For some people, Hull City didn’t exist until the club joined the Premier League and entered the national consciousness. For long time City fans though, the Tigers are far more than a single match or season, they are the sum of childhood memories of standing on Boothferry Park’s ‘well’, of recollections of Simon Gray coach trips to away games, even of events not witnessed first hand but passed down from a previous generation of Tiger Nationals. Hull City is a rich tapestry comprised of many individual and overlapping threads.
Some threads are more important than others though, and we set out to define what it is that makes Hull City unique, different from every other club in the land. What are the key events, people, sights and sounds that combine to form the soul of Hull City? Not every entry has to be of monumental historic importance, but it has to be quintessentially Hull City…
Entries by Ian Thompson, Richard Gardham, Mike Scott, Les Motherby, Andy Dalton and Matthew Rudd
WAGGY AND CHILLO Dramatis personae
The greatest strike partnership in Hull City’s history, in spirit and backed up easily by the figures. Upon the arrival of cocky and stocky Ken Wagstaff to partner Sproatley’s own centre forward par excellence Chris Chilton in late 1964, the pair never looked back. The giant Chilton’s brand of brave, strong, uncompromising marksmanship yielded the individual club record for goals which nobody will beat; Wagstaff was the artier, more cultured footballer, devilish at getting into the right positions and fearless when faced with any chance, in any game, against any goalkeeper.
The pair of them make sure in their dotage today that supporting forwards Ken Houghton, Ian Butler and Ray Henderson get their share of the credit as suppliers and supporting characters, but for seven years the name of Hull City was better known than the club’s league status may have deserved because of these two men at the helm, masters of the simple-but-difficult goalscoring craft. They scored 366 League goals for City on aggregate in 15 years of involvement; 252 of which came as a partnership between Wagstaff’s debut in November 1964 (in which both he and Chilton scored) and Chilton’s departure for Coventry in August 1971.
A staggering 52 of these were hammered in during the Third Division title winning season of 1966, in which Houghton, Butler and Henderson also each reached double figures. Wagstaff also scored a comparatively whopping four goals in FA Cup quarter finals, a round of the competition which remained alien to Hull City thereafter until 2009. Maybe all these stats really should have appeared at the start of this paragraph, as they say more than meagre words.
HALF TIME v LIVERPOOL, 1989 Heights of Joy
Rarely do lower league football clubs have moments of genuine global significance. Premier League clubs on the other hand, do so routinely, so City beating Liverpool in successive Premier League seasons can make it easy to lose sight of what a remarkable achievement it can be for a small club to best a genuine world class footballing side, no matter how briefly.
In 1989 the Tigers, an established second tier side thanks to the calm administrations of manager Brian Horton but now piloted by dour Leeds-type Eddie Gray, reached the Fifth Round of the FA Cup after solid wins at Cardiff and Bradford and drew a plum tie at home to Liverpool, a global phenomenon in the 1980s.
The masses crammed into Boothferry Park (the attendance of 20,058 that day wasn’t subsequently bettered in the old place) and watched in amazement as goals from bludgeoner Billy Whitehurst and arch-poacher Keith Edwards saw City return to the dressing room at half time with an unlikely 2-1 lead. Boothferry Park witnessed a remarkable spectacle at half time, an almost deafening hum of people talking in low tones to each other about how unbelievable this all was. It was a sound that many football fans will never experience.
Alas, it all faded away as quickly as it arose. Liverpool soon assumed a second half lead and the plucky Tigers went down 2-3. City narrowly avoided relegation while Liverpool suffered their worst of tragedies two months later when the South Yorkshire Police force facilitated the death of 96 supporters in the sheep pens of Hillsborough.
But just for a moment, whispering scarcely credible predictions over steaming cups of half-time Bovril, the little guys from Hull believed they were going to rock the footballing world. Nice feeling, that.
IAN McKECHNIE FETED WITH FRUIT Fan Culture
Jovial Scottish custodian Ian McKechnie was a mainstay between the sticks for City over eight seasons in the 60s and 70s, but despite all his agility and bravery – team-mates said he was brave almost beyond the call of duty – it’s the pre-match routine between him and City fans which was dominant in securing his place in City folklore.
Numerous stories have been related, but McKechnie’s own version has to be taken as the definitive: one Thursday afternoon after he’d left Boothferry Park following treatment, he walked along North Road and then Anlaby Road and noticed a Jaffa orange in a shop – a wet fish shop, oddly – and decided to buy it to scoff during his walk.
Two young lads then shouted their good wishes for the coming away game to him, and McKechnie, still chomping on his snack, responded with thanks. Two weeks later, at the next home game, two oranges landed on the pitch near McKechnie’s goal, almost certainly from the same two lads.
McKechnie, who happily sucked on the oranges during the game, related afterwards to the Hull Daily Mail whom he believed had thrown them and why, and subsequently numerous oranges started appearing in his goalmouth as a ritual at each game. Some got squashed or bruised, but he’d end up taking half a dozen or so home each time.
One week, an orange had a phone number and ‘I LOVE YOU’ on it which McKechnie showed to the Mail reporter who then arranged a meet up. Although McKechnie was greeted by an attractive woman upon ringing the doorbell, it was her five year old daughter who had chucked the fruit.
Another time, a fan was arrested at Sheffield United for hurling an orange McKechnie-wards, and the keeper himself appeared in court on the supporter’s behalf later to explain away the reasoning.
Given that McKechnie, who played for City between 1966 and 1974, was also responsible for English competitive football’s first penalty save in a shootout (in the Watney Cup semi against Manchester United in 1970; he also missed a penalty, a further first), he could have got uppity about being more associated with fruit than football when his City career ended. But he was truly proud of his unique contribution to player-fan interaction at a time when fan-fan interactions were rather more feisty.
McKechnie died in 2015 and, at the funeral, his family threw oranges into his grave. It’s impossible to define how fitting as a final gesture this was.
MIKE SMITH Dramatis Personae
It was seen as something of a coup for City when Wales manager Mike Smith was appointed as the club’s new boss as the 1980s got underway, though it was tempered by the knowledge that he had never played with, nor managed daily, any professional footballers. An amateur player by choice and ex-teacher, he had overseen the Welsh into the quasi-quarter finals of the European Championships of 1976 and within a game and a dodgy penalty at Anfield of the World Cup two years later, but taking on City was new territory for everyone involved.
Smith was more teacher than coach, more athlete than footballer. Tales of his training programmes remain legendary, with the squad barely touching a football due to Smith’s insistence that they ran and ran and ran all the time – round the pitch, through Boothferry Estate, in the gym. His Friday night sessions became notorious as they rendered the players knackered before important games while also struggling to understand what he required of them when a ball was at their feet.
Nevertheless, the fitness of the players did improve and the remainder of 1979/80 saw a run of form that allowed City to avoid a first ever relegation to the Fourth Division, courtesy of a win over Southend on the same day that two other Hull teams were eggballing around Wembley. Smith’s long knives came out over the spring and close season, however, with a stack of seasoned and established professionals released or sold – his decisions to let Roger deVries and Stuart Croft leave especially saddened the fans – while those that survived were evidently hacked off and his signings distinctly out of sorts.
There was an exception, a glorious one, in the shape of goalkeeper Tony Norman, who pretty much single-handedly rescues Smith’s legacy by being unbeatable and unmatchable for eight terrific years with the club after joining from Burnley. He also took credit for getting youngsters from a gifted youth side into the first team picture, with Brian Marwood, Steve McClaren, Gary Swann and Garreth Roberts all becoming regulars, the latter even becoming skipper at the age of 21.
He also wasn’t afraid to give 16 year old striker Andy Flounders regular football. He needed to do something with the strikers, after all. Keith Edwards was scoring regularly but hated the new regime, chucking his shirt at Smith after being substituted during a goalless game against Brentford at a time when City were so woeful and so short of ideas that the demotion to the bottom division they had been so relieved to avoid the year before was now inevitable. Smith signed two non-league forwards in Billy Whitehurst and Les Mutrie, both of whom had to be an improvement on the plodding Welsh international Nick Deacy, brought in by Smith early on after a nonentity career in Holland.
City went down with games and weeks to spare, and Edwards was sold early the next season. Whitehurst became a regular up front but couldn’t score (or head, trap, run…), but Mutrie, at 29 one of the oldest Football League debutants of all time, settled in well and scored quite freely alongside him. Smith’s side were just a middling, inconsistent, uninteresting team when the club was thrown into the national spotlight suddenly in February 1982 thanks to Christopher Needler revealing he had been advised to stop putting funds in.
Receivership documents were drawn up and Smith, along with one of his assistants, was sacked to save cash. Most of his players remained – though Deacy was one quick to jump ship – and when Don Robinson and Colin Appleton came in, they made a team that could score, win, defend and get promoted from the squad Smith left behind. The youngsters from the ranks became legends, as did Whitehurst, Mutrie and the immense Norman.
Smith managed Egypt for a bit, winning the African Cup of Nations, and had a second spell with Wales in the 90s, but City is the only club he ever managed. It was a strange time, unique in terms of the way the team was plummeting and the financial struggles that would somehow salvage him from a worse ultimate fate, yet despite the bigger picture surrounding the club, and the handful of decent, if misused or mistreated, players he left behind, there isn’t a great deal of lingering affection for a manager whom, at the time, the fans didn’t get chance to really dislike.
THE GREAT ESCAPE Talking Points
Between mid-1986 and 2004, Hull City fans endured little but relegation, winding-up orders, the sale of the club’s best players, and chairmen and boards that ranged from the inept to the corrupt. They had seen both a once-great stadium crumble to ruins and Simon Trevitt playing at right-back.
That isn’t to say that the club’s dark ages were without their good points, however. And chief among them stands the ‘Great Escape’ of 1999. Given the circumstances, to a generation of City fans who had known nothing but pain and despair, our survival that season felt like a promotion.
1998 had been as grim a year as Hull City had ever experienced. David Lloyd’s Plan A seemed to be to lead us to extinction off the pitch. His Plan B was to allow Mark Hateley to lead us to the Conference on it. By November we were bottom of the bottom division, six points (briefly nine) off the rest. Thankfully, Lloyd ran out of toys to throw out of his pram, and sold the club to a consortium backed by local farmer and former Scunthorpe chairman Tom Belton. Belton’s first task was to fire the awful Hateley. Midfielder Warren Joyce was temporarily given the reins, and brought in former Bolton team-mate John McGovern to assist, as he had no plans for retire from playing just yet.
Joyce’s impact in the league wasn’t immediate. A memorable 1-0 win at home to Carlisle thanks to a last-minute Craig Dudley goal gave the fans some hope of survival, but this was followed by four dispiriting defeats to Torquay, Swansea, Chester and Shrewsbury. Indeed it was a morale-boosting FA Cup run that seemed to instil belief in the players. High-flying Division Three side Luton were dispatched in the second round, leading to a visit to top-of-the-Premiership Aston Villa in the third. In the 3-0 defeat at Villa Park, City – still 92nd in the league – did not disgrace themselves.
However, it was relegation that needed avoiding, and Joyce set about building a team capable of such a task. Out went Hateley’s powder-puff nonsense of French, Hawes, Hocking, Rioch and Whitworth. In came the heavy-duty Whittle, Alcide, Perry, Whitney, Swales, Williams and Oakes. Mark Greaves was given a first-team berth. Oh, and before we played in-form Rotherham in early January, a double signing was made: Mark Bonner came in on loan and was to score the only goal of the only game he was to play for us, and former bouncer Gary Brabin was introduced to the City faithful. Within 10 minutes of his debut he’d slide tackled a Rotherham player with his head.
The 1-0 win at home to Rotherham was followed by a 4-0 win against fellow strugglers Hartlepool, in which Brian McGinty’s brace was to be his last telling contribution to the City cause, unable as he was to oust the excellent and underappreciated Gareth Williams from left-midfield (go on, admit it, you can’t even picture him, can you? For shame…). This was the first time City had won back-to-back league fixtures in more than two years. This was followed by two 1-1 draws, away to Peterborough, in which Jon Whitney scored from what seemed like 60 yards, and at home to Shrewsbury, in which Brian Gayle scored what seemed like the 200th own-goal of his career.
Then came Brentford away. Brentford hadn’t lost at home all season. They were top of the league (and would go on to win it). The near 2,000 City fans that packed into Griffin Park’s marvellous old away end made more noise than I can ever remember us making as Colin Alcide scored on his debut and David Brown scored a second-half volley to give us a memorable 2-0 win in what was surely City’s game of the 90s. As Scarborough lost 5-1 to Exeter, we came off the bottom of the league for the first time since August.
A 3-0 defeat at Rochdale in our first-ever televised league match set us back, but with Brabin and Whittle at the heart of the team we were never going to stay down for long. Indeed it was the former who was to score our winner at Darlington in our next game, and the latter who was to score against Barnet in a 1-1 draw the game after that. A 1-0 win at Halifax the following week kept us off the dreaded relegation spot, as Scarborough, Hartlepool and Torquay all flirted with the bottom position, while Carlisle – once in the play-off positions – entered freefall.
A lull was to follow in the shape of a goalless draw at home to Mansfield followed by a 2-0 defeat at high-flying Cambridge. Again though, City’s new-found powers of recovery came to the fore as Leyton Orient – in the play-off positions – were beaten 2-1 at Brisbane Road. A Gary Brabin overhead kick had given us the lead only for Orient to equalise with 15 minutes or so remaining. Brown’s late winner made the once-inevitable relegation now seem more unlikely than likely, and wins in our next two games against Plymouth – courtesy of yet another Brabin goal – and at Southend on a Friday night thanks to a volley by Dai D’Auria set up the next game – at home to bottom-of-the-table Scarborough – nicely.
Many City fans talk of the Scarborough game as if it were crucial to our survival that season. It wasn’t really. The hard work done in the three games before had given us a comfortable cushion over Scarborough and Hartlepool, but a win against our North Yorkshire rivals would all but seal our survival. The Hull public – aware of this fact – turned out in force on that sunny April afternoon. The official attendance figure that day was 13,949. I’ve never met a City fan who was there who believes this figure. But Boothferry Park was crammed full for its first five-figure attendance in five years to witness a nervy game in which Brabin scored for City, only for Scarborough to equalise in the second half as City sat back on their lead. While the draw was disappointing, the point was of more use to us than it was the Seasiders.
A draw at Cardiff was followed by a win at home to Exeter as the occasionally maligned Colin Alcide silenced some of his doubters with goals in each game. A couple of 0-0 draws sandwiched an entertaining if disappointing 3-2 home defeat to Scunthorpe, as we struggled towards the finishing line. We needed to avoid defeat at home to Torquay, sweaty Neville Southall and all, in the penultimate game of the season to make safety mathematically certain, and again, nearly 10,000 packed into Boothferry Park to see the Great Escape completed (except no one would ruin it by foolishly speaking English – do the football fans who talk so much of ‘Great Escapes’ actually realise that the escape they are basing this reference on actually failed?). David Brown beat Southall in a one-on-one to trigger celebrations all around Boothferry Park as the theme to the film was sung endlessly. What had once seemed impossible had been achieved with a game to spare, and we could look on and smile as Jimmy Glass condemned Scarborough to relegation and, ultimately, extinction.
Scarborough’s eventual extinction is a poignant reminder of the importance of our Great Escape. Had we kept hold of Hateley for even a little while longer, had we not been lucky enough to have Warren Joyce among our playing staff, had we not been able to sign the likes of Whittle and Brabin, who knows what might have happened? We might have bounced straight back up. But we might – with Buchanan and Hinchliffe running the club into the ground – have never come back from such a blow. We might, right now, be supporting a non-league FC City of Hull at Dene Park while Hull Dons’ league matches are being ignored at a pared-down version of the KC. But we’re not. We’re watching Championship football, and we’ve seen City play in the Premiership. And regardless of what would have become of Hull City had we succumbed to relegation that season, I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that any of the amazing things that have happened to us over the past decade would have occurred were it not for the wondrous way we turned things around in 1999.
It is for this reason that we should never let the bright lights and razzmatazz of our current status cause us to forget the debt we owe Andy Oakes, David D’Auria, David Brown, Mike Edwards, Mark Greaves, Gerry Harrison, Steve Swales, Jon Whitney and Gareth Williams. That goes tenfold for the spine around which our survival was constructed – Gary Brabin and Justin Whittle. Add to that Tom Belton – who was to be ousted from the boardroom in the summer and replaced by the despicable Nick Buchanan. But chief among the heroes of that dizzying four months is Warren Joyce. He was never to manage us for a full season, but must go down as the most important manager in the club’s history. The steps we took under his stewardship were not just crucial to the club’s survival, they were the first on the road to Wembley, Old Trafford, the Emirates and Anfield.
BEST STAND DUST SHOWERS Fan Culture
Best: a superlative of ‘good’, meaning of the most excellent or desirable kind – though the word is often loosely used to describe something that’s less shit than whatever is surrounding it. Hence, Mel C was the ‘best’ singer in the Spice Girls, Benidorm is the ‘best’ ITV sitcom of the past 25 years, Carlsberg is probably the ‘best’ lager in the world, and Boothferry Park’s ‘Best Stand’ was fractionally less shit than the South Stand, North Stand or Kempton.
The Best Stand had very little going for it, other than the fact that it wasn’t one of the three other stands. Yes it housed The Well, and it was where the dignitaries and sponsors sat, but it was still shit. In the final 30 years or so of its existence, when it had basically been left to rot, it had the added benefit of showering City fans with dust, rubble and bits of masonry whenever a clearance from a City player (or a pin-point pass from Steve Terry) hit any part of the stand’s upper areas. If the ball happened to hit the part of the stand’s roofing above the players’ wives, it was often the highlight of a Saturday afternoon watching these ladies, done up to the nines (well, more like threes for the most part), having to pick bits of concrete out of their Mark Hill hair-dos. The KC has yet to show any signs of fraying, but should the day come it can only be hoped that it does so in as comical a fashion as its predecessor.
BILLY BLY Dramatis Personae
Hull City’s history might be a bit underwhelming, but our history of goalkeepers most certainly isn’t. From Eddie Roughley, reputed to have been outstanding in Hull City’s first serious stab at promotion to Division One, to the underappreciated Boaz Myhill more often than not standing as firm as could be expected behind such a porous Premiership defence, the list of Hull City greats is heavily weighted in favour of custodians of the leather.
Boaz would rightly have his supporters in an all-time City XI, as might George Maddison, Maurice Swan, Ian McKechnie, Jeff Wealands, Alan Fettis and maybe even Roy Carroll. In all likelihood, however, the green jersey would go to one of two men: Tony Norman or Billy Bly. In the event of a tie, the decision would have to go on who has the most pre-season trophies named after them.
