s name was instantly blackened after 34 years away from the European roll call, as having coloured their season to date.
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“You’re going to be gutted, it was devastating,” he says. “We are playing good football, but the breaks aren’t coming our way. I hope they’ll come on Sunday. If we get a victory against Hearts, that will get the crowd back behind us.”
Those supporters have been increasingly irascible with each passing disappointment, unable to withstand the itch to make as yet unfavourable comparisons between Hay and the previous governor in the Kingdom of Fife, Calderwood, who escorted them to the Scottish Cup final and those long unbreached boundaries of the continental game, all at once last year.
The transitional period, as one regime merges awkwardly into another, has not been without its impact on the players. Mehmet was brought to the club as part of a sustained raid on the fringes of the Premiership which also had Gary Mason, Aaron Labonte, Gary Dempsey, David Grondin and Sean Kilgannon crossing the border, and he concedes his surprise at Calderwood stopping the masterplan short by moving to Aberdeen.
“When I found out he was going, I was shocked. He was the man who’d brought me in, and I’d hoped that I’d proved myself to him. Now I’ve got to prove myself to Davie Hay. That’s what football’s like.”
Nobody knows that more than Hay himself, savagely discarded by Livingston in May despite being behind the securing of the first major trophy in the club’s history. Mehmet, who after working under Harry Redknapp is experiencing the other extreme of the managerial excitability scale, reassures you that proficiency is not the reserve of the extrovert.
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“Davie’s been successful at a lot of the clubs he’s been with. Jimmy was more of a loud manager, and Harry was just mad, but all managers have their own way of doing things. Davie doesn’t shout as much, maybe he doesn’t show it as much, but he’s a good manager.”
To safeguard that reputation, he could do with his players living up to their own. After Hearts, Partick Thistle head eastwards on Wednesday in the third round of the CIS Cup. True to football’s desultory personality, a couple of wins in those matches could put an altogether more hale sheen on affairs.
Mehmet has his own motivations for desiring a prompt turnaround. His eclectic background (his father is Turkish and his mother English) gave him multiple options in the international field, but it was his grandfather’s link to the Republic of Ireland that has now been reforged by his selection for their under-21 team.
To date, he has played one match, against Poland in April. “Playing in the first team here, and getting the team doing well, will give me a better opportunity to get back into the Ireland set-up. The other strikers at the club have to try and fill the boots of Stevie Crawford (last season’s top scorer now at Plymouth). I just hope one of us can do that.”
Should Mehmet prove to be that man, his timing would be spot on as far as Hay is concerned.