“I went there [Palace] in November [1986] and from then until the end of the season I scored seven and Wrighty scored eight – and we said: ‘That’s not good enough. If we think we’re elite players and we think we can play in the First Division, we have to work hard and try to get our partnership together working’,” Bright later explained.
The next season Wright and Bright scored 23 and 26 times respectively; a year later the tallies were 33 and 25. The numbers are still to be reckoned with today. The two racked up 232 in combination for the club.
“Everybody added a little bit to what we had and you have to perfect it,” Bright remembered. “When we got on the pitch, there was just certain things he knew I was going to do and I knew he was going to do. He would sit it up to the far post and I would slide it into the six-yard box for him to slide on and tap in.
“A lot of hard work went on behind the scenes, but on the big stage and on the pitch on the Saturday, that’s where it all came out. Everybody was like ‘wow, that’s telepathic’ but there’s just a lot of hard work went into it.
“You have to remember he scored over 100 goals and I scored over 100 goals in five seasons and I was six. There were only a few goals between us and we averaged 19 goals a season each for five seasons, which is incredible.”
After leaving Palace, Wright would go on to break the Arsenal goalscoring record, and sits second in the list today behind only Thierry Henry. He won the Premier League in 1998; also played for West Ham, Nottingham Forest, Celtic and this weekend's opponents, Burnley; and earned 33 caps for England.