Bly was born in Newcastle in 1920 and came through his home town club’s youth system. It was while playing for Walker Celtic that he caught the eye of Ernie Blackburn and joined City as an apprentice in August 1937. However, Bly had to wait until April 1939 to make his debut at Rotherham in a 2-0 win though he was to remain City’s first-choice keeper for the remainder of the season. The war seemingly ended Bly’s City career before it had begun. Though he was to turn out for the club in a few wartime games, there could have been no clues that this skinny keeper who had played only a handful of games before the commencement of hostilities in Europe was going to stamp his name all over the history of the Tigers.
It was a 0-0 draw at home to Lincoln City in August 1946 in which Billy Bly’s City career started in earnest. He was first choice for City that day, and was to remain so until March 1960. Indeed had it not have been for a series of unfortunate injuries (Bly was reputed to be ‘the most injured man in football’ at the time) and the war robbing him of six years of his career, one can only wonder just how many more appearances than the eventual 456 Bly would have racked up in his 22 years at Hull City.
Bly’s star was to rise quickly. In the hubbub that surrounded Raich Carter’s appointment and the club’s rise in the next couple of years from half-decent Division Three (North) team to being on the verge of promotion to the First Division, Bly was outstanding. Carter’s class may have been taking the plaudits on a national scale, but among the City faithful Bly’s popularity was second to none.
In the famous 1949 FA Cup run, Bly kept an impressive clean sheet at Stoke in a 2-0 win to set up the famous Sixth Round tie at home to Manchester United. The 55,019 fans at Boothferry Park that day saw Bly break his nose in the first-half, and bravely play on despite clearly being concussed. It was such devotion to the cause that means that ten-a-penny fanzine writers are still writing about him 50 years on and why fans at the time loved him so much.
Injuries then started to hit Bly. He missed much of the 1950/51 season with a variety of injuries (his bravery was to see him suffer 14 fractures in his career, as well as a glut of other injuries). His fitness also seemed to be affecting any possible football career outside of the confines of Boothferry Park too, with Bly having to withdraw from an England ‘B’ call up due to injury.
The rest of the 1950s seemed to continue with a pattern of: Bly plays, City look fine; Bly is injured, City look shaky. Indeed Bly was to never be ever-present for City in any season. The closest he came was in 1958/59 when he missed just one game. It was no coincidence that that season City were promoted from Division Three.
Despite his obvious frailties, Billy was 39 when he played his final game for Hull City in a 1-0 defeat at Bristol Rovers. His final season was, predictably, blighted by injury, and again, City fortunes floundered in tandem. Relegation at the end of the season also saw Bly announce his retirement, 21 years or so since he’d made his debut in a career that spanned four decades. Bly came out of retirement to play for Weymouth two years after his last game for Hull City, and helped his new team to a giant-killing run into the fourth round of the FA Cup, but as far as league football was concerned he remained a one-club man. After his football career ended, he ran a sweet shop near Boothferry Park and remained a City fan after his playing days had ended.
So there’s much more to Billy Bly than a mere trophy. The trophy – usually presented to the victors of the North Ferriby v Hull City pre-season match by his son, Roy – means that his name stays in the consciousness of Hull City fans, but in truth his achievements while at City deserve more recognition than that. The longevity of his City career, his bravery, his talent, his likeability and the achievements of the club while he was stood between the sticks make Bly a worthy recipient of the title ‘legend’, a title that shouldn’t diminish with time.
THE HINCHLIFFE CREST Keeping Up Appearances
Back in 1999, at the start of a period of self inflicted financial turmoil that saw the club evicted from Boothferry Park, players go without pay and the taxman issuing High Court winding-up orders over unpaid VAT, the board saw fit to pay a few grand for an unneeded rebranding exercise. At the behest of vice president Stephen Hinchliffe, (a man disqualified from being a company director by the DTI and later convicted of fraud and jailed for two years) his nepotistically-appointed son James Hinchliffe was tasked to design a new crest. It was an utter abomination.
At the top of a shield was a crudely illustrated Humber Bridge that had three giant coronets hovering ominously, Damocles sword like, over the span. Underneath, inside the escutcheon, was an owl with a goatee beard rendered in iron filings, or maybe it was a clipart crab with a circumcised penis for a nose, or maybe, just maybe, it was a tigers head. It was supposed to be, but it sure didn’t look like one.
Thankfully, that design, which first appeared in a programme in March 1999 and inspired indignant protest, never graced the players’ kit. A hastily redrawn version was used on the Avec strips for 1999-2000 and 2000-2001, and though it was a little bit better, it was awful nonetheless, retaining the nose that looked startlingly phallic.
Adam Pearson sought to erase any trace of the ‘Sheffield Stealers’ reign when he brought the club out of administration in 2001 and heroically commissioned a new primary logo that contained the old, beloved tigers head design that had adorned City shirts between 1978 and 1999. Every now and then, however, the Hinchliffe crest is unwittingly used by a lax page editor in the national press, and the Tiger Nation is forcibly reminded of the time our club’s logo was, depending on your perspective, a bearded owl or a cock-nosed crab.
RAICH CARTER Dramatis Personae
Many Hullensians still have an understandable chip on their shoulder about the lack of publicity (and subsequent funding) regarding the pounding the city took from the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. If you don’t know the facts, then shame on you, but suffice to say that wartime Home Secretary Herbert Morrison considered Hull the worst affected city in the UK by such raids. Basically, post-war Hull was a mess and morale was at rock bottom.
Why am I going on about this? Because it helps put into context just how important Raich Carter was to the city and its football team.
Raich was a household name before he arrived in Hull. He’d won the FA Cup before the war with his home-town club Sunderland and then after it with Derby County. Still an England regular, In 1948, Raich was looking for a move into management. Assistant management offers flowed in, with two, Division Three North Hull City and Division Two Nottingham Forest, emerging as frontrunners. Mindful of the fact that City manager Major Frank Buckley was nearing retirement, and Forest boss Billy Walker was relatively young in management terms, Raich plumped for East Yorkshire, £6,000 was exchanged and a legend created.
On April 3rd 1948, Raich led out his new team-mates against York City in front of 33,000 at Boothferry Park. The game finished 1-1, and afterwards Raich immediately travelled up to Scotland to fulfil his duties as England reserve in a friendly at Hampden Park, so near yet so close to becoming our first England international. While Raich was away, his decision to join opt for City because of the potential for a quicker move into full management was proven to be a shrewd one. Major Buckley had fallen out with the City board, resigned, and Carter was offered the job one game into his City career, a move made official on April 23rd.
In the following summer, Carter signed former Sunderland FA Cup final team-mate Eddie Burbanks to add to an impressive-looking team that contained the likes of Billy Bly, Ken Harrison, Norman Moore and Jimmy Greenhalgh. City got off to a flyer that year, with Raich prompting from inside left and Boothferry Park regularly packing in 30,000-plus gates. The side remained unbeaten until October 16 when Darlington won 1-0 at Boothferry Park. Carter responded by signing Danish international and City legend-in-the-making Viggo Jensen. They weren’t to lose again until mid-February, in which time First Division Stoke had been knocked out of the FA Cup in the fifth round in a match at the Victoria Ground. City were the talk of the football world, with Carter’s profile remaining as high as it had been when he was playing in the top-flight. His presence was adding thousands to any game he played in.
Though clinching promotion was not quite a formality, the sixth-round tie at home to Manchester United in the FA Cup in 1949 captured the city’s, and nation’s, imagination in a way that that other sport could only dream of. Sadly, City lost 1-0 in front of our record home crowd. Unluckily too, by most accounts, with the ball reportedly going out of play just before Manchester United scored the game’s solitary goal.
Promotion to Division Two was sealed on April 30th after a 6-1 win at home to Stockport, with Carter netting twice. In the whole season, Raich had missed only three league games, scoring 14 times (level with Viggo Jensen and only behind centre-forward Moore’s 22). Football historian Peter Jeffs names Raich as the manager of the year in his ‘The Golden Age of Football’. Raich was the king of Hull. The city that had taken such a battering in the war – and had been largely been ignored by the national media – was given reasons to be both cheerful and optimistic. And it was Raich we had to thank.
So, Division Two beckoned. City had shown that we could match the best in the FA Cup the previous year, but could we sustain it over a full season? Did Raich’s 36-year-old legs have another full season in them? Would he be as effective at this level? Of course he would. City won 12 of the first 18 games of the season to challenge at the top of the table, with Raich scoring 13 times. Carter missed only three games all season, but was to only score three more times and a once-promising campaign faded as City won only one of the final 15 games, and finished what was generally viewed as a disappointing seventh
Raich started the 1950-51 season in incredible form, scoring in eight of City’s first nine games as the Tigers once again started a season among the division’s front-runners. However, an injury to Raich in November saw the good form tail off, and though it picked up again on Raich’s return, the gap to the top two couldn’t be breached and City had to settle for 10th. Yet again, there’d been plenty of cause for optimism, but how much longer could Carter go on for? And who could replace him on the pitch? His 35 appearances had brought with them 21 goals. Alf Ackerman and Syd Gerrie had been brought in to plug the goalscoring gap with some success, but replacing the irreplaceable? You might as well replace Michael Turner with Ibrahima Sonko.
The 1951/52 season started with the usual optimism. Though Raich had missed the team’s pre-season tour to Spain to care for his sick wife, he’d declared himself fit for another season. However, he was injured in the first game of the season – a goalless draw against Barnsley. Little did anyone know that it was to be his last game as City’s player manager. Carter handed in his resignation on September 5th, and it was unanimously accepted by the board on September 12th. Mystery shrouded Raich’s resignation. The board said nothing, and Raich’s vague explanation was that he’d quit because of “a disagreement on matters of a general nature in the conduct of the club’s affairs”.
The rumours that surrounded (and still surround) Raich’s exit just added to the highly unsatisfactory way in which such a great servant to the game and Hull City had left the club. His popularity remained undiminished with the people of Hull though, and the following season when City went on a 12-match winless run saw the board partially relent and allow Raich to return – as a player. The club’s fortunes improved with Raich dictating things, and the club staved off the relegation that once looked to be a certainty. The club even had time to beat First Division Manchester United 2-0 at Old Trafford in the third round of the FA Cup. Carter was man of the match. In the final game of the season – in what was to be Raich’s final game in the black and amber – Doncaster were beaten 1-0. The scorer? One Horatio Stratton Carter.
At the end of the season, Carter was given a civic testimonial by the Lord Mayor of Hull and the Carter family were showered with gifts from all kinds of companies and families connected with Hull. But the bitter truth was that Raich was going to move on, and when he did, it was surprisingly to Cork Athletic, but he was soon back in England, managing Leeds United and helping shape the early stages of the career of John Charles. After getting Leeds promoted to Division One, Raich resigned from Leeds because couldn’t recover from the board selling John Charles to Juventus. Managerial posts at Mansfield and Middlesbrough followed, but Raich’s managerial career, while impressive in places, was never to hit the heights of his playing days. After his sacking by Middlesbrough, Raich moved back to Willerby and made ends meet by starting his own football magazine, reporting on matches for the Daily Mirror, sitting on the pools panel and opening a newsagents close to where the KC is now situated. He remained a regular at Boothferry Park with his son, Raich Jr, but sadly only as a commendably passionate supporter.
Raich’s final ‘appearance’ at Boothferry Park came at half time in an otherwise forgettable 0-0 draw against Sunderland in October 1988. He and fellow Sunderland FA Cup final hero Bob Gurney dribbled a ball up and down the pitch as the crowd – to a man – stood to applaud them. The affection for Raich from all supporters was clear for anyone to see, several decades after he’d had any involvement with either club.
Raich died on October 9th, 1994 in Hull. At the time largely regarded as the club’s greatest ever player, the city mourned one of its finest adopted sons. At the request of then chairman Martin Fish, the funeral cortege stopped outside Boothferry Park to be met by a guard of honour formed by the playing and management staff and some 400 fans. His funeral ceremony was littered with football greats mourning a player who could stand shoulder to shoulder with any of them.
So where does Raich stand in what we can now hopefully call with some justification the ‘pantheon’ of City greats? Comparing players from different eras is in many ways futile. Who was the best Hull City player out of Carter, Waggy, Chillo, Whittle, Windass and Turner? Well only one of them thrived in the top-flight with the club, but that shouldn’t necessarily end the argument. Raich’s stats – 136 games, 57 goals – don’t necessarily tell the full story either, the story of the hope he gave a bomb-battered city and its underperforming football club, the flashes of skill that could change a game, the cheeky penalties where he would pass the ball to a team-mate instead of shooting, the fact that one of the country’s finest players was gracing the black and amber.
It’s hard to appreciate the present. Mention that Waggy and Chillo have been surpassed by Deano and Ash and you’ll generally get some Hull City fan over the age of 50 giving you a lecture on how two centre-forwards who for the most part couldn’t take City much higher than the middle of English football’s second tier were way better than anyone who played for us and against us between 2008 and 2010, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. There is generally a third name added to the list of they who will never be bettered. Horatio Stratton Carter. That’s because it would seem he was every bit as good as misty-eyed nostalgics would tell you.
CALEB FOLAN JOINS FOR A MILLION Talking Points
Finally, we paid a million pounds for a player. And frankly, it was the first time our finances could really justify it. Adam Pearson’s support for Peter Taylor in the market was unflinching, but never could either chairman or manager have been able, even after elevation to the Championship, to apply reason to shelling out seven-figures on one player, especially as Taylor preferred to recruit from below. So, long after Taylor and Pearson had gone, it was Phil Brown who selected the player, using Paul Duffen’s resources, who would create City spending history. Caleb Folan had been deeply lacking in distinction during a brief loan spell years earlier during his kindergarten days with Leeds, but on August 31st, as the window was being pulled to, Brown offered a cheque to Wigan Athletic, whom City had dumped out of the Carling Cup, complete with Folan, days earlier, and they accepted.
Folan’s first act was to have his skull smashed by a wayward Blackpool forehead on his debut, but once he returned he proved an agile, able and awkward character who diminished initial doubts about his finishing (first goal wasn’t until December) by scoring crucially at Stoke, West Brom and in the play-offs against Watford, along with some invaluable strikes as a sub when Fraizer Campbell and Dean Windass were on form as the starting pair. He subsequently scored the goal that earned our first ever Premier League win, although injuries and an obvious inability to step up a level (or run around, or stay onside, or control a ball) made him peripheral and frustrating thereafter as relegation was fought against, and though he started the first four games of the second Premier League season, it was obvious that he wasn’t cut out for the job on any level except for actual effort, and was soon packed off on loan to Middlesbrough via a few disparaging words in Brown’s direction. Despite this, and irrespective of where he or the Tigers end up in the future, his contribution to promotion made the historic investment in his services prove more than shrewd.
HAROLD NEEDLER Dramatis Personae
As chairmen and owners go, Hull City know what it’s like to see both compassion and spite rule the roost in the boardroom. So many of the recent besuited figureheads have either emerged as icons worthy of immortalisation or villains worthy of incineration. Harold Needler’s commitment to the Tigers was long, unflinching, loyal and active to the very end – literally so, given that he was in control of the club until the day he died.
Needler bought the club when it was dead, gave it the new home that the previous regime had only seen half completed prior to the war dissolving any short term hope of a future, sorted out the identity as far as team colours were concerned (despite an initial period in an unattractive blue kit while awaiting the materials ordered) and appointed Major Frank Buckley as manager after initially using him as a go-between in a futile attempt to attract Stan Cullis from Wolves.
The 30 years that followed were sometimes eventful and regularly interesting. Needler’s natural character cut that of a benevolent and forward-thinking chairman, the type who would make the great Raich Carter the first player-manager of the type commonplace today and put his faith and confidence into the people who knew their job, offering Cliff Britton a ten-year contract to develop the club to the extent that it would be ready for the top flight of English football. He transferred £200,000 of his profits from sale of his construction company into the club in 1963 that funded a redevelopment of Boothferry Park and allowed Britton to purchase good players, most notably Ken Wagstaff. The ultimate ambition to reach the top tier didn’t quite happen, although the Tigers came mightily close in 1971 under youthful player-manager Terry Neill, one of many individuals associated with the Needler area that ferociously promote the man’s legacy to this day.
Needler’s sudden death in the summer of 1975 heralded a decline in the club’s fortunes, with his unsympathetic, undynamic son Christopher taking over for two years and maintaining a notorious family stranglehold on the club for many dark years afterwards. It is testament to the impact and stature of Harold Needler that he is still referred to reverentially by those who worked with him and supported the club during his tenure, even though the surname dually represents, thanks to his son, periods of disappointment, greed and profligacy.
HULL CITY RAILWAY PLAQUE Keeping Up Appearances
Acquired from LNER B17 class steam locomotive 2860 (later BR 61660), built in Darlington in 1936 and one of a group of locomotives named after football clubs, the elegant black and amber plaque, one of two that adorned the sides of the aforementioned train, enjoyed iconic status above the Boothferry Park tunnel for decades until the dastardly Martin Fish sold it to a collector and replaced it with a tatty plastic replica.
In the grand scheme of things it didn’t seem the most savage action of the Fish era, but it was witless and, thanks to no official club announcement until they were found out, desperately underhand. More than ten years on, and ever aware of a chance to show his caring, sharing side, Paul Duffen managed to find the purchaser and re-acquire it for the club, and it is now tacked resplendently to the very centre of the West Stand at the Circle.
DON ROBINSON Dramatis Personae
Hull City had spent the later years of the 1970s and the early parts of the 1980s seemingly on a path to either non-league football or non-existence. The Waggy and Chillo golden years were now a distant memory and a couple of relegations had seen the club in the bottom division for the first time, with the receivers called in and no one within the city interested in saving it. The local media – when it bothered with football instead of rugby league – would generally focus on stories of funeral marches to the ground, collections to pay the players’ wages, how low attendances were…
An hour or so up the east coast, Scarborough were making waves as the most forward-thinking and successful non-league football club in the country, underpinned by consecutive FA Trophy successes. The owner of Scarborough was an eccentric businessman, a one-time professional wrestler who’d turned up at Craven Park one day claiming to be one of the finest prop forwards in rugby league. He wasn’t. He was an astute businessman, however, with a natural flair for promoting whatever it was that piqued his interest at the time. More often than not, it was himself. From 1982 to 1989, it was Hull City. The man’s name was Don Robinson.
When, in May 1982, the SOS call to Don came from Christopher Needler, with City in deep financial trouble, he couldn’t get to Hull fast enough. A £250,000 cheque was signed and Don was our majority shareholder, while Boothferry Park was purchased by a foundation set up by the Needler family. Don Robinson was our new chairman. He brought Colin Appleton with him from Scarborough to become our new manager. Hull City were about to embark on a journey that was fun and thrilling. The moon was the limit.
First up, red – Scarborough red, though Don claimed it represented the blood City players were going to shed for the club’s cause – was added to our kit. We looked uncannily like Watford. It was one of many changes that were happening at the club. Don would stand on Boothferry Halt selling raffle tickets before games. Robinson bought his own season ticket, “like the other fans”. Crucially, things picked up on the pitch too. Under Appleton, and with the likes of Garreth Roberts, Brian Marwood, Tony Norman, Pete Skipper, Billy Askew and Billy Whitehurst flying, City were promoted in Robinson and Appleton’s first full season running things. Don handed out champagne to the crowd afterwards to anyone – children included – who wanted some.
We were doing things that Hull City just didn’t do. Tours of exotic places were introduced – Florida, the Caribbean – adding the, ahem, illustrious Arrow Air trophy to the club’s threadbare trophy cabinet. Return friendlies with touring American teams were organised. Don would come onto the pitch riding a white horse and wearing a cowboy hat. Emlyn Hughes – probably the most recognisable footballer in the county at the time thanks to his captain’s role on A Question of Sport – played a handful of games for the club and was to act as a director in later years. We were – Don told us – going to be the first club to play on the moon. You couldn’t really be sure that he hadn’t already bought a rocketship on the cheap in preparation.
After our promotion from Division 4 in 1983 the trick was very nearly repeated the season after, the Tigers falling one goal short of a promotion-sealing win on that fateful night at Burnley. The aftermath of the game saw Appleton resign, presenting Don with the first big test of his regime. The result? A masterstroke.
Hull City were an upwardly mobile club and the vacancy was enticing for young and old managers alike. It therefore came as something of a shock when Robinson appointed Brian Horton – a midfielder at Luton – as our player-manager. The result was a promotion the next season and, with the likes of Richard Jobson, Garry Parker and Frankie Bunn now added to the side, an excellent first season back in the second tier, with City finishing sixth in Division 2 the season before the play-offs were introduced.
Everything about the club felt positive, home crowds were regularly hitting the 8,000 mark and Don was in his element. However, the good times couldn’t last. A few murmurings of unrest among the fans had started. The sale of Billy Whitehurst to Newcastle hadn’t gone down well. A sponsorship deal which resulted in the club having ‘Twydale Turkeys’ emblazoned across the shirts was poorly received. On the pitch, City’s form became inconsistent too. Had Don taken us as far as he could? There was a feeling that that was the case, though our chairman remained a popular figure among the fans and players.
The 1987/88 season was to sow the seeds to Don’s demise. An excellent start couldn’t be built upon and when we lined up at home to Swindon in mid-April, City had gone more than three months without a victory. As Swindon stuck four past a demoralised City defence that night, the crowd made their feelings felt and a sizeable number were calling for Horton’s sacking. There were also a few renditions of “Robbie out” to go with it. Don panicked and sacked Horton in the aftermath of the defeat. The next day, the players asked him to reconsider. Horton was asked to come back but refused. Hull City needed a new manager.
Don Robinson’s choice was former Leeds winger Eddie Gray, who’d spent his short managerial career inspiring Rochdale to not very much. Eddie enjoyed a mixed first season, with the disappointment of a fourth-from-bottom finish balanced against an excellent FA Cup run which saw us lose 3-2 in the fifth round to one of the great Liverpool sides. Gray had done enough to suggest there was something to build upon, only to be sacked at the end of the season. How much had been decided in advance is impossible to say, but Robinson returned to his first manager at the club – Colin Appleton.
The 1989/90 season was to be the last that would start with Don Robinson as Hull City’s chairman. It started in controversial circumstances. Unable to find a shirt sponsor, Don decided to simply have the word ‘Humberside’ printed across City shirts, as a thank you to Humberside County Council for the help they had offered the club over the years. At this point, the hatred of the word ‘Humberside’ – combined with the very existence of the county – was approaching fever pitch among those within what they considered to be East Yorkshire. That the announcement was made on August 1st – Yorkshire Day – only added to the depth of rancour among a not-inconsiderable number of City fans.
The shirt sponsor was nothing compared to the disaster that was to unfold on the pitch, however. Colin Appleton had been managing Bridlington Town in the Northern Counties league and was totally out of his depth back in league football. After starting the season with a 16-game winless streak in the league, Appleton was sacked and Don went with him, resigning as chairman and handing over the reins to Richard Chetham. Don stayed on as a director for a short while but bowed out quietly not long after, cutting his ties with the club. His name would appear as a potential savior during some of the darker days of the 1990s when the club was seemingly on the brink of collapse, but Don’s time with Hull City – a time he described later in the local press as “the best years of my life” – was done.
For all of his eccentricities and penchant for self-promotion, Don never forgot what was important, and therefore retains a level of affection with older generations of Hull City fans to this day. In an interview with the Hull Daily Mail years after leaving the club, he gave the following quote: “The biggest thing in football and in Hull is the fans. It’s their club, always will be, no one else’s. I felt I was part of those fans and I wanted to win as much as any fan.” The chances of anyone running our club at the moment coming out with anything approaching such a sentiment are about as likely as us playing on the moon.
So thanks Don. It was successful. It was unpredictable. It was excruciating at times. But sandwiched in-between the two grimmest periods of Hull City’s history, it was a hell of a lot of fun.
JON PARKIN’S FALL FROM GRACE Talking Points
Few were thrilled, to say the least, when Peter Taylor decided that lumpy, slow and dubiously skilled striker Jon Parkin was the right man to helm City’s progress in the Championship, for real money and everything. The memories of City fans who saw him in useless mode for York and laughed at him at Macclesfield were long. But Parkin was immense upon arrival, twatting defenders with aplomb while scoring peachy goals and quickly earning a cult status not seen for a man in his position since Billy Whitehurst was putting the shits up centre halves a generation earlier.
His winner against Leeds United near the end of that campaign seemingly secured his legacy forever, only to ruin it with an appalling lack of self-respect in pre-season that saw him arrive with a good few stones added to his already porcine appearance. Taylor had gone and Phil Parkinson didn’t have a clue what to do about Parkin, as now only his dreadful attitude fitted his nickname of the Beast, and apart from two sharp goals on telly against Sheffield Wednesday (reserving it for the cameras, eh?) he became an embarrassment, a target of fierce criticism not seen since John Moore. So from Whitehurst to Moore in the space of six months.
He fucked off to Stoke on loan as Phil Brown reached the end of his tether but had to come back in an injury crisis, during which time he proved he cared not a jot – including in a crucial game against his new bessies at Stoke, as City equalised in injury time but Parkin was the sole participant not to partake in the wild celebrations. Stoke bought him that summer and quickly they too realised what a fat, lazy waste of space he was, forwarding him to Preston within another year. An astonishing lurch from villain, to icon, to villain in such a short period.
HEDNESFORD CUP DEFEAT Depths of despair
The 1990s was a long procession of debasement and debilitation for those of a Tiger persuasion. Humiliations jostle with one another for supremacy in our scarred memories, with no clear winner, no definitive top ten possible, just an unending slurry of dismay. However, while we may never be able to select for certain our lowest point, few have a more vigorous claim than an afternoon of shame that’ll be forever known simply as “Hednesford”.
They were our opponents in the First Round of the FA Cup in 1997/98, a match played one chilly November day, a rancid affair replete with squalid cheating, loathsome officiating and a City side more mind-meltingly hopeless than anyone new to the support nowadays could believe ever turned out in amber and black. Those who do remember need only consider that Gage and Rioch were our full-backs that day, or wing-backs, as manager Mark Hateley attempted to mould them. Match of the Day were there too, featuring the Tigers on that evening’s show and fervently hoping for a “giant-killing”. They got one.
City started poorly, as was their wont. Hednesford now ply their trade in the Southern League, but at the time were a progressive Conference team, only a handful of places below the Tigers in the football pyramid. They probably had the better of the first half as a cold, sullen Boothferry Park crowd of 6,091 sighed with displeasure. Mick Norbury, veteran striker of virtually every crap northern team in existence, scored with a penalty shortly before half-time, comically awarded by Mr D Laws, a name not easily forgotten – for he turned in one of the worst refereeing displays ever witnessed.
The Pitmen led at the break, and City’s attempts to rescue the game in the second half were pitifully inept. Memories include Gregor Rioch (described as ‘barrel chested’ by Mark Lawrenson on MOTD) shooting from about fifty yards, as he did almost every game, Hateley bringing on the attacking duo of Ellington and Fewings (seriously) in bid to level matters, and Rioch tumbling in the area and Mr Laws waving it away before being almost jubilant as Hednesford scored again in injury time. The 1,000 Hednesford fans celebrated their cup final victory, their cretinous fat oaf of a manager pranced on our pitch, and we slunk away into the night in utter disgrace, wondering if we’d ever see the sun again.
SUPERMARKETS BEHIND THE NORTH STAND That’s SO Hull City
As the 1970s drew to a close and a swathe was cut through the North’s economy by a wicked woman from Grantham, Hull City AFC described a similar arc of decline. By 1982 the club had descended to the fourth division for the first time in its history and the disinterested Chris Needler had assumed the chairman’s post, only to plunge the club into receivership within six months of his second tenure. Struggling to stay afloat, the Tigers came perilously close to extinction.
In 1979 City’s directors had announced a scheme to develop Boothferry Park, with the Boothferry Road car park being given over to a complex of leisure facilities, a supermarket, club offices and a multi-storey car park. The proposal took three years to develop and was progressively scaled back to cut costs.
In February 1982 receivership and redevelopment plans crashed into each other. And so it came to pass that the fine North Stand structure with its imposing clock, was demolished and replaced by a functional supermarket shed that was occupied by Yorkshire grocery chain Grandways. The rear of the supermarket, which flanked the Boothferry Park pitch behind one goal, accommodated a shallow area of uncovered terracing that became an unsatisfactory home to many an away following for the next 20 years. It also housed an electronic scoreboard that would seem ludicrously basic now, but was considered to be a sign of the space age coming to Kingston upon Hull at the time. It clapped; it issued yellow cards; it responded when wayward shots narrowly missed it; it told the time. I was to all intents and purposes a miracle in electronic form.
Once a stadium that proudly boasted to being the only one with a dedicated British Railways station, now Boothferry Park was the only ground in English league football with a fruit and veg aisle behind one goal. The store closed early on matchdays so the spectacle of middle aged shoppers in headscarves mingling in the car park with the Fred Perry wearing hoolies of Middlesbrough and Derby never came to pass, but the embarrassment endured and Boothferry Park was denied much of its original cavernous atmosphere.
The decline of Boothferry Park, its name picked out in red backlit letters across the roofline of the store, was characterised most savagely by the failure of the club to replace busted light bulbs in the 1990s, which resulted in the stadium being announced to night-time passers-by as “—–FER– -ARK”.
Grandways begat Jacksons in the early 1990s and after a few years in this guise the store became a Kwik Save budget food seller. The store ceased trading in 2007 when Kwik Save went bust and was subsequently demolished along with the rest of Boothferry Park to make way for a housing development.
CHAMPIONSHIP SURVIVAL WHILE LEEDS ARE RELEGATED Talking points
So it’s us or Leeds to go down, and we have to go to Cardiff whereas Leeds, a point adrift of us, are at home to a middling Ipswich. One game remains after this so relegation may yet not be decided there and then, but if City could manage a win at Ninian Park, that’d be very handy, thank you. Few actually believed it would happen in tandem with Leeds conceding a hilarious late equaliser to Ipswich, prior to their lamebrained fans trying to get the match abandoned by invading the pitch, mind.
Dean Windass, three months into a glorious Indian summer with the club he adores, scored City’s only goal shortly after half time, and in front of a boisterous and euphoric travelling Tiger Nation. Every outfield player jumped on the 38 year old striker’s back, all part of the cause, though Leeds were winning too. But then Alan Lee, Ipswich’s effective lummox of a striker, completed the fairytale at Elland Road, and City were three points clear with a goal difference of considerable superiority. Leeds accepted their relegation before the maths confirmed it a week later, even taking a ten point deduction for administration and finishing bottom of the table.
We’ve had moments to celebrate our own achievements, but this one remains unique for the feeling of inflicting deserved damage on hated rivals which prompted, as a nice bonus, messages of congratulation from all other football fans. Hell, even the Cardiff fans more renowned for offering us steel toecaps and People’s Elbows were cheering for us by the end. And the following year we won the play-offs at Wembley to get to the Premier League, prior to Leeds losing theirs to Doncaster and staying in League One. Perfection.
TENNIS BALL PROTEST AT BOLTON Fan Culture
City fans were already miffed that tennis tosser David Lloyd had merged many functions of both the Tigers and egg-chasers Hull Sharks (as Hull FC were then known) such as the feebly named ‘Tiger-Sharks Inc.’ club shops, and were deeply suspicious that what little money Hull City had was being diverted to fund the rugby league clubs ambitions. The petulant fool had several times threatened to close both clubs down if the people of Hull (who he branded ‘crap’ in one interview) didn’t back his plans, and when he announced that City would leave Boothferry Park and become tenants at the dilapidated Boulevard ground, Tiger Nationals were enraged.
A beer fuelled meeting of the TOSS and Amber Nectar fanzines determined that protest needed to be made, and the forthcoming League Cup tie at Bolton seemed the perfect time. It was agreed that in order to truly grab the attention of the media, and in turn the sporting public, we needed to delay or disrupt the game somehow. A pitch invasion was deemed unacceptable as the publicity would be wholly negative, so a Nectarine suggested throwing tennis balls on the pitch, it made sense; it was non-violent, highly visible and amusingly ironic as former tennis pro Lloyd was the current Davis Cup captain.
A few hundred tennis balls were purchased and randomly distributed to willing supporters on the coaches bound for the Reebok Stadium. Just before kick off, they were hurled onto the turf, a few at first, then en-masse creating a vivid shower of luminous orbs to the bemusement of the players, officials and watching media. Radio Humberside’s Gwilym Lloyd, despite having been tipped off about the protest, curiously stated on air that it was apples being thrown at Steve Wilson, musing that maybe it was a twist on the old ‘oranges for Ian McKechnie’ ritual of yore. Nonetheless the media lapped it up, and each subsequent report in the national press increased the estimate of tennis balls used, a few hundred had become ‘thousands’. The protest worked better than anyone could have anticipated, and a humiliated Lloyd soon announced he was putting the club up for sale. Game, set and match to City fans.
LEIGH JENKINSON IN THE RUMBELOWS SPRINT CHALLENGE That’s SO Hull City
For 104 years we waited to play an actual match at Wembley, but at least it took only a mere 88 years before a Hull City kit was legitimately on show there. League Cup sponsors Rumbelows held an inter-club competition to find the fastest footballer in the 92, with each club (apart from those who thought it was a toss idea and declined) submitting their nippiest squad member, in football kit and boots.
Ultimately, a race at Wembley prior to the Rumbelows Cup final was the pinnacle. Regional heats were held, and although Jenks, the City winger renowned for being both fast and yet a carthorse (as well as slicing crosses into the South Stand with alarming regularity), was done by Huddersfield’s Iffy Onuora in his 100m semi at the Don Valley, he took him in the final and got to Wembley for the big occasion. There, with a sense of inevitability which summed up City’s fortunes in the entire 1990s (relegated twice, frequently humiliated), he came very, very last.
JEFF RADCLIFFE’S HAT Keeping up appearances
Few physiotherapists manage a quarter of a century at one club, and even fewer physiotherapists’ tam-o’-shanters manage to survive the same quarter century. It’s perhaps not the most staggering fact to suggest Jeff Radcliffe was unique because he wore a tam-o’-shanter, but it certainly made him recognisable.
Bought for him by his Scottish mother, he began wearing it after realising that sitting in a dugout watching a terrible game could be quite a cold experience, and the sight of this bobbled head nodding up and down as he ran across the pitch to spray Garreth Roberts’ knee (again) was often more thrilling than the football. One assumes that the hat was dunked in team baths, nicked, placed halfway up floodlights and probably shat in by Billy Whitehurst over its lifespan at Boothferry Park, but it was always there, on Radcliffe’s head, on matchdays.
Such was the impact of said millinery item that nobody recognised Radcliffe when he took to the field in his 1988 testimonial match; indeed only the sight of City and Spurs players applauding him on to the park gave his identity away. An example to any non-playing football employee of how headgear can look good and become part of your already likeable personality – Tony Pulis take note.
COLIN APPLETON Dramatis Personae
Grumbles of an old boys network and genuine concerns for the club’s future were clearly audible when the wispy-haired Appleton, a former chippie and captain of Leicester City, was appointed in the summer of 1982 by new chairman Don Robinson as the man to remove the Tigers from the abyss of the Fourth Division as quickly as possible. Relegation, within financial meltdown, had forced the club to its knees, but while Robinson’s rescue package was greeted with gratitude and open arms, his decision to bring his manager buddy from Scarborough in as well was less warmly received.
No-one need have worried. The two were a killer combination, but Robinson’s scheming, gimmickry and good-natured headline-grabbing often overshadowed the reflective Appleton’s sturdy work with his inherited squad, unable as he was to add many of his own purchases to it, though he did snap up freebie winger Billy Askew after a trial, a player who would be crucial to City’s progress for the rest of the decade. Appleton soon got into his stride, recognising the fearless gift in front of goal of teenage striker Andy Flounders and the creative might (and penalty-taking excellence) of the fast-developing Brian Marwood, all while garnering his predominant reputation as a manager who was obsessed with safe football and strong defence. City duly lost just six times, remained undefeated at Boothferry Park until the March (conceding just 14 goals there all season) and were promoted with two games to spare, eventually finishing as runners-up to Wimbledon. Hell, he even signed Emlyn Hughes for a bit.
Appleton again didn’t feel the need to change much for the return to Division Three and was vindicated with another season of effective percentage football that didn’t always please the eye but regularly turned up results, again thanks in no small measure to the mercurial Marwood, who put away another 16 goals from the flanks and the penalty spot. But the climate intervened in the January as City lost momentum and a whole month of games due to the weather and played an exhausting catch-up for the rest of the campaign, eventually needing a 3-0 win at Burnley in the final fixture to go up again via goal difference. Marwood scored twice but nobody could add the third, and the only cheers heard at Turf Moor on the final whistle were those of interloping Sheffield United fans, whose team had benefitted from City’s last-ditch failure.
Appleton quit before the journey back to Hull had been completed, to everyone’s utter horror, and went to Swansea, even not bothering to hang about for the remainder of the Associate Members Cup campaign. The recruitment of the excellent Brian Horton as his successor meant he soon wasn’t missed but his legacy was secure, even remaining so when Robinson brought him back for a wretched second go in 1989 (“How does feel to be back Colin?” “Er, I’m on cloud seven…”) which resulted in no wins from 16 games and, when Robinson then gave up the club, instant dismissal from new chairman Richard Chetham.
