The circumstances at St Johnstone will seem sedate to Tommy Wright compared to his last managerial role.

When he took charge of Lisburn Distillery four years ago, Wright was taking on a challenge that was to include a fight against relegation, financial collapse, a threat to the club's existence, and cup final glory.

In being confirmed yesterday as Steve Lomas's successor, Wright now has an opportunity to call upon the experiences he encountered earlier in his career.

He is unlikely to face a bout of crisis management at McDiarmid Park, since the stability of the club under Geoff Brown and now his son, Steve, means that it has become a place where managerial careers can flourish. Owen Coyle, Derek McInnes and now Lomas, who has left to take charge of Millwall, have all impressed enough at St Johnstone to be offered jobs in England.

Wright was the first and overwhelming choice of the board, as well as the dressing room, and the 49-year-old is well versed in the demands that the job can make of people.

A former Northern Ireland internationalist, he had spells in charge of Limavady United and Ballymena United, as well as goalkeeping coaching spells at Norwich City and Shamrock Rovers, before moving to Lisburn Distillery in 2009. The team was bottom of the league and the true extent of the club's financial difficulties were soon to emerge, with the list of creditors growing, a winding-up petition and Wright finding his budget drastically cut. Yet he saved the team from relegation, then took them to sixth place the following season, as well as winning the Co-Operative Insurance Cup, the club's first senior trophy since 1993.

It is a measure of Wright's style of management that once the trophy was presented and the players were about to begin celebrating in front of the cameras, he slipped away. Having persuaded most of them to remain at the club during the difficult times, there was already a strong bond between them. Wright has been a popular figure throughout his career, much of which was interrupted by injury – he was out for almost three years while at Nottingham Forest, as well as having 10 operations on his right knee and one on his left – but there is also a firm ambition to him.

He left Distillery when Lomas offered him the assistant's role at St Johnstone, and the two men originally shared a flat in Perth when they first moved there. As part of their routine, they often shared cooking duties with their neighbours, the St Johnstone players Francisco Sandaza and Alan Mannus. This kind of informality contributed to the sense of unity within the team under Lomas, who could be an inspirational figure.

Wright will have the benefit of taking over a well-run and successful team, as well as already having established relationships with the players. He is also the Northern Ireland goalkeeping coach, and spent most of his playing career in England, so can call upon similar contacts across the game as Lomas, who signed some influential players during his short spell at McDiarmid Park.

Wright is highly regarded as a coach, and will have understood the importance of man management from his own career. He worked under Billy Bingham, Bryan Hamilton and Lawrie McMenemy at international level, as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson and Kevin Keegan during his club career. Wright was also the goalkeeper – on a short-term loan – at Newcastle United when Ruud Gullit dropped Alan Shearer ahead of a derby match with Sunderland. Gullit had already ostracised Rob Lee from the squad, then informed Shearer of his omission as he pinned up the team sheet. Newcastle lost 2-1 and Gullit never recovered from the fall-out of the way he handled his decisions.

When he was 17, Wright was offered an athletics scholarship in America because of his talent at cross-country running, and played as a centre-forward at primary school, before eventually settling on becoming a goalkeeper. He now has the chance to show he is a safe pair of hands when it comes to management.