BILLY Bowie will be the first to admit he hasn’t got everything right at Rugby Park. When Steve Clarke left and the call went out for Angelo Allesio, things unravelled so quickly the Italian’s name had barely been etched onto his office door.
Tommy Wright, practically in with the bricks and mortar in comparison, arrived at the end of one winter and was gone before the next began. His replacement had to be spot on – and so Derek McInnes has proved.
From fourth in the table behind Arbroath, to champions and back in the top tier at the first time of asking, it’s gone even better than Bowie and the Killie board might have hoped.
That’s why it’s no surprise to hear the chairman is ready to back his manager, pledging the “biggest-ever” budget in Kilmarnock’s history and already setting the club’s sights on the top-six holy grail.
“We’ve already discussed the future with [McInnes] and this summer he’ll be given the biggest budget ever in Kilmarnock’s history,” Bowie said in the aftermath of Killie’s Championship-clinching win over Arbroath on Friday night.
“I’ve been here for nine years now and you get to know what’s right for the club and we know the budget we require to become a top-six club.
“There’s a calmness about Derek which gives us confidence. He’s gone higher than top six before and that would be nice but we’ll go for top six for starters.
“We can enjoy the summer now, knowing we have an extra month in which to gather our thoughts.”
When Killie return to Premiership action next year, they’ll hope for more nights like Friday, where a capacity crowd - the first for nearly three decades - had Rugby Park bouncing in a way most assumed had been lost to time.
It was good news for the spectacle and maybe even better for the chairman and the club’s bank balance but, for Bowie, it showed just what could be done if the town gets behind McInnes and the team.
“There were 10,000 Kilmarnock fans in the ground,” Bowie, who became Killie chairman in 2019, said. “We’ve had bigger crowds before but you need to go back to 1995 until the last time we had more of our own supporters at a game here. It was fantastic.
“It [shows what can be done] and it lets us know we can do more and go further as well. Had we pushed the boat out to come back up straight away? Absolutely – and it would have been tough if we’d had to go through it all again next season.
“But we’re glad we’ve done it: we said we would and now we have. Other big clubs haven’t been able to get out of the Championship at the first attempt so we’ll just put that down to experience.”
With the biggest budget and the largest list of star names, even Bowie could concede it has been Killie against the ‘nation’s’ Arbroath in these final, frantic weeks of the season. The fact it all came down to Friday said so much about the part-timers - who’ll still hope to come up through the play-offs - but in the end Killie’s class told.
Even when James Craigen’s opener looked like taking the title race to the final day, Kilmarnock regrouped and came again, Ash Taylor getting the party started before Blair Alston’s late winner sparked an eruption of emotion.
“There was a nervousness throughout but it was great when the winner went in - you could see the relief by our reaction to both of the goals,” said Bowie.
“In fact, relief would be a mild way of describing it. I’ve never known a response like that at Rugby Park before, from the supporters as well as ourselves.
“Directors normally just applaud when we score during games but we erupted like everyone else on Friday night. Even when we were beating Celtic and Rangers here during Steve Clarke’s time in charge it wasn’t like this.”
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