His willingness to let Robinson do the talking, plus the brevity of his stay and the manner of his departure, unduly devalue Appleton’s spell at the helm, but Appleton’s record during those two campaigns make him City’s best ever gaffer on pure stats. That he is also the worst, courtesy of his apparent inability to beat a carpet, let alone an opposing football team, upon his return in 1989, somehow adds to his legend and charm, and is easily forgiven when held alongside those astonishing achievements from 1982 to 1984. Those two seasons of salvage and hope make this softly-spoken, modest man just as important to his era of management as the likes of Warren Joyce and Phil Brown would later be in other turbulent periods for the club.
Now pushing 80 and still living in Scarborough, Appleton regularly rummages through a huge cardboard box of keepsakes – programmes, contracts, newspaper cuttings, photographs – in his attic that remind him of his time at Boothferry Park. His memories of being Hull City manager are very fond, and he can be assured that the supporters who watched his sides play feel the same.
CITY BLOW CHANCE OF TOP FLIGHT PROMOTION, 1910 Depths of despair
Oldham Athletic. When they’re not stealing Jobbo for half his true worth, or poaching our best schoolboy players of the late 80s and early 90s, or gaining an unfair advantage on a plastic pitch, or persuading us to overpay for Andy Holt, then they are pipping us to promotion to the top-flight of English football 100 years ago. Bastards.
1910 was when we managed to mess up the best chance we’d had of promotion to what was then known as Division One, and were to get for another 98 years. City’s team back then doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the great post-war teams but that’s more to do with the length of time that has passed than it is the quality of the players. You’ve all probably heard of EDG ‘Gordon’ Wright. Some of you may even believe that he was our first and only England international (he wasn’t; official FA records have him down as a Cambridge University player, unfortunately). But there was more to this team than the Hymers College schoolmaster. Manager Ambrose Langley seemed to want to field teams with as few surnames as possible, meaning the defence and midfield was based around the Browell brothers, George and Albert, while up front the goals were largely supplied and scored by ‘the three Smiths’, Joe (five goals), Jack (32 in 35 games) and Wallace (17). Davy and Dan Gordon were also crucial members of the squad. And in addition to Gordon Wright’s impeccable wing play, City’s forward line was usually completed by Arthur Temple – who contributed 16 goals that season – or occasionally the highly rated Alf Toward, who Langley deemed surplus to requirements and sold to Oldham for £350 mid-season.
City didn’t seem to miss Toward – who had contributed little that season anyway. Going into the final game of the season in second place, City needed to win at Oldham, who were two points behind but with a better goal average, which was how teams on level points were separated, or draw and hope that third-placed Derby didn’t win. As City went into the game unbeaten in 12 games, 11 of which were wins, top-flight football was City’s to lose. And lose it they did.
Derby did their bit, only managing to draw against West Brom, but City were blown away by Oldham. Missing the influential Jack McQuillan, City had no answer to the Latics attacking football. The home side went ahead on 18 minutes, and were two up on 25 minutes when – you guessed it – Alf Toward scored from what looked like an offside position. The third in the 80th minute compounded the agony. Oldham – who had spent much of the early part of the season propping up the Second Division – were promoted. City were left vowing to make amends the following season. And the season after, and the season after, and the season after…
And that was it. Of course we finished sixth in Division Two in 1986 – the year before the play-offs came into being –but until 2008 this was the nearest City had come to experiencing the upper chamber of the football league. It can only be speculated what might have happened had we won that day. Would we have gone on to greater things, build on the success and flirt with greatness in the way in which teams from similar-sized cities and towns with similar resources to City managed? Or would we have come straight back down and endured a very similar path to the one we were to tread anyway?
One thing we can be sure of, however, is that we wouldn’t have got to witness the too-good-to-be-described-in-words events of May 2008. Sure, promotion would have been incredible even if it hadn’t been our first time in the top flight, but knowing that we were prising a 104-year-old monkey off our back made the celebrations all the more elating and tear-inducing. So while our great-great grandfathers missed out on the opportunity to sup celebratory halves of milk stout down Canal Street, them being denied their bit of history made the bottles of over-priced piss that we got hammered on on the streets of Camden and Soho taste all the sweeter.
‘THE TIGERS ARE BACK’ RECORD Talking points
The football record has all but died a death, apart from every four years when some deluded ego is roped in by the FA to write something for the England team that they mistakenly believe will be a fraction as good as World in Motion. Or Vindaloo, for that matter.
The 70s and 80s were a different matter. Football records were all the rage. You couldn’t move for Nice One Cyrils, Back Homes, Anfield Raps and Ossie Ardiles’ knees going all trembly. Seeing the potential in this, a newly resurgent Hull City decided in 1981 that a seven-inch single was the best way to celebrate our ‘revival’.
We didn’t have a Chas and Dave among our fans, but we did have a soon-to-be award-winning film writer/director and a soon-to-be member of The Christians among our fans, and so schoolfriends Mark Herman and Henry Preistman were soon laying down some beats, or whatever it is that these people do.
The result is interesting. And if you think that ‘interesting’ is a euphemism for ‘a bit shit’, you’d be right. But shit in an endearing way. Lines such as “We used to roar a lot, along with 20,000 others” mixed seamlessly with crowd shouts of “Give ‘em some stick Dennis” in a deliciously low-key offering complete with a classy sounding 80s synth. Sadly, the top 40 didn’t quite beckon for this offering, but it remains the only Hull City record ever to be released. And in the general crimes against music committed by various football clubs or players, there has been much, much worse released.
JAMES CHESTER’S GOAL AT CARDIFF Heights of joy
City have had a share of “I was there” moments of late – three trips to Wembley, wins over Premier League opposition, European adventures – but these are obvious and many can lay claim to them. However, the more soulful type of “I was there” moment (and that’s why we’re here) lends itself to specific, idiosyncratic or just brilliant moments, rather than occasions, and if they were witnessed by only a smattering of people, all the better. They can be as ridiculous or as delightful as you see fit, and in the case of James Chester’s goal at Cardiff, it was absolutely a delight.
To many, it will set the benchmark for the great team goal, the type that doesn’t end with a thunderous volley or aerodynamic diving header but still epitomises how beautiful football can be. Chester, settled into the back four of the post-apocalyptic side fashioned by Nigel Pearson, was already evidently a striking example of defensive excellence and style, but his goal at Cardiff’s shiny new stadium in the spring of 2012 gave him extra prestige.
He intercepted a pass in his own half, left the ball to Josh King – and just kept running. King fed Robert Koren, the Slovene then reached the edge of the box before returning it to King who instantly flick-heeled it behind him to an unmarked, unnoticed Chester, and as everyone tried to work out how he got there, he steered it under the keeper and in.
It was a divine team goal, made to look easy from start to finish and sandwiched two further strikes to give City a 3-0 away win that was the most impressive performance of a season that nearly, under Nick Barmby, resulted in a play-off place.
City ran out of puff in the end – the same month saw eight more games squeezed in – but Chester’s name, a name that endured after Barmby and into the Steve Bruce era of promotion, Premier League returns, the FA Cup final and Europe, was made with fans that night.
ANDY PAYTON V. BRIGHTON Heights of joy
Memories are great things. Totally unreliable, of course, but great nonetheless. Thanks to the internet, Sky and the general profile of football, every last detail in any Football League game is now recorded from any number of angles. You don’t need to remember goals, you just need access to YouTube or Virgin Media.
Of course none of these things were available when Andy Payton inspired City to an enthralling 5-2 demolition of Brighton in December 1988. I haven’t seen Payton’s second goal that day since I witnessed it while freezing to death on the South Stand. My memory tells me that he picked the ball up on the edge of his own area and ran in zig-zags past eight Brighton players before scoring from an acute angle. He didn’t. I accept that.
If I strain my memory I know that the goal was still remarkable; that Payton picked up the ball in his own half, beat the two centre-backs in the centre circle, skipped past a full back and rounded the keeper from the afore mentioned acute angle. But YouTube or ESPN Classic are never going to prove me wrong or right. Payton – a player who really should be higher in the pantheon of Hull City greats than many seem to rank him – was to score many more goals for City, and a good few of them were spectacular, but he was never to get close to this incredible run, at a time when he was only really on the verge of cementing his place in City’s first team.
The soon-to-be-ignited Edwards and Whitehurst partnership was to delay his rise for a while, but this goal told us everything we needed to know about Payton: he was going to be a star.
THE WELL That’s SO Hull City
Boothferry Park’s West Stand had just one actual standing area, a small shallow-level structure beneath the expensive seating which made up most of this alleged ‘best’ stand. This was the Well, admissible via season pass only, and gave the impression when you stood in it that a moat, akin to those later as standard in mainland Europe grounds, was earmarked for this side of the Ark when the architect was still drawing up the plans, but a few judicious flicks of a set-square later, realised it was impossible, or pointless, or too expensive, or dangerous, or all of the above, so they concreted it through and made it into a standing zone which felt quite exclusive (mainly because so few people chose to use it) but offered far less of a view than any other standing area of the ground.
It was impossible to lean against the back wall when bored (ie, most of the time) because the tiny pebble-dashing made it uncomfortable, while it was hardly ideal for kids, who had to stand at the front and therefore only got a grass-level view if they got on tiptoes and rested their chins on the famous white fencing that circled the whole ground, risking a ball in the face whenever Pat Heard sliced a clearance.
In the 80s, this went from difficult to impossible with the arrival of all the wheelchair-using fans to the grass area immediately in front of the Well. For all this, it was popular enough to stay open until the Ark itself was no more, even though there was ample seating or standing elsewhere to relocate the Well’s hardier souls if necessary. The main advantage of being in the Well, depending on the setting of your maturity threshold, was the ease with which you could shout abuse to opposing players, as the caged Boothferry Park tunnel was right next to you.
1990-1991 RELEGATION SEASON Depths of despair
The season that cost too much. Too much in terms of wages, too much in terms of status, too much in terms of future security, too much in terms of emotional stress. Stan Ternent’s decision to bring in mercenaries on mega wages as a tool to keep the Tigers afloat in the second tier failed so utterly spectacularly that a man hailed a hero the summer before for keeping the Tigers up (with a side winless as recently as the November, his month of appointment) was out on his backside by the New Year, immediately following a 5-1 defeat at Portsmouth; the latest in a line of humiliations that had previously produced a 5-1 loss at Sheffield Wednesday and a 7-1 garotting by West Ham.
It was obvious by then that this manager was not going to keep a bloated, aged and confidence-free side up, so Richard Chetham did the honest thing and jettisoned the man he had appointed 14 months earlier, with the classless Ternent wailing for months and years afterwards that he was promised everything and was given nothing; a claim not borne out by the fees and salaries paid for players like Gwyn Thomas, David Hockaday, Malcolm Shotton, Leigh Palin, Tony Finnegan and the most wretched of City wretches, Dave Bamber.
Some of these journeymen – well, Palin certainly – were good players for City but the smell of incompetence stifled their abilities and only the front duo of Andy Payton and Peter Swan brought any optimism to the table, with a 37 goal partnership proving a phenomenal achievement in a team so bad that it went down six points adrift and with 117 goals in the ‘against’ column. Still, Terry Dolan had been appointed to stop the rot… erm…
PHIL BROWN’S SHOES Keeping up appearances
Tan shoes with black suits would turn the stomach of any personal shopper or homosexual stylist, but they were official club uniform for all playing and coaching staff throughout the first full season of Brown. Only the manager himself took the attention for wearing the famous footwear, and one suspects he rather enjoyed that. The shoes, which did look remarkably like winklepickers when viewed from a distance, were changed upon promotion to the Premier League, and Brown’s sartorial quirks switched to black shirts and patterned scarves instead.
JOHN HAWLEY SIGNS AMATEUR TERMS Talking points
Hawley was a proficient local lad, a Withernsea-born striker who was spotted like any other talented youngster would be, but he kept refusing to sign terms with the club, even after making his debut in 1973, a fortnight short of his 19th birthday. Very simply, he was the heir to the family antiques business and wanted to be an antique dealer more than he wanted to be a footballer (and had greater earning power in being so).
However, as he was good, City maintained his services at weekends, paying his expenses only, gallantly never questioning his commitment and it took four seasons of progressive goalscoring and gentle cajoling before finally he was persuaded to go full-time. After City’s relegation in 1978 he joined Leeds United and also had spells at Arsenal and Sunderland before returning to City, briefly, ahead of his retirement. He is still regarded in the national press as the last amateur of English football, and is still selling antiques.
TERRY NEILL Dramatis personae
All front, swagger and charisma, the 28 year old Neill was the shock choice of the Tigers to replace the ageing, revered Cliff Britton in 1970 when it was finally decided that fresh ideas and a spot of modernity was required to drag City into the new decade. Neill had put the feelers out about his coaching ambitions once he realised his playing days at Arsenal were coming to an end, and it was with the notorious offer of an E-Type Jaguar as a final sweetener that Harold Needler eventually convinced him to take over at Boothferry Park, sealing the deal while Neill was being shown the view of Boothferry Park’s floodlights in the dead of night from Hessle Road flyover.
City were in the second tier but progress was minimal and the squad was starting to age; indeed, a handful of players were older than their new manager. Neill’s cocky Ulster persona and still evident talent as a centre back revived the team and gave the supporters a new confidence and City came the closest they’d ever been to top flight football with a sixth placed finish in 1971, along with a controversial exit from the FA Cup quarter finals.
However, the short-term acquisition of Tommy Docherty as assistant manager, and his immediate advice that “younger legs” were needed, heralded the beginning of the end for an ageing side, with Chris Chilton (still only 28) sold to Coventry after a fall-out with the new gaffer and the likes of Ian Butler and Ken Houghton slowly phased out, with the former still unable to forgive Neill to this day. Ken Knighton and Bill Baxter proved good signings but progress was slow and Neill, who was also player-managing Northern Ireland, had to use all his charm and wisecracks to maintain patience from both board and supporters. Before he came close to achieving any goals though, he was headhunted by Tottenham Hotspur in 1974 as successor to Bill Nicholson, and then quickly shifted back along the Seven Sisters Road to Arsenal, whom he managed to lots of cup finals.
Neill’s international appearance tally was a club record for two decades afterwards, keeping his name in City’s mind’s eye long after he’d gone, and to this day he remains a storyteller and wit, hugely complimentary of the club and still devoted especially to the memory and character of both Needler and Britton (and of what a lovely time he had living in Swanland). He has been happy to tell his own Hull City story over and over again since the Tigers rose to top-flight glory, just to make sure such a high-flying club never forgets about him.
PUB QUIZ QUESTIONS Talking points
There were two of them – the one about Hull City being the only team on your pools coupon (presumably now updated to a Ladbrokes betting form swiped on the concourse of some artless nu-stadium) with no enclosed letters for you to colour in; the other was about the biggest city in Europe never to have had top-flight football. We can’t do anything about the first (short of loaning our fringe players to Lymm FC for eight seasons until they make it) but you may have noticed that Phil Brown and his 2008 squad managed to sort out the second one. Plymouth is most welcome to it.
SECURING PROMOTION AT YEOVIL Heights of joy
When kicked, pummelled, abused and insulted for 19 long years, a battered wife may appreciate a tiny bit of affection and let you enjoy unspeakable sexual acts with her. So it was with Hull City in the 19 years that preceded City’s 2003-04 promotion from League Two. City – the club and its supporters – tried to hide the black eyes and broken bones administered by the likes of Lloyd, Needler and Buchanan but the hurt was evident to all who knew what was happening behind closed doors.
All we needed was a little bit of love, a cuddle even. And at Yeovil in the May of 2004 we received that love, gently crescendoing to a long awaited climax that sated even the neediest of hearts. And it was Ian Ashbee, the club’s captain who even two seasons into his City tenure had proved himself an influential lynchpin of the side, that served up the final thrust as he stroked home a delightful chip from the edge of the Yeovil penalty area that secured a 2-1 victory and sent the assembled masses in the away end into sun-kissed paroxysms of delight.
An incredible day saw pubs across this distant Somerset town brimming with Tiger nationals before and after the game, but the finest moments of all were that Ash goal and the post-whistle cavort of the players, management and chairman on the pitch. Sheer joy and elation, we felt briefly loved once more – then ordered a pizza.
REVEREND BALLBAG’S YULETIDE CAROLS That’s SO Hull City
As City moved from the near-derelict Boothferry Park to the brand-spanking KC Stadium, everything about the club seemed to move up a few gears. The image, marketing, national profile and on-pitch fortunes of the club took off, but there is still an annual reminder of our former inglorious self. Nestled away at the back of whatever the Rothman’s yearbook is calling itself these days is a list of the chaplains of a handful of clubs. Hull City’s, the Reverend Allen Bagshawe, probably has a higher profile than most. This is because of the sea of indifference that greets him every December as he ‘leads’ the half-time carol session while the KC masses queue for beer.
The whole exercise is shambolically enthralling as the Reverend enjoys his yearly fifteen minutes of lame. Favourites such as Ding-Dong Merrily On High, O Little Town of Bethlehem and Hark The Herald Angels Sing are belted out with gusto as a small handful of City fans join in, usually ironically/drunkenly. Old-fashioned ‘entertainment’ is a rarity in football these days, and in many ways this festive treat would be missed if it were to be ditched, or, even worse, modernised, with the Reverend belting out the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York or E17’s Stay. And as small-time as the carol singing may seem, it is about a billionth as excruciating as Steve Jordan’s vomit-inducing pre-match one-man hysteria.
POST WAR SKY BLUE KITS Keeping up appearances
Initially not interested in buying Hull City, Harold Needler was intent on forming a completely new club in 1946, deciding on the somewhat unweildly moniker of Kingston Upon Hull AFC. When the Football League rebuffed his application for membership, he turned his attention to buying the Tigers, who had been dormant during the late war years and their Anlaby Road ground heavily damaged.
Needler had wanted his side to play in orange shirts, white shorts and orange socks with blue turnover bands, indeed an illustration on the cover of the match programme for the first game at Boothferry Park, City v Lincoln, depicted a player wearing such garb, but the Department of Trade refused to release the dyes requested, claiming them too expensive, so for time being orange or amber were out. When the Tigers emerged from the new ground’s tunnel to take on Lincoln they did so wearing light blue shirts, white shorts and blue and white hooped stockings, a kit used throughout the 1946-1947 campaign.
The club returned to tigerish amber and black the next season however, though no longer with striped jerseys. Needler never got his desired orange shirts, but as a compromise of sorts we switched to plain jerseys and remained sans-stripes for another thirteen years.
SIMON DAKIN’S LIFT SHAFT TUMBLE That’s SO Hull City
In the mid-90s football in England became sexy in a way that had seemed impossible just a few years previous. Sadly, through crass mismanagement on and off the pitch, Hull City didn’t just miss the boat, we aimlessly floated around on a piece of driftwood while the rest of the world steamed ahead. Yet there was something endearing about us. Our rag-taggle bunch of free transfers, youth players and North Ferriby imports were often so out of their depth that there was a certain glory in our naffness. And nothing seemed to sum up this naffness better than when our decidedly average right-back Simon Dakin, a free transfer from Derby County, fell down a lift shaft on a pre-season tour of Spain in 1995.
At a time when Eric Cantona was kung-fu kicking thuggish fans and Tony Adams was drunkenly ploughing cars through the front gardens of Essex, our players’ misdeeds were in-keeping with our relative mediocrity on the pitch. “Biscuit”, as Dakin was naffly nicknamed, never fully revealed the details of what happened that fateful evening, though it’s fair to presume that tomfoolery and/or sangria was involved. The broken collar bone kept him out of the first team at the beginning of the subsequent season, and Adam Lowthorpe’s general excellence, meant that he never quite retained his place in the Tigers’ defence and he was released in 1996.
Non-league football – including a lengthy and successful stint at King’s Lynn – and a career in law beckoned for Dakin. And you can’t help but wonder if he specializes in suing negligent Spanish hotels.
SIGNING JAY-JAY OKOCHA Talking points
The most skilled footballer Hull City has ever had, even though his impact was as much as an inspirer as it was a player, Okocha’s presence in the crowd at Blackpool began the rumours which were soon confirmed as fact, that Phil Brown had used his Bolton connections to persuade the ludicrously gifted Nigerian to come back to the English game from Qatar and add serious star quality to a slowburning Championship squad of promise.
Okocha’s impact on the pitch was sometimes glorious, just for his flicks and tricks and swivels and turns, but more often unusually pragmatic, and by never scoring for City, the only statistic adjacent to his name was that of a red card against Burnley. Okocha was injured too often and missed the climax to the campaign and all of the play-off glory, and few aired mega derisory howls when Brown decided not to offer him terms for the Premier League, presumably because he already had Geovanni in his sights.
But for a while he was ours and it made the rest of the division insanely jealous, and the spectacle of the whole of Molineux standing to applaud him off the park as he was substituted there, having inspired City to a 1-0 win and kept the ball in their penalty box despite the hapless attentions of five old-golded defenders, remains one of the most endearing images of a season littered with them.
FER ARK SIGNAGE Keeping up appearances
Emblematic of Hull City’s decline and financial strife throughout the 1990′s was the illuminated letters that spelt out BOOTHFERRY PARK above the club’s offices behind the ground’s North Stand terrace. Nightfall gave the increasingly ramshackle stadium a shortened moniker, as only FER ARK was lit up, the bulbs having long given up the ghost in the other characters. Many attempts to fix the red signage were made, alas with but fleeting success, as one by one the lamps winked out, once again leaving just FER ARK visible on an evening. As a result many supporters affectionately referred to the ground as ‘Fer Ark’, sometimes just ‘the Ark’, a practice that began on the Tiger-Chat email group.
SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY 2 HULL CITY 4 Heights of joy
Peter Taylor was a negative football manager. Peter Taylor would go one goal up and then get 11 players behind the ball to preserve this lead. Peter Taylor masterminded one of the most formidable attacking displays Hull City has ever produced, in front of one of the largest and noisiest away supports to have got behind the Tigers in many a year. Only one of those statements is true.
City went to Hillsborough in December 2004 on the crest of a wave. A long unbeaten run had seen us storm up League 1, but the trip to Sheffield looked daunting. A delayed kick-off and misinformation spread by the Owls’ PA announcer that Stuart Elliott wasn’t playing didn’t help matters, and when Wednesday took the lead on two minutes after some comical Marc Joseph defending it looked like we’d been exposed as pretenders; a form team destined to wilt in the face of real class. What followed was 43 minutes of the most scintillating football a Hull City team has ever produced. Nick Barmby was the architect, but Elliott, France, Keane, Ash and Facey plundered through the home team’s defence like we were being controlled by a bored 12-year-old FIFA Pro expert playing on ‘easy’ to sharpen his skills.
By the time Michael Keane had equalised with a harshly given penalty, we’d already established our superiority. Not long after Barmby converted a scuffed Elliott shot from close range after good work by Facey. Then came one of those moments that seems to define a season. When a long ball landed in the Wednesday penalty area it seemed like meat and drink to the lumbering home centre-backs. Ryan France then defied gravity to flick the ball to Barmby’s right, who swiveled and hit the ball on the volley across Lucas in the home goal and into the top corner. There was a second of silence from the 7000 or so City fans, as everyone took in the beauty, the brilliance, the class of the moment. Then utter pandemonium. Very, very few players in our history could have scored that goal. Very few. The half-time whistle was welcomed by all Owls, and City took their foot off the gas in the second half a little.
Wednesday made it 3-2, only to see Danny Allsopp make it 4-2 and render the final 10 minutes little more than an excuse to celebrate/gloat. The League 1 season may not have had its Yeovil moment, but this game was as important as any under Taylor. We rarely looked back after this and achieved promotion with almost a month to spare. And despite us being spoilt these days by the likes of Ronaldo, Lampard, Gerrard and Rooney, the Premiership has thrown up nothing to surpass the technique of Nick Barmby’s volley on that crisp December evening.
BILLY WHITEHURST GRAFFITI Keeping up appearances
Upon the beer-bellied centre forward’s return to Boothferry Park on the penultimate day of 1988 (thereby dulling the pain of seeing Tony Norman go the other way just a smidgeon), some wag seemingly clambered over the barbed wire of the Ark in the early hours of New Years Eve and wrote ‘RAMBO BILLY’ (very 80s) and ‘WELCOME BACK BIG BILLY’ in crude, but not illegible, black lettering on the western side of the North Stand.
This is remarkable enough in itself, but given that a) it was deliberately positioned so that every Tigers supporter in the stadium for the day’s game against Ipswich could see it; b) nobody from the club condemned what was essentially criminal activity; c) the club didn’t feel the need to comment on its lax security which allowed the artist access; and d) he’d have probably needed a high ladder to reach the spot where his words were daubed, it all contributed strongly to the belief long held (and never denied) to this day that chairman Don Robinson was behind it, something Whitehurst himself happily claims.
He duly got a returning hero’s welcome, scoring in a 1-1 draw, and the graffiti stayed for the rest of the season. Subsequent attempts to remove it were rather half-hearted, really, although this may have been less about the joke wearing thin and more because the club couldn’t afford the paint.
IAN ASHBEE Dramatis Personae
Signing Cambridge United’s left back is rarely a sign of Premier League intentions. And let’s be honest, when Jan Molby signed Ian Ashbee in the summer of 2002, jubilant victories at Arsenal were a trillion miles from any City fan’s thoughts. But Ash clearly had something about him and his clenched-fist personality saw him quickly elevated to club captain and midfield dynamo.
Molby soon waddled away from Hull, but his replacement Peter Taylor evidently saw the same attributes in Ashbee as the gigantic Dane and constructed an attacking unit around Ash’s holding and destructive qualities at the base of the midfield. A tough tackler but a hopeless passer, that was Ashbee’s rep in the lower leagues – but despite often playing up to this description with a string of yellow cards and misplaced glory balls, he also showed the occasional flash of brilliance that made you wonder if there was more than plain brutalism to his game – most notably when he flighted a chipped winner into the Yeovil net to secure the Tigers’ first promotion in 19 years.
He’s not good enough for League One, the received wisdom went, and Michael Keane was brought in from Preston to replace Ash. The corpulent badge-kissing Keane was soon sent packing as City punched straight through League One into the Championship. He’s not good enough for the Championship, that was the new mantra, and Keith Andrews was brought in from Wolves to replace Ash. Yet despite a career threatening bone injury Ash bounced back a more mature, more considered player that could still deliver killer tackles but also nurtured those around him. He captained Phil Brown’s Tigers to play-off victory at Wembley, and went on to establish himself as a credible Premier League midfield engine room operator.
Alas, a nasty knee injury may have now finished Ash, but he will remain the man of records – the only player to captain an English side in all four divisions, the only City player to score in all four divisions – and, overwhelmingly, the man that drew little old Hull City around him, imposed his character on it and helped propel it to the highest heights imaginable. Is Ash City’s finest player ever? Almost certainly not. Is he City’s most influential player ever? Absolutely 100% definitely.
HDM NICKNAME CITY ‘THE TIGERS’ Keeping up appearances
The Hull Daily Mail is much maligned nowadays, often disparagingly termed ‘the Fail’ by City fans, but we do owe them thanks for a splendid nickname. A week before City’s first ever game against Notts County in 1904, it was announced that the new club would wear black and amber stripes.
It turns out they didn’t, and instead wore white shirts with black shorts for their inaugural fixture, but the colour scheme we are familiar with today was soon adopted. The Mail’s sports reporter noted that stripy strip bore a resemblance to the markings of a tiger, and the nickname stuck, to the extent that the reserves were referred to as ’cubs’ back then.
The sobriquet is a sub-editor’s dream, lending itself to puntastic headlines such as ’Tigers roar to victory’ and all too often ’Toothless Tigers tamed’ or some such, but despite the tired copy, in a league of “Trotters”, “Bantams”, “Hatters” and “Chairboys”, we wouldn’t swap it for anything.
DAVE BAMBER’S OWN GOAL AT BRIGHTON Depths of despair
Rule number one of Hull City management: Don’t buy players who have done well against us in recent years. No player gives a better example of this than Dave Bamber, who had seemingly scored against us at will for Blackpool, Walsall, Swindon (including a brace in Brian Horton’s last game as City manager) and Stoke.
In February 1990, with Billy Whitehurst wanting to link up with Dave Bassett at Sheffield United, City needed to sign a tall centre forward. Of course we had Peter Swan in our ranks, but he was being used more as a centre back in those days, thus meaning that Stan Ternant happily shelled out £125,000 to Stoke for the veteran striker. Feelings among the City faithful were generally optimistic. It was a lot of money, but at the very worst we’d be spared him scoring against us for a while. Or so we thought…
It didn’t take long for Bamber to endear himself to the Boothferry Park boo boys. His lack of goals seemed to mirror his apparent lack of interest, one wonderful volley in a home game against Wolves aside. It was becoming obvious that Swan and Andy Payton was the right combination for our forward line, but Bamber was still messing things up, forcing his way into the starting line-up as (reputedly) one of our top earners.
Bamber’s crowning moment in a City shirt came on the 6th of April, 1990. The relegation-threatened Tigers were visiting the Goldstone Ground to play Brighton in a Friday night match. The home side tore into City from the off. Sergei Gotsmanov, an outrageously skilful Russian forward, seemed capable of winning the game single-handedly, but that first goal just wouldn’t come. That’s where Dave Bamber came in. Mid-way through the first half a Brighton corner from City’s left is swung over. There appears to be no danger of anything happening as the ball gently arcs towards our hero’s tousled locks, with no home attacker anywhere near him. But all those goals for Stoke, Swindon, etc… were obviously lingering in the recesses of Bamber’s mind. A split-second and a perfectly executed header into the top corner later, and we’re 1-0 down. The game’s effectively over (though Gotsmanov is later to round Iain Hesford, start his celebrations, and then score) and all Bamber can do is contemplate just how many times a guffawing Saint and Greavsie will replay it the following lunchtime (three, if my memory is working properly).
Bamber hung around like a bad smell for the rest of that season and then went to Blackpool on loan early in the next. Four goals in five games persuaded the club he started his career with to pay £50,000 to mercifully make the move permanent. With bastard-like inevitability, Bamber was to score two in the first ten minutes of his next encounter with City, as Blackpool beat us 6-2.
I’ve seen worse than Bamber. Christian Sansam, John Pearson, Robbie Turner and a cast of dozens were inferior footballers to the useless, lanky get. But they didn’t cost us £125,000. They didn’t command huge wages. They didn’t suck a shedload of money out of the club just before we were to suffer a decade of financial crises and winding-up orders. They didn’t score against us with such consummate ease whenever they came up against the Tigers. And, most importantly, they didn’t score the most fuckwitted own-goal in the history of the club.
BILLY WHITEHURST Dramatis Personae
Definitively raw when signed from non-league in 1980 by Mike Smith, the brawny and fearless Whitehurst would ultimately carve a reputation as football’s hardest and most brutally unforgiving player, but not before a slow, occasionally comical and sometimes frustrating development into something resembling a League standard centre forward.
A figure who loathed authority and demanded good reasons before offering respect, he fell under the tutelage of Chris Chilton, record goalscorer and assistant manager, whose statistics made the cussing Whitehurst finally bow and scrape.
Using the simple strategy of instructing Whitehurst while throwing balls at him, (“Control!” “Volley!” “Shield!”) Chilton sorted out the previously invisible first touch and subtly brought out a striker’s instinct in him.
Eventually he’d become a valued and valuable goalscorer for both Colin Appleton and Brian Horton, getting more than a half century of them in the League, and Newcastle United paid a fortune for him.
Unsuccessful there, Whitehurst took trips to the backwater of Oxford and sunken hotbed of Sunderland before his return to Boothferry Park under Eddie Gray, complete with welcoming graffiti, a chest (and stomach) like a garage door and a good supply of goals, including one against champions Liverpool in the FA Cup.
But of course, he’s really all about shitting in yogurt pots, bare-knuckle fighting, forcing apprentices into shaving foam blowjobs and threatening to kill Stan Ternent, isn’t he? Well yes, but he was a good player too, made all the better by the fact he seemed to be bloody awful when he first signed. We shouldn’t forget that.
PREMIER CLUB BELL That’s SO Hull City
Very simply, a large bell encased in glass that was installed in the KC Stadium’s ‘Premier Club’ hospitality suite upon the grounds opening in 2002, and the edict was it would only ever be rung on the occasion of Hull City’s first Premier League game at the Circle. Making sure the cameras were all present, and expertly milking the moment for as long as he could, Paul Duffen duly rang the bell (sans glass casing) prior to victory over Fulham on August 16th 2008. One assumes it will next be rung when we host our first European game, which makes one almost wish for the Intertoto to make a return. But not quite.
ROBINSON AND HORTON WITH SOME TURKEYS Keeping up appearances
That’s Don Robinson, chairman. And Brian Horton, manager. And two turkeys. Not even a predictable joke about the ability of Neil Williams could somehow make light of the image of our chairman and our manager posing with some turkeys. Turkeys. Feathers and beaks and stuff.
It was all because local poultry firm Twydale Turkeys had become sponsors of City’s first team kit in 1986-87 (though mercifully not soon enough for the pre-match team photo, where the shirts remained reassuringly mantra-less and help just a little the attempt to write turkeys out of the club’s history) and so the publicity machine demanded Robinson (not looking embarrassed at all), Horton (putting a brave face on it, aided by emotional shrouding via luxuriant beard) and the turkey (whose expression remains hard to decipher without consultation of an ornithological mood assessor) should all pose for the cameras.
City nearly got relegated as well, and missed out on a juicy FA Cup quarter final date with Leeds United after being beyond shit at (then) lowly Wigan Athletic in the last 16. All of this while promoting turkeys. Turkeys.
BOOTHFERRY HALT That’s SO Hull City
A fluke of post-war construction rather than a visionary sustainable transport measure, the Tigers’ move to a new ground at Boothferry Park following war-time bombing of their previous Anlaby Road home, saw the side play alongside the Neptune Street Docks Branch of the Hull and Barnsley Railway. And pretty soon this facility was employed on matchdays to transport folk from across the City of Hull – then the beneficiary of a dense rail network and over a dozen suburban stations – to the club’s home games.
Never used for purposes other than matchdays and with turnstiles leading directly from the platform rear to the terraces, Hull City was (and still is) the only football club to have had a dedicated overground railway station that directly served its stadium. And it was used by home and away supporters alike, with the 60s and 70s bringing away supporters’ special trains direct to the ground with only the briefest of time available for stuffing bog roll down the toilets and pulling the emergency cord.
Alas, by the 1980s the railways were in a state of disrepair, so was Hull City, and the motorcar had taken over the train as the preferred mode of travel to City matches. Thus it was that the trains saw their time pass. The final football special transported Derby County supporters into the ground for a rip-snorting Third Division promotion encounter in March 1985, and the last home fans’ shuttle from Paragon station (with tickets dispensed until the end from the fine wood-panelled ticket office flanking WH Smiths) set forth largely empty in May 1986.
The platforms were removed as late as 2007, long after the stadium was abandoned for the brave new world at The Circle, itself flanked by a railway and on the site of City’s pre-WW2 Anlaby Road home, which was demolished to make way for a railway in the 1960s. Hull City and railways, eh? Now, where’s that plaque gone…?
MARK HATELEY Dramatis Personae
Orange skin.
Check.
Arrogant.
Check.
Vain.
Check.
Hull City manager.
Check.
The parallels between arguably the best manager in our history and a strong contender for the worst are frightening.
As Hull City tumbled down the leagues under Terry Dolan, many sections of the City faithful claimed that they had the solution to our ills. Harking back to the days of Raich Carter, Terry Neill and Brian Horton, a player-manager was all we needed to turn around our fortunes.
When Dolan was finally ousted, and the Lloyd/Wilby era paraded into Hull to a near orgasmic reception at the City Hall, the promise of a high-profile player-manager was met with rapturous applause. But who would it be? Peter Beardsley? Maybe Ian Rush? Would David Platt slum it with us? Hateley wasn’t mentioned much, but his appointment was still met with great enthusiasm. Boothferry Park wasn’t exactly brimming with England internationals, former AC Milan players or Rangers legends.
And god, we were terrible. A rabid couple of thousand City fans headed for Field Mill for the first game of out brand new era. We lost 2-0. And we kept losing. There were a few highs – a 7-4 win against Swansea, knocking Premiership Crystal Palace out of the League Cup, a David Rocastle-inspired 3-0 victory over Scarborough – but on the whole there was a lot of losing. To Chester, to Scunthorpe, to Shrewsbury (4-1 at home!), to Hednesford…
To call Mark Hateley a player-manager at this point would be a bit misleading. He was injured for much of of the time (but still managed to play in Paolo Maldini’s testimonial at the San Siro). He did start in the high-profile League Cup game against Newcastle, in which he did nothing but rob one of our promising youngsters a chance to play on such a big stage. And he’d come on for the last five minutes of many games, fuelling rumours he was on an appearance bonus and was simply ensuring that he was raking in a bit more cash. There were other rumours doing the rounds too, about his conduct in and around the pubs of Swanland. Hateley’s profile, it appeared, was high, but for all the wrong reasons.
We were thankful in Hateley’s first season that Doncaster were so woeful (never more so than when they beat us at Belle Vue in early April 1998) that the relegation spot to the Conference was wrapped up by mid-November, and a McGinty and Boyack-inspired flurry of goals at the back end of the season had us hoping that better was around the corner.
It wasn’t. The first half of the next season was to the worst in Hull City’s history. A 3-1 defeat at Rotherham in the first game of the season was followed by defeat at home to Darlington. We seemed to keep losing and losing and losing. Hateley was contributing a little more on the pitch – a penalty at Chester, a goal in what was to turn out to be a vital 2-1 win at Scarborough – but managerially he was a disaster. His ego wouldn’t accept it, but he was way out of his depth. And City veered from three to six to (briefly) nine points clear at the bottom of the Fourth Division. Fortunately David Lloyd’s ego was larger than the man managing the football club he owned. Lloyd didn’t seem to understand the lease details on the supermarket attached to Boothferry Park, then blamed the fans for his own shortcomings. His brain disengaged, Lloyd thankfully departed, and in came Tom Belton and a few other board members who didn’t matter for now…
Their first task was to sack Hateley. Former Radio Humberside reporter Chris Harvey once told me that Belton had initially gone to Hateley telling him the budget he had and asking him for a list of players he could start chasing up. Hateley took out a pen and scrawled a number down for the avuncular farmer. When Belton asked him what it was, Hateley replied “It’s the number of my agent, give him a ring and ask him who’s available at the moment.” Hateley’s actions over the previous 18 months, and his erratic transfer ‘policy’, give me no reason to doubt this story’s veracity. Within 48 hours, Hateley was sacked.
Warren Joyce came in and cleaned up Hateley’s mess, and Hateley seemed to give up on management. Far too much like hard work, no doubt. A faltering media career began, and on the odd occasion when Mark was asked what had gone wrong at City, obviously the board upheaval was to blame. Never mind the fact that, for all Lloyd’s faults, he’d given Hateley a much bigger budget in that first season than nearly every other manager in the division.
Earlier this year, Hateley made a surprise return to management. Liberia, ranked the 143rd best international team in the world by FIFA, decided that Hateley was the man to lead them. Poor bastards. Of all the awful managers City have had over the past two or three decades, most of them – Dolan, Ternent, Parkinson, Molby, Appleton – have at least had spells in their careers when they’ve suggested that they have some sort of managerial talent. Hateley didn’t, and was a disaster from his first game to his last, leaving us in our lowest ever league position, a position it took a minor miracle for us to recover from.
1965-66 PROMOTION SEASON Heights of joy
When not driving around in Minis, enjoying a range of pill-based hallucinogens and listening to the Righteous Brothers, people in 1960s Hull used to go to see the Tigers at Boothferry Park. In very large numbers. The early sixties had seen City hover around mid-table in the old Third Division, with a squad that could generally score a few but also conceded plenty. But something was emerging by 1964 as a squad of players was signed by manager Cliff Britton and bankrolled by chairman Harold Needler.
Boothferry Park was being improved as well with the Bunkers Hill development being completed, offering a thoroughly modern venue at which to view the striking delights of Ken Wagstaff and Chris Chilton, and the battling qualities of stalwart captain Andy Davidson. After a shaky start to the 1964-65 season City lost only 3 of the 24 games played from December onwards and finished fourth, missing out on promotion by a solitary point. During the season home gates had increased three fold from seven or eight thousand to 20 thousand plus. So it was with some momentum that the Tigers entered the World Cup season of 1965-66, momentum that saw the club race into top spot with a series of thumping victories interspersed by the occasional clattering reverse.
By Christmas, 40 thousand City fans were watching the Tigers beat rivals Millwall 1-0 to consolidate their position at the head of the table. Despite an epic FA Cup run that took the Tigers to a sixth round tie against Chelsea via Bradford Park Avenue and Gateshead, their form rarely wavered, even when replays and adverse weather caused the club to play nine games during April, including three matches in four days over Easter. Thus it came to pass that an early May victory at far-away Bristol Rovers sealed promotion and a final day win at home to Southend confirmed the Tigers as champions.
Home gates hovered around 25 to 30 thousand as the whole City was gripped by the excitement of promotion, a collective positive football-inspired feeling across Hull that many claimed would never be repeated. Of course, we know better now but these were the very headiest of days for the first 100 years of City’s history. So much so that England celebrated City’s success by claiming the World Cup.
HEDNESFORD CUP DEFEAT Depths of despair
The 1990s was a long procession of debasement and debilitation for those of a Tiger persuasion. Humiliations jostle with one another for supremacy in our scarred memories, with no clear winner, no definitive top ten possible, just an unending slurry of dismay. However, while we may never be able to select for certain our lowest point, few have a more vigorous claim than an afternoon of shame that’ll be forever known simply as “Hednesford”.
They were our opponents in the First Round of the FA Cup in 1997/8, a match played one chilly November day, a rancid affair replete with squalid cheating, loathsome officiating and a City side more mind-meltingly hopeless than anyone new to the support nowadays could believe ever turned out in amber. Those who do remember need only consider that Gage and Rioch were our full-backs that day, or wing-backs, as manager Mark Hateley attempted to mould them. Match of the Day were there too, featuring the Tigers on that evening’s show and fervently hoping for a “giant-killing”. They got one.
City started poorly, as was their wont. Hednesford now ply their trade in the Southern League, but at the time were a progressive Conference team, only a handful of places below the Tigers in the football pyramid. They probably had the better of the first half as a cold, sullen Boothferry Park crowd of 6,091 sighed with displeasure. Mick Norbury, veteran striker of virtually every crap northern team in existence, scored with a penalty shortly before half-time, comically awarded by Mr D Laws, a name not easily forgotten – for he turned in what is to this day the worst refereeing display I have witnessed. The Pitmen led at the break, and City’s attempts to rescue the game in the second half were pitifully inept.
Memories include Gregor Rioch (described as ‘barrel chested’ by Mark Lawrenson on MOTD) shooting from about fifty yards, as he did almost every game, Hateley bringing on the attacking duo of Ellington and Fewings (seriously) in bid to level matters, and Rioch tumbling in the area and Mr Laws waving it away before being almost jubilant as Hednesford scored again in injury time. The 1,000 Hednesford fans celebrated their cup final victory, their cretinous fat oaf of a manager pranced on our pitch, and we slunk away into the night in utter disgrace, wondering if we’d ever see the sun again.
PETER TAYLOR Dramatis Personae
Cold, fussy, hard to like, bad-tempered … and the best manager we’ve ever had. Two promotions in his first two full seasons. He crafted a team capable of winning any game put before them, defying the howls of derision from supporters underwhelmed by individual signings (Aaron Wilbraham, Delroy Facey, Marc Joseph, Junior Lewis), outraged by isolation of heroes (Justin Whittle) and generally irritated by Taylorisms such as belting the ball to the far right flag on kick off, bringing everybody back to defend corners even when we were behind, and playing as defensively as any Hull City team could ever be upon going ahead.
Cynics say Taylor was lucky, idiots say he was over praised because he didn’t finish top of the table with either promotion, but ultimately he revived Hull City in a way previous managers could never have done so – by being right, knowing best and ignoring the paying public who had too many years of hypercriticism and mistrust ingrained in them to notice a job being executed well.
He got out at the right time for man and club, albeit messily, but still only the acutest of churls didn’t wish him good cheer when he got his dream job at Crystal Palace, and with Phil Parkinson’s appointment we soon missed him like hell. Phil Brown’s glories owe, as the man himself happily admitted, almost as much to Taylor as they do to Brown himself.
SIX PYLON FLOODLIGHTS That’s SO Hull City
For the final 20 years or so of its existence, Boothferry Park was a bit of shithole; a shadow of its former great self. Yet even after City had vacated the ground, after arson attacks and partial demolition work, the six floodlights stood majestically over Gypsyville and never ceased to impress, in sharp contrast to the surrounding weeds, rubble and Lonsdale sportswear. Though the building of Boothferry Park was completed in 1946, the floodlights didn’t arrive until 1963. Costing £50,000 and replacing the old pair of gas-powered gantries, the floodlights were first used (well, four of them were) in a 7-0 victory over Barnsley.
From a decade or so later, as Boothferry Park slowly rotted under a series of absentee and arse-brained landlords, the floodlights were the only part of the ground that seemed immune to decay and they continued to give Fer Ark a Subbuteo-esque feel, especially with John Cooper’s meticulously prepared pitch looking like your mum had just run an iron over it. And as wonderful as our new surroundings are, there was always something about that first Saturday afternoon in mid-November at Boothferry Park when the floodlights were deemed necessary at 4.30pm or so.
Freestanding floodlights seem to be a thing of the past, as any identikit new ground or stand has the lighting built into the design, more’s the pity, but Boothferry Park’s six freestanding floodlights – as opposed the more uniform four – brought about the third-most-likely pub quiz question concerning the Tigers for a good few years, in that it was (eventually) unique to British grounds. More than that, it gave our former home a great deal of its character, made it a little more physically imposing and helped run up the colossal electricity bills that were eventually to force Fish and co out of the boardroom. What isn’t there to love about them?
ANDY DAVIDSON Dramatis Personae
The drive up to Glasgow from Carlisle on the M74 (and its predecessor the erstwhile A74) passes, once you have left Lockerbie behind, through over 50 miles of the most barren, unpopulated terrain in the United Kingdom until the small town of Lesmahagow is reached, marking the southernmost point of the densely-populated Central Lowlands – a frontier town if ever there was one. This was always an excitement-inducing point in the journey to Paisley (the home of my forebears) when I was a child, as that was where you used to turn off before the M8 was built and marked the last leg of the journey. Treated with rather more reverence, however, was the junction before Lesmahagow, marked by a sign reading simply, “Douglas Water 2”. At this point the conversation in the family Ford would become hushed, and even though we knew, and he knew that we knew, my dad would point at the sign and announce in solemn tones, “that’s where Jock Davidson was born”.
Andy Davidson was a legend among Tiger legends, notching up a record 520 first-team appearances in a career spanning 21 years. The son of a miner and a distant relative of the great Bill Shankly, he joined City as an apprentice at the tender age of fifteen. Although bedevilled by homesickness when he first arrived (on one occasion he returned to Scotland but was coaxed back by City manager Major Frank Buckley) he soon settled down, eventually making his first team debut in 1952 against Blackburn. Davidson will best be remembered as a right-back, but in fact started out as a wing-half and occasionally even made the forward line, before an injury crisis forced him into the defence as an emergency measure, but having once donned the number 2 shirt he was never to relinquish it.
Although not the biggest or bulkiest of men (he was 5’ 10” in height) Davidson was as determined and hard as they come. Ferocious in the tackle, he was the epitome of the old-fashioned “stopper”. He was not averse to putting the fear of God into opposing wingers – on one occasion Swindon’s famous left winger Don Rogers is said to have taken up a position behind his own left back after Jock had had a quiet word with him during the warm up – and one of the most priceless moments among the interviews in the “Waggy and Chillo” video comes when Davidson recounts with a completely straight face how he saw it as his duty to cut the opposition strikers down to size by way of retribution for any similar treatment meted out to Wagstaff or Chilton (“Ah, wisnae proud ay it, but it hud tae be done”). But there was much more to him than that: his organisational and leadership skills on the field were second to none and he captained the Tigers for many seasons, including the famous 1965/6 campaign. He also ran up an astonishing 202 consecutive games during the early 60s.
Davidson’s courage and unstinting devotion to the City cause was exemplified by the fact that he suffered no fewer than three broken legs during his career and battled his way back to fitness after each, although it was an Achilles tendon injury, sustained in a 3-2 win at Aston Villa on 18th November 1967 that finally put paid to a long and distinguished playing career.
After the end of his playing career, he remained at Boothferry for another 13 years in a coaching role, earning notoriety during that period by throwing a bucket of water over a Lazio player during a stormy Anglo-Italian Cup game at the Ark, before diversifying into the mobile fishmongery business.
For seven years of my childhood, Jock Davidson lived directly opposite my family’s home, and he was always a popular, ebullient and larger-than-life figure in the neighbourhood. I well remember getting knocked off my bike by a car, being not badly hurt but rather shaken, at the age of 11, and Jock being the first person to call round to check that I was OK.
The mid-60s will, in the Tiger scrapbook, inevitably (and probably rightly) be dominated by tales of the exploits of Waggy and Chillo, but those same exploits tended to overshadow several other very fine players in that team who did not perhaps get the full recognition that they deserved, and Andy Davidson – along with Ken Houghton and Chris Simpkin – was at the forefront of those. His loyalty and devotion to Hull City, spanning 33 years in total, would be complete anathema to 99.9% of today’s so-called stars.
He didn’t score many goals – eighteen in competitive fixtures – but the one that I shall always cherish was scored on the grass in front of Davidson’s house in about 1968, when he joined in the local kids’ kickabout and completely wrongfooted the goalkeeper with an outrageous backheel just inside the tree trunk which served as one of the goalposts. I remember it because I was that goalkeeper.
THE REGGAE BOYZ Talking points
Warren Joyce raised many an eyebrow when he acquired Jamaican internationals and World Cup performers Ian Goodison and Theodore Whitmore to join the Tigers’ refreshed, optimistic cause in the bottom division. Goodison was the ox-strong, cultured, unflappable central defender, while Whitmore was the creative, stylish midfielder who seemed to have the ball perennially tied to his boot. Of course, as befitting the stereotype, Whitmore’s form and contribution seemed to rest on whether he could actually be arsed or if he was warm enough, but even though Joyce had been impetuously fired within a few months of their arrival, they certainly livened up the football and the mood round the Ark.
Each made their contribution to the play-off charge under Brian Little – a manager who took to them so much he signed them for Tranmere afterwards – and given their international heritage, it would have been easy for them to follow such luminaries as David Brightwell out of the door when the wages stopped coming in but, to their credit, they stuck around. Despite being lumped as a duo all the time, they’re fondly remembered as individuals, although Goodison was certainly the more consistent, and they added a bit of glamour and pizazz to Boothferry Park and trips to Sixfields and Moss Rose at a time when there was otherwise none whatsoever.
PEARSON TAKEOVER Off field drama
Gotham City 2001: the place is a mess. The Joker had been running the city for five years or so, then handed over to the Penguin to fuck it up a bit more for a couple of years, who in turn stood aside to let the Riddler and the Puzzler join forces to finish the job off. Batman comes along, presumably to the rescue, surveys the ruins, says “Sod this for a lark, I’m only a superhero, not a miracle worker” and resigns himself to a life of fending off Robin’s advances. My point? Adam Pearson is better than Batman.
It’s obvious really. On February 10th, 2001, we came as close as we ever were to playing our last ever game. There’d been a few, of course. As the Needler, Chetham and Fish era of ineptitude and indifference nearly brought about our extinction under the weight of unpaid bills for tax, electricity and (possibly) Nottingham Forest season tickets, then the Lloyd, Wilby and Appleton bunch of fuckwits threw their toys out of the pram and threatened to close us down because they hadn’t read the supermarket lease on the North Stand of Boothferry Park properly, and then the evil Hinchliffe and Buchanan stripped us of everything they could and left a limp, lifeless corpse shorn of any assets, we’d seen a few ‘last games in Hull City’s history’. There was something a bit more worrying about this one though. The latter of those regimes was the only one that was genuinely evil, and while you always got the impression that the odd individual in the Needler and Lloyd regimes didn’t actually want an extinct football club on their CV, Buchanan and Hinchliffe didn’t seem to care what state the club was left after they’d finished overpaying for coaches and getting their relatives to unnecessarily redesign the club crest.
Who – apart from the comical Hart brothers – would want to take over such a hopeless case? Well, as it turned out, Adam Pearson would: a former Hull University student who’d attended a few games in the 80s, a friend of the mega wealthy Peter Wilkinson (who may or may not have provided Adam with a loan to kickstart our revival), a man who was part of the Ridsdale revolution at Leeds, and was timing his exit to perfection. Within days proper cash signings were being made, the PR onslaught from our new chairman got into full flow, and though we’d seen it all before as we’d welcomed the two previous boards with tickertape parades, there was something about Adam. As it turned out, he was as good as the past three regimes had been bad. Better even.
He’d arrived at our lowest ebb and within months was a game away from our first visit to Wembley, only to be denied at Brisbane Road. We’ll never know just how close we came to going under in mid-February 2001, but Adam Pearson didn’t just save the club, he then went about rebuilding the whole damned thing. We weren’t to know that when a relative unknown with a Leeds background became out third saviour in the space of five years or so. It is a strong candidate for being the most important day in our history, and from there onwards, though there were a few wobbles, all roads led to Wembley and the Premier League.
MARTIN FISH Dramatis Personae
14th December 1996. About 7 p.m. A group of four Hull City fans, returning from witnessing one of an interminable stream of reverses away to Brighton (3-0 on this occasion), seek solace in the bar at St Pancras – a gloomy, decrepit place in the pre-Eurostar era – whilst awaiting their train back to Nottingham. As they stand at the bar nursing their pints of Shepherd Neame, the curiosity of another customer – an elderly Belgian gentleman – is aroused by the legend of the yellow T-shirts being sported by the group:-
“Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire? Feesh Out? C’est un club de pêche?”
“Non, monsieur, Fish est le nom du président de notre club de foot”
“Un club de foot? Ah, vraiment?”
And so the unenviable reputation of our former chairman was spread beyond the seas.
Martin Fish, who sat at the head of the Boothferry boardroom table from 1991 until 1997, will not go down in history as the most successful – or popular – of Hull City’s chairmen. The club was relegated twice under his stewardship – a feat not managed, mercifully, by the procession of shysters and incompetents that followed him in the next four years, and like the years that followed, his term at the helm was notable for severe financial problems, the club’s reputation in the football world being rooted firmly at rock-bottom, and a relentless procession of challenges to the very existence of the club.
But there was one essential difference between Fish and his successors: he genuinely cared about the club. The trouble was, he had neither the financial resources, the know-how nor the charisma to bestow upon the ailing beast the care and attention it needed to be nursed back to health.
No, Fish was a puppet Chairman, installed by majority shareholder Christopher Needler, unwilling to invest in the club, to part with it or run it, offering no solution of any note (except for the wrong reasons) to the club’s predicament, but resolved to keep his clammy grip around the windpipe of Hull City. When the first Needler appointee, his brother-in-law Richard Chetham, was unable to carry on through ill-health, Fish was planted into the hot seat: there was no power struggle, no chicanery, no white smoke.
Although he can in many ways be said to have done his best, he simply was not cut out for the job and, after an unlikely but welcome purple patch when management duo Terry Dolan and Jeff Lee took a squad composed largely of has-beens and never-weres (plus Dean Windass and Alan Fettis) to the brink of the Division 3 play-offs two years running, a series of ill-judged actions (selling Windass too cheaply, offering new contracts to Dolan and Lee at the end of a disastrous campaign culminating in relegation, selling the name plate – which has only just been restored – on the QT, the cack-handed sacking of loyal secretary Tom Wilson, Walter Mitty-type plans for new stands) that betrayed his lack of experience, football nous and feel for the fans saw the long-suffering Tigers fans become irreversibly disillusioned.
This, of course, reached its nadir at the end of the 1995/96 season, when Fish, having disregarded calls to make the match all-ticket, was pressured by the police at the eleventh hour into giving the expected large travelling support of Bradford City – who needed the points to qualify for the play-offs – the whole of the South Stand, including the traditional home territory of Bunkers, for the final game against the already-relegated Tigers.
That day – the grisly details of which are more fully chronicled elsewhere -marked the last straw for many and saw the declaration by the Tiger Nation of open warfare on the City regime, with a vituperative hate campaign launched against Needler, Fish, Dolan and Lee consisting among other highlights of demonstrations in an open-topped bus outside Fish’s home, constant chanting for the heads of all four of them at every City game the following season – win, lose or draw – the aforementioned T-shirts, “Fish Out” posters all over Hull and a sticker proclaiming “Sack Dolan” plonked on the manager’s head during a game at Torquay. The embattled Fish soldiered on defiantly, but with increasing bitterness towards the supporters, epitomised for many by the sale of cult hero Alan Fettis when the much-awaited takeover and (or so we thought at the time) financial rescue package was imminent, but time was running out for him and after the most strife-ridden of seasons imaginable, the home game against Scarborough a year after the infamous Bradford encounter was to be his last before the sale to David Lloyd went through, as Needler was finally forced out.
He may have thought he was saving the club by taking charge, and some – albeit the kind of apologists who have written that guff about Terry Dolan on Wikipedia (check it out if you haven’t read it) and one or two attention-seekers – have always maintained that he did save us. By far the prevailing view, however, is that by acting as Needler’s stooge in the way he did, when he had neither the qualities, money nor support from his lord and master to make any kind of positive difference to the club, and when, but for his involvement, Needler would surely have been forced to sell up much sooner, he was actually a huge part of the problem, despite his undoubted good intentions, and he ought to have had the perceptiveness to realise that. One way or another, he certainly won’t be forgotten, but not for the right reasons.
Mind you, he was responsible for the Tiger Stripe shirt: – the best ever.
PAYTON & SWAN Dramatis Personae
A terrific strike partnership that should never have been, really. Peter Swan wasn’t even signed as a centre forward when City shelled out a record £200,000 for him in 1989, and absolutely hated playing up front.
But, with Keith Edwards and Billy Whitehurst both buggering off the following season and Dave Bamber ultimately ending up as a worthless yet expensive piece of shit, needs must and the big centre back, who had a scoring record as an emergency striker at previous club Leeds United (including a consolation at Boothferry Park on the same day youth product Andy Payton grabbed his first senior Tigers goal) was shoved up the field.
It also shouldn’t have worked because the two evidently didn’t get on. The brilliant, short, mulleted Payton was beyond archetype as the selfish centre forward, both in the way he played and the surly air he gave off in interviews and the like. He felt a strike partner, even a good one who benefited his own game, was some kind of occupational hazard.
Yet Swan aided Payton and Payton helped Swan, if only to appear professional, and the two scored for fun in Stan Ternent’s unspeakably abysmal team of 1990-91, one of the more freakish and unlikely statistics in Hull City history. Swan was tall and courageous and scored most of his goals while airborne, whereas Payton relied on flicks and crosses or simply his own pace and a self-confidence bordering on narcissism to earn the many goals he stuck away.
Sadly, the defence was way too often unable to prevent a similar concession rate to the strike rate at the other end, and ultimately it was Payton and Swan alone who benefited from their prolific association as City were horribly relegated. Payton went to Middlesbrough for £750,000 a few months into the next season after Swan had already offed it in the summer, heading for Port Vale.
Payton maintained, publicly, his love for Hull City afterwards following a nomadic career which involved many moves to acquire signing-on fees (and probably avoid bills, fines and divorce lawyers) whereas Swan built a local media career which proved successful enough to warrant an autobiography that was panned in reviews but did reveal his dislike and mistrust towards Payton. Thankfully, that they worked together so well, even when shoddy defending at the other end meant it almost didn’t matter, will remain the dominant memory of them. It ultimately wasn’t relevant that they weren’t particularly enamoured with one another. All that was important was that they were ace.
ce facilitated the death of 96 supporters in the sheep pens of Hillsborough. But just for a moment, whispering scarcely credible predictions over steaming cups of half-time Bovril, the little guys from Hull believed they were going to rock the footballing world. Nice feeling, that.
ASSOCIATE MEMBERS CUP FINAL – NOT AT WEMBLEY That’s SO Hull City
A competition which has struggled on manfully under the weight of high street sponsors like Sherpa Van, Autoglass and, currently, Johnstone’s Paint, the Associate Members Cup final made its debut in the 1983-4 season in an effort to give lower division clubs the chance of proper silverware and an appearance at Wembley. Yet the second of those laudable incentives didn’t happen in its first year as the national stadium’s pitch had been ruined by the Horse of the Year show – and obviously that had to be the year Hull City got to the final.
It was an easy path that Colin Appleton’s men beat through the competition, defeating northerly foes like York City and Sheffield United on the way to a final that, in any other circumstance at all, would have had the Tiger Nation dancing in the streets at the prospect of a first ever visit to the Twin Towers. Once that dream had been shelved by equine vandals and their jodhpured friends, the mood went from disappointed to perplexed when it was decided that Boothferry Park would host the match, awarding the Tigers an obvious and clearly unfair home advantage for a one-off, winner-takes-all occasion.
Of course, by the time City played Tranmere in the semi-final, the promotion from the third tier dream had been shattered courtesy of one poxy goal, and Appleton had announced immediately after the crucial game at Burnley that he was doing one. Chris Chilton had to lift the heads of a gutted team three days later as they beat Tranmere 4-1 in the semis, but it was all too much at Boothferry Park once the final came. Bournemouth won the game 2-1 and took the trophy back to Dorset. In pretty much one fell swoop City had lost out on promotion, lost out on a visit to Wembley, lost out on a proper trophy and lost a good manager.
Naturally every subsequent final in this competition until the original Wembley was torn down made it to the great stadium, while City had to wait another 24 years to get there. Typical.
MAULED BY THE TIGERS Fan culture
Liverpool (and Celtic) have You’ll Never Walk Alone, Manchester City have Blue Moon, West Ham have I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, Manchester United have whatever the ‘terrace poet’ appointed by the marketing men in charge at Old Trafford tells them to sing. Even the rugby clubs have their own anthems – the only, and I mean ONLY, thing that they can maybe feel superior to us about. And what do we have? Don’t even think about claiming Can’t Help Falling In Love – Sunderland have been singing that for ages. Sadly, Bread of Skeltons rarely gets an airing these days. That leaves our only unique terrace chant/song as Mauled by the Tigers. Still, it’s better than most have to offer.
Born some time in the mid to late 90s, the ‘Mauled’ chant, with the accompanying hand movements, has been taken to the bosom of City’s support. Younger fans seem to love its childish appeal, older fans appreciate that it’s just plain amusing and a more inventive way of reminding opposing fans of the fact that their team is losing than simply chanting the scoreline. A few fans may harrumph at how gay we all look, but we know its shit, and never shitter than when thousands of hardened, tattoed Hullensians are singing it in unison. However, it’s also funny, and never funnier than when it’s being chanted at Anfield or the Emirates.
It’s unlikely – given that among English clubs there’s only Millwall who it might apply to – that anyone is going to steal it off us. Most importantly though, it’s ours, in all its self-deprecating, camp, mocking glory.
CITY BLOW CHANCE OF TOP FLIGHT PROMOTION, 1910 Depths of despair
Oldham Athletic. When they’re not stealing Jobbo for half his true worth, or poaching our best schoolboy players of the late 80s and early 90s, or gaining an unfair advantage on a plastic pitch, or persuading us to overpay for Andy Holt, then they are pipping us to promotion to the top-flight of English football 100 years ago. Bastards.
1910 was when we managed to mess up the best chance we’d had of promotion to what was then known as Division One, and were to get for another 98 years. City’s team back then doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the great post-war teams but that’s more to do with the length of time that has passed than it is the quality of the players. You’ve all probably heard of EDG ‘Gordon’ Wright. Some of you may even believe that he was our first and only England international (he wasn’t; official FA records have him down as a Cambridge University player, unfortunately). But there was more to this team than the Hymers College schoolmaster. Manager Ambrose Langley seemed to want to field teams with as few surnames as possible, meaning the defence and midfield was based around the Browell brothers, George and Albert, while up front the goals were largely supplied and scored by ‘the three Smiths’, Joe (five goals), Jack (32 in 35 games) and Wallace (17). Davy and Dan Gordon were also crucial members of the squad. And in addition to Gordon Wright’s impeccable wing play, City’s forward line was usually completed by Arthur Temple – who contributed 16 goals that season – or occasionally the highly rated Alf Toward, who Langley deemed surplus to requirements and sold to Oldham for £350 mid-season.
City didn’t seem to miss Toward – who had contributed little that season anyway. Going into the final game of the season in second place, City needed to win at Oldham, who were two points behind but with a better goal average, which was how teams on level points were separated, or draw and hope that third-placed Derby didn’t win. As City went into the game unbeaten in 12 games, 11 of which were wins, top-flight football was City’s to lose. And lose it they did.
Derby did their bit, only managing to draw against West Brom, but City were blown away by Oldham. Missing the influential Jack McQuillan, City had no answer to the Latics attacking football. The home side went ahead on 18 minutes, and were two up on 25 minutes when – you guessed it – Alf Toward scored from what looked like an offside position. The third in the 80th minute compounded the agony. Oldham – who had spent much of the early part of the season propping up the Second Division – were promoted. City were left vowing to make amends the following season. And the season after, and the season after, and the season after…
And that was it. Of course we finished sixth in Division Two in 1986 – the year before the play-offs came into being –but until 2008 this was the nearest City had come to experiencing the upper chamber of the football league. It can only be speculated what might have happened had we won that day. Would we have gone on to greater things, build on the success and flirt with greatness in the way in which teams from similar-sized cities and towns with similar resources to City managed? Or would we have come straight back down and endured a very similar path to the one we were to tread anyway?
One thing we can be sure of, however, is that we wouldn’t have got to witness the too-good-to-be-described-in-words events of May 2008. Sure, promotion would have been incredible even if it hadn’t been our first time in the top flight, but knowing that we were prising a 104-year-old monkey off our back made the celebrations all the more elating and tear-inducing. So while our great-great grandfathers missed out on the opportunity to sup celebratory halves of milk stout down Canal Street, them being denied their bit of history made the bottles of over-priced piss that we got hammered on on the streets of Camden and Soho taste all the sweeter.
KC STADIUM MOVE Talking points
A ‘super stadium’ in Hull had been talked about for decades. The more Boothferry Park and the Boulevard crumbled, the louder the calls for such a development came. However, a few things always seemed to be lacking: money, ambition, interest from the clubs’ respective boards and the ability to pull in the fans to fill anything worth building.
To make such a stadium work, a successful, well supported football team would be needed, as rugby league, despite what a handful of egg-chasing fuckwits will tell you, doesn’t have the interest in Hull or anywhere else in the country to make such a large-scale project viable. In a case of impeccable timing, Adam Pearson took over Hull City just as the local council became rather wealthy after selling a percentage of its shares in Kingston Communications.
The money was there, the ambition from Pearson certainly was, and the Hull City fan base, which seemed to swell to vaguely impressive levels as various ‘saviours’ came in and raped the club after the hated Needler regime was replaced, suggested that if they built it, we would come. The complacency and self-serving of endless Labour-dominated councils in Hull did the city few favours while other cities in the UK of a similar size were regenerating and making themselves attractive to investors, but in building the KC Stadium rather than spending the share money on worthy bottomless pit projects is something we should always be grateful to the then council – and Paddy Doyle in particular – for. The KC Stadium, and the change in fortune it helped bring about in Hull’s only sporting team that had any hope of becoming a recognizable name outside the confines of the M62, has done more to raise the profile of, and feelgood factor within the city than anything else in living memory.
Premiership football, international sporting events and concerts by internationally renowned pop stars mix seamlessly with community events, schoolkids playing on the many outlying all-weather pitches and corporate events. And it’s all surrounded by attractive parkland within walking distance of the city centre.
The KC looks at home in what is arguably the best, and richest, football league in the world. It’s a thing of beauty and it has done as much to turn around the fortunes of Hull City as any player and chairman. In fact, the campaign starts here: let’s have a statue of the KC erected. Just outside the KC.
A KICK IN THE BALKANS DOCUMENTARY (1990) Talking points
The fall of communism brought a multitude of benefits to Bulgaria; free elections, a restructured economy, and, err, a visit from Hull City. Recently departed chairman Don Robinson saw the legacy of ‘Perestroika’ as an entrepreneurial opportunity, and involved himself with ‘dental tourism’ to the Balkan state. He also organised a three game pre-season tour of Bulgaria for the Tigers in the summer of 1990, and for commentator John Helm and a Yorkshire TV film crew to document the trip.
The result was a moderately intriguing half-hour programme which aired after the 10 o’ clock news on ITV, punderfully named ‘A kick in the Balkans’. Highlights include pre-game folk dancing, Dave Bamber’s critique of local cuisine, Paul Hunter’s Bart Simpson tee shirt and Don Robinson talking to camera topless. Iain Hesford’s contrived links counting down the days until the squad return home aren’t quite as mirthful as the corpulent ‘keeper believes.
MICHAEL TURNER Dramatis Personae
From (very) briefly threatening to become one of the worst Hull City defenders ever, to the sight of a city shedding real tears of anger and distress at his sale, the three years Turner spent with the Tigers epitomised the growth and progress of the club as a whole.
When Peter Taylor left for Crystal Palace in the summer of 2006, he took Leon Cort with him in exchange for a seven-figure sum and his successor Phil Parkinson needed to find an imposing central defender quickly. He brought in Turner, a former Charlton trainee who had dropped down the divisions to Brentford and become a big hero there. The fee was £350,000 but soon it seemed clear that he was overpriced, overrated and, well, now over here.
There were many shaky games for the new centre back, though occasionally he would redeem himself with a crucial goal or two, notably an injury-time equaliser against Palace at the KC that ruined Taylor’s return and also mercifully stopped Cort’s awful over-celebration of his earlier strike in front of the East Stand being the defining memory of the day. However, Turner was culpable for at least two of Colchester’s goals in a dismal thrashing at Layer Road, the nadir of a wretched period for player, manager and club, and before long Parkinson was gone. Phil Brown took over and Turner seemed transformed.
A stunning volley at Luton later in the season as City battled like hell to stay up (and send Leeds down) became the official goal of the season but by now Turner had discovered his defensive attributes again and, aside from when he was bafflingly dropped for the awful Danny Coles on the opening day of the next season, neither he nor the Tiger Nation looked back. Unerring in his reading of the game, accuracy in the tackle, total dominance in the air and occasional knack of scoring immaculately timed goals (an injury time winner at Burnley, another injury time equaliser against QPR, a first minute header against Watford that settled everyone down) made him by a mile the player of the season as City reached the play-offs, then his immortal act of chucking himself at a late, obviously goalbound Lee Trundle shot at Wembley, deflecting said effort over the bar, provided the moment when we knew, deep down, we were going up.
In the Premier League he never missed a minute, never mind a game, and Fabio Capello had supposedly kept a bespectacled eye on him (albeit from a distance, and only after the Hull Daily Mail felt obliged to write to the FA), putting him in a provisional England squad though eventually leaving him out at the final stage. Turner never once, just once, looked forlorn or out of his depth, even scoring a few smart goals, and was again the runaway player of the year as City stayed up by a whisker. It seemed that for as long as Turner was around City, City would be around the Premier League, so when he was sold to Sunderland at the end of the summer transfer window with worrying enthusiasm by Paul Duffen and for a fee nobody would reveal, there was an outcry of atomic proportions that took Duffen and the hierarchy by surprise. Turner himself, befitting the serene, unaffected and affable figure he cut in interviews, never asked to leave and gave his all to the last moment, his parting gift being an eye-watering block with his wedding tackle on the goal-line which preserved a point at Wolves. Within 48 hours he was gone.
His character was enhanced further when he inevitably scored against City on his Sunderland debut (in one of those coincidences that happen, and one the club didn’t seem to notice) and offered a gesture of apology to the Tiger Nation before taking the celebration to which he was entitled elsewhere. When Adam Pearson returned to the club two months later and instantly disclosed that merely £4m, minus sell-on payments to Turner’s two previous clubs, was all City got for an all-time great, his legend was somehow enhanced within the shrieks of rage and idle threats aimed towards the departed, discredited Duffen.
The destiny of City without Turner remains unclear, but Turner’s own destiny surely is the international recognition he merited for some time and maybe a huge move to one of the biggest clubs in the land. The best we’ve ever had? Yeah.
CITY’S AMAZING START TO PREMIER LEAGUE LIFE Heights of joy
Still aghast at the enormity of achieving a Wembley Play-Off victory the previous May, City fans entered season 2008-09, the club’s first in top flight football, with an attitude that said “let’s not worry about the results, let’s just enjoy the ride”. It was indeed, it transpired, to be the best trip most of us had ever been on. So it was a combination of bemusement, lung-emptying excitement and patronising by the world’s media that greeted City’s opening weeks in the Premier League when, contrary to received wisdom (and all common sense, let’s face it), City compiled a run of wins that propelled them momentarily to joint top of the richest league in the world.
There were few signs of glory in the first 20 minutes of the opening fixture at home to Fulham, as Roy Hodgson’s side passed the ball crisply and quickly and threatened to score every time they crossed halfway. Clinging on at the back, it was talismanic Brazilian Geovanni that turned the game as he stepped inside from the right wing and smote a 25 yard drive into the far corner of goal. Caleb Folan scored a late second and the Tigers, carded to “do a Derby” and achieve no more than a dozen points all season, were a quarter of the way there. A dour 1-1 draw at Blackburn was followed by an embarrassing extra time League Cup loss at Swansea and a 0-5 undressing at the hands of Wigan’s Amr Zaki and Emile Heskey. Had normal service been resumed? Well maybe not, because despite the horror scoreline the Tigers had competed OK in the Wigan game and the Latics had converted all four of their goalscoring chances in the 90 minutes (their opener being a Sam Ricketts own goal from a corner).
City then travelled to Newcastle, fortuitously catching the Geordies just after Kevin Keegan had flounced out of the club and personally ensured his supposedly beloved club would be relegated nine months later. And despite the late loss of Craig Fagan to a vicious leg twanging assault by Danny Guthrie, Marlon King potted a penalty and a splendid one on one drive past Shay Given’s despairing dive to give City their first away win of the season. Late goals saw Everton claim a 2-2 draw after falling behind at the KC. Then it all went off.
Arsenal away was the first marquee fixture of City’s season, a real step into the world class unknown for the plucky Yorkshire side. After going a goal down, Geovanni curled an astounding shot into the top right corner of Arsenal’s net to equalise before Daniel Cousin nodded a corner home and enable City to claim all three points. Those present that day will always treasure the sheer tumult that greeted both goals, the very pinnacle of Total Tiger Mayhem. Returning to London a week later to take on Tottenham, Geovanni again won the day as he blasted a free kick unstoppably and scored the game’s only goal. This was seriously bonkers stuff – we are only Hull bloody City for gawd’s sake.
A third win was claimed when Michael Turner’s header saw the Tigers breeze past a disinterested West Ham side. Then City travelled to West Bromwich and played 45 minutes of utterly irresistible football (the Baggies had been the better side in the first stanza), sweeping to a 3-0 victory. The frontline of King, Cousin and Geovanni proved unplayable and crash-bang-defender Kamil Zayatte thumped home a goal from a corner, prompting captain Ian Ashbee to clothes line the Guinean to the ground in gleeful but brutal fashion.
The good times continued for another six weeks or so, until Phil Brown decided that after tonkings by Sunderland and Manchester City he would abandon the attacking formation that served him so well and retreat into a 4-5-1 shell. But those first nine Premier League fixtures really did represent the most unexpected and unbelievable two month spell of any Hull City supporter’s lifetime. It was regrettably, almost entirely downhill from there.
RUNCORN WALL COLLAPSE Talking points
Rarely recalled these days, precious little mention of it on the internet, an incident which might as well be described in Swahili for all the recognition that it would elicit from a good 90% of current City “regulars”. But for some it remains a chilling memory, as much by virtue of being a genuinely frightening experience as for the fact that it came very close to resulting in widespread injury among City supporters and going down as the blackest day in the Club’s history.
The date was 12th November 1993. The occasion was the first round of the FA Cup. City at that time were a perpetually cash-strapped outfit, the team comprising a motley bunch of has-beens, never-weres and Dean Windass under the managership of Terry Dolan and Jeff Lee but who, runaway favourites for relegation at the start of the season, were to defy all the odds in coming to within an ace of securing a play-off place in what is now League One both that season and the next. On the day over a thousand City fans (a decent enough turnout for that sort of game in those days) descended on the Cheshire town and made their presence felt in the local pubs from opening time, before trooping off to the Canal Street home of the then Conference perennials to witness a fixture that bore all the hallmarks of a potential banana skin: we certainly wouldn’t have been the first League outfit to come to grief there.
For those City fans who stopped to ponder such things, the first impressions of Canal Street were somewhat out of keeping with what might have been expected of the home of a team with genuine aspirations of League status, being faced as they were with a trudge across a muddy training pitch in order to reach the away turnstiles and, once inside, with pre-pubescent stewards and temporary loos. The area allocated to City fans was L-shaped, consisting of maybe a dozen steps of open terracing behind one goal, devoid of crush barriers, which continued round the corner and along the side until it met the main stand, itself a typical non-League fifty-yard long effort straddling the halfway line. The more vocal element of the City support – about half of the total following and, typical of those days for that sort of game, well tanked-up and including a fair few ne’er-do-wells – packed together as close to the main stand as they could get, with the local constabulary keeping a watchful eye close by. It wasn’t an altogether comfortable atmosphere as the game kicked off, and there was a palpable hint of menace hanging over this section of the ground, a slight nagging worry, for no specific reason, that things might get out of control. A few fans, sensing this, wisely moved away.
For the time being, however, one place where things were very firmly under control was the pitch. The Tigers looked easily two leagues higher than their opponents, being disciplined, organised, and in no mood to permit the home side even a whiff of an upset. All it needed was a goal for City to stamp their indelible mark on the game, and we didn’t have that long to wait. Just before the half-hour a deep cross from the right found Graeme Atkinson, whose astute header looped over the Runcorn keeper and into the net from twelve yards out.
Among the City crowd by the main stand, the pressure that had been building up since before kick-off finally had an outlet and wild and prolonged celebrations ensued. But then it happened. Whether it was fans at the back pushing in the excitement, or someone losing either their balance or their footing has never been established, but the whole mass of fans suddenly tumbled forward, out of control, like a snowball gathering pace down a hillside, until its course met resistance in the form of the perimeter fence at the front. Now, such happenings may well have been commonplace on the Kop a dozen or so miles away, but the sturdy enclosures and sunken terracing of Anfield generally ensured that no damage to life or limb resulted. In contrast, the flimsy wall at Canal Street didn’t stand a chance, and with a resounding crack as the fence disintegrated the entire human avalanche landed unchecked on the field of play. Celebrations on the terraces gave way to shouts and screams, some of pain rather than panic. Amidst the general confusion, the first to react and render assistance were the Runcorn players, who were lining up for the restart in front of the broken section of wall. Chaos ensued as the mood turned angry and the police struggled to maintain order with remonstrating fans. A press photographer trying to take photos was punched by a Southern Supporters stalwart of that era before being dragged away by others for his own safety. Anxious City Chairman Martin Fish arrived on the scene, trying to calm fans down and ascertain what exactly had happened and how many had been hurt. Other fans helped the police and Runcorn officials to remove smashed concrete posts and other debris from the pitch. Nobody seemed to notice that referee Lynch had taken the players back to the dressing rooms.
And they were not to return. The collapse of the fence had resulted in a good deal of metalwork being exposed and, although the fire brigade arrived and started cutting it away, and although the police, numbers swelled by reinforcements, had restored calm among the Tiger Nation, it was announced, some twenty minutes after it all happened, that the game had been abandoned. There was some (forcibly expressed in some cases) suggestion at the time that it could have resumed, with the wall being made safe by the fire brigade and the damaged area sealed off (there being plenty of room for all the City support on the remainder of the away terracing), but in truth everyone’s heart had gone out of it and the correct decision had been made. One of the abiding memories of walking back to the station for an earlier-than-expected train back to London was the near-total silence among the departing spectators.
In the event, casualties were relatively light – nine fans injured and only four hospitalisations – but it could have been so very, very much worse. Barely had the two sets of club officials retired to the sanctuary of the Runcorn board room before accusation and counter-accusation began to fly. The whole thing was down to hooliganism on the part of the Hull fans, declared the Runcorn chairman. Nonsense, countered Fish: the fans were simply celebrating a goal, and the ground was a death-trap, totally unfit to stage such a game. This, of course, all spilled very messily into the press over the next few days. To give credit where it’s due, Fish handled the whole business extremely well, publicly and resolutely defending the City fans, and insisting that City should not be made to return to Canal Street for the replay – an issue over which he got his own way, the game eventually taking place at Witton Albion ten days later amidst an atmosphere of no little hostility between the two sets of fans. To be sure, when the definitive magnum opus on football stadium disasters is compiled, it is unlikely that the events of 12th November 1993 will merit more than a footnote. For those who were unfortunate enough to be caught up in the midst of it, however, it is not a day that will be forgotten.
Mind you, there was a happy ending. Had it not been for the wall collapse at Runcorn, we would never have got to see striker (as he then was) Chris Hargreaves score for City, his only goal for us in over 50 appearances coming in the replay at Witton, which the Tigers won 2-0.
THE 1995/1996 RELEGATION SEASON Depths of despair
And you thought our second season in the Premiership was bad? It was, of course, but winless streaks against the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal are in some ways excusable. Try going through the same thing but with the likes of Shrewsbury, Rotherham and Wrexham being the teams inflicting blow after miserable blow. And instead of being sat in the comfort of the KC with 25,000 others, try doing it on the decaying terraces of a neglected Boothferry Park as one of 3,000 or so. Oh, and those World Cup-bound players that are donning the black and amber? Imagine that they are all Simon fucking Trevitt. Every single last one of them. Only then can you come close to imagining just how utterly demoralising 1995/1996 was.
It needn’t have been so bleak. At various points of the season we could call upon the likes of Dean Windass, Alan Fettis, Rob Dewhurst, Neil Mann, Linton Brown, Greg Abbott, Roy Carroll, Duane Darby, Garry Hobson, Adam Lowthorpe, Richard Peacock and Michael Quigley. It would take a special kind of manager to organise such a talented bunch of players in lower league terms into a team capable of only five league victories in one season. Thank Christ, then, that we had Terry Dolan.
Prior to this season, Dolan, it must be whispered, hadn’t quite been the hate figure he was to later become. His agricultural brand of football hadn’t exactly been packing out Boothferry Park, but the two seasons leading up to this darkest of campaigns had seen bright starts fizzle out around Easter as we flirted with the play-offs. By the close of this campaign, Dolan would only be behind Martin Fish and Christopher Needler when it came to the title of the most despised figure in the city, and Tigers 2000 would be vociferously demanding his head.
The season didn’t start off too badly. A 1-0 home defeat to title favourites Swindon was followed by a draw at Rotherham and then victory against Blackpool, with the winner coming from promising new signing Andy Mason. Cruelly, the early season promise of Michael Quigley, who was what counted as a big name signing for us back then when he joined from Manchester City, was cut short by an injury that would see him ruled out for six months. We would win only two league games in that time.
After the Blackpool win in late August, we would go another 16 games without victory during which we would lose Dean Windass to Aberdeen, and Alan Fettis, who had been reserve to Steve Wilson for much of the season, to Nottingham Forest. However, selling players to make ends meet wasn’t a situation that was unique to Hull City in the mid-1990s. As the impact of the Premiership clubs hoovering up the bulk of the TV money made itself felt, teams throughout the lower leagues were becoming accustomed to operating on a shoestring. This didn’t prevent Dolan and Fish using a lack of funds as an excuse for our poor performances time and time again, but it wasn’t a lack of money that would cause our manager to bring in Simon Trevitt to strangle Adam Lowthorpe’s promising career at birth. Lack of funds wasn’t the reason for Dolan shattering the confidence of Andy Mason by bringing him on as a sub in a home game against Oxford only to bring him off again ten minutes later to be replaced by a goalkeeper masquerading as a centre forward. No amount of money would have altered the manager’s route-one tactics. Dolan’s limitations were being exposed. Shorn of the brilliance of Dean Windass, the team looked as clueless as the manager.
As the season went on, attendance figures went down. City were glued to the bottom of what was then known as ‘Division Two’ and breaking the 3,000 crowd barrier was greeted with an ‘oooh’ by the City fans dotted around Boothferry Park. Solice was found in the obscure and the comical. In a 5-2 home defeat to Carlisle, in which Richard Peacock saw a dazzling brace wiped out before the half-time whistle, City fielded former Leeds trainee and Carry On film character Richard ‘Dick’ Fidler. In a rare win, 4-2 at home against Wycombe, 5ft 4” Paul Wharton was sent off for a savage assault on 6ft 5” centre-back Terry Evans. In such hard times such moments had to be cherished.
Another crumb of comfort this season was the number of youth players coming through. Roy Carroll was the pick of them, making his debut in January and comfortably picking up the player of the season award. Additionally, Paul Fewings, Gavin Gordon, Ian Wilkinson and Adam Lowthorpe all looked to be much better bets that the likes of Trevitt, Craig Lawford, Simon Dakin, Kenny Gilbert, Glenn Humphries and various other footballers who Dolan’s contacts in the game had brought to Hull. Such rough baptisms were hardly the ideal starts to a life in football, but Carroll and Gordon at least managed to forge impressive careers for themselves, away from Hull City, naturally.
City had long been relegated by the time the final game at home to Bradford came around. In what was Martin Fish’s crassest decision to date, Bradford were given the home end of Boothferry Park to house their fans travelling en masse in the hope of the Bantams taking the final play-off berth. A 3-2 defeat with home fans in the away end and pitch invasions holding up the match was a fitting end to the grimmest of seasons. Five wins were recorded in 46 games, with a mere 36 goals scored in the process. Dolan had but a handful of supporters in Hull. Fortunately for him one of them was Martin Fish, who rewarded Dolan’s ineptitude of the previous 12 months with a new contract the following summer.
Events off the pitch had been just as depressing as events on it, as City seemed to be drowning under a sea of unpaid tax and electricity bills. Newly created Tigers 2000 were also sharpening their claws. We were devoid of hope, we had a clueless manager tied to a long contract, any player who looked half-decent would either pick up a career-threatening injury or be sold for a fraction of his true worth, and worst of all we had a boardroom full of individuals who not only lacked the money or the inclination to take Hull City forward, but also seemingly wouldn’t sell the club on anything other than the most ridiculous of terms. That summer, the summer of 3 Lions, Gazza’s dentist’s chair celebrations and the general hullabaloo that came with the Euro 96 tournament being hosted on home soil, saw football’s image, its coolness, surpass even the levels it had reached during Italia 90, yet Hull City seemed a million miles away from football’s new-found sexiness. Winless, cashless, clueless and hopeless, it truly was the bleakest of times.
THE GALVIN SHUFFLE Talking points
Huddersfield born Chris Galvin was a product of the early 1970s Leeds United youth team – his role was scandalously airbrushed from The Damned United because Gareth Gates, the obvious choice for the part, bailed out at the last minute. He joined the Tigers in the Summer of 1973 and stayed around for five years before joining Stockport County. In that time he perfected a trick that was known as the Galvin Shuffle. Except it wasn’t really a trick. Or a shuffle.
Patrolling the left wing, Galvin would dribble towards goal and when confronted with a right back, he would do a kind of double step-over affair without touching the ball – of the kind performed in every playground across the land these days. Imagine Cristiano Ronaldo at his most unnecessarily flashy, slowed down five times. Reputed to bamboozle defenders, the Shuffle was principally a weapon only thanks to the laughter it induced amongst the opposition. I suppose the best we could say is that Chris Galvin (whose brother Tony was an altogether more successful Irish international wideman in the 1980s) was before his time.
GRANDWAYS/KWIK SAVE SUPERMARKETS That’s SO Hull City
As the 1970s drew to a close and a swathe was cut through the North’s economy by a wicked woman from Grantham, Hull City AFC described a similar arc of decline. By 1982 the club had descended to the fourth division for the first time in its history and the disinterested Chris Needler had assumed the chairman’s post, only to plunge the club into receivership within six months of his second tenure. Struggling to stay afloat, the Tigers came perilously close to extinction.
In 1979 City’s directors had announced a scheme to develop Boothferry Park, with the Boothferry Road car park being given over to a complex of leisure facilities, a supermarket, club offices and a multi-storey car park. The proposal took three years to develop and was progressively scaled back to cut costs.
In February 1982 receivership and redevelopment plans crashed into each other. And so it came to pass that the fine North Stand structure with its imposing clock, was demolished and replaced by a functional supermarket shed that was occupied by Yorkshire grocery chain Grandways. The rear of the supermarket, which flanked the Boothferry Park pitch behind one goal, accommodated a shallow area of uncovered terracing that became an unsatisfactory home to many an away following for the next 20 years. It also housed an electronic scoreboard that would seem ludicrously basic now, but was considered to be a sign of the space age coming to Kingston upon Hull at the time. It clapped; it issued yellow cards; it responded when wayward shots narrowly missed it; it told the time. I was to all intents and purposes a miracle in electronic form.
Once a stadium that proudly boasted to being the only one with a dedicated British Railways station, now Boothferry Park was the only ground in English league football with a fruit and veg aisle behind one goal. The store closed early on matchdays so the spectacle of middle aged shoppers in headscarves mingling in the car park with the Fred Perry wearing hoolies of Middlesbrough and Derby never came to pass, but the embarrassment endured and Boothferry Park was denied much of its original cavernous atmosphere.
The decline of Boothferry Park, its name picked out in red backlit letters across the roofline of the store, was characterised most savagely by the failure of the club to replace busted light bulbs in the 1990s, which resulted in the stadium being announced to passers-by as “—–FER– -ARK”.
Grandways begat Jacksons in the early 1990s and after a few years in this guise the store became a Kwik Save budget food seller. The store ceased trading in 2007 when Kwik Save went bust and was subsequently demolished along with the rest of Boothferry Park to make way for a housing development.
FISH’S PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES Keeping up appearances
It’s a practice considered passé by the print media nowadays, but in the Eighties and early to mid Nineties, comedic photos of prominent football figures were de rigueur for redtops. If Liverpool’s keeper was having a tough time dealing with crosses, it was only natural for Bruce Grobbelaar to appear in The Sun dressed as Dracula, another man with cross aversion. Hoho.
If England had a vital World Cup qualifier in Italy, convention demanded that any match preview text be accompanied by a picture of England boss Glenn Hoddle pretending to eat a pizza. A frozen pizza at that. Silver-maned Italian striker Fabrizio Ravanelli marking his move to Middlesbrough by dressing up as a fox hunter simultaneously represented an apex and a nadir for this photographic genre.
Though largely a tabloid custom, local rags occasionally got in on the act, usually when a team had signed a Scandinavian midfielder, allowing for Viking helmet and sword based lampoonery. Most Hull City managers and players had the good sense to steer clear of this kind of idiocy, chairman Martin Fish though, did not. Whenever the club had a financial crisis, and in the Nineties that was every other week, Fish could always be relied upon by Hull Daily Mail photographers to pose holding aloft collection buckets, or with pockets turned inside out, to illustrate the club’s skintness. The in-over-his-head chairman publicly chided local businesses for not getting involved with the club, but when the man in charge makes light of financial travails in such a manner, who can blame them for giving Hull City the swerve?
The worst example came when the Yorkshire Electricity Board threatened to cut off power to Boothferry Park because of unpaid bills, meaning no floodlights for night time games. To highlight the gravity of the situation and reassure fans that evening home fixtures could be fulfilled, Fish appeared on the back of the HDM dressed as Wee Willie fucking Winkie, holding up a candlestick and grinning like a hoon. The preposterous rapscallion.
ROARY THE TIGER Keeping up appearances
A sad example of the way British football has been over-commercialised since the inception of the Premiership? Nah. A bit of fun for the kids to enjoy but which helps strengthen Hull City’s identity a bit? Probably.
Club mascots had been with us for a while when, in 1999 after a competition run in the club programme to name him, Roary the Tiger strode out at St James Park, Exeter. Seasoned City fans, bred on a strict diet of inappropriately dressed majorettes, latex giants and half-time raffles drawn out of a tombola by Roger De Vries, looked on aghast. Indeed, when Roary was led from the pitch in a 2-2 draw in an FA Cup tie ay Hayes, wry smiles could be seen spread across the faces of many old timers.
Roary was to make the headlines again a year later the man portraying the role of Roary jumped ship and signed a deal to take on the part of Alexander the Greek at Exeter. We were such a shambles back then that we couldn’t get a mascot right, never mind a football team. But since then, Roary has wormed his way into the affections of all but the most cynical of City fans. Whoever is inside the suit (why are these things always such closely guarded secrets?) knows his audience: entertain the kids, indulge the pissed-up adults who want a hug or high five, pose for photographs with the over-excited girlfriend attending her first City match, and win the half-time penalty competition should the host club bother with such things.
It should also be added that at least Roary looks the part. The suit looks good (remember Southend’s first stab at ‘Sammy the Shrimp’, which looked like a man wondering around in a rolled-up pink carpet crudely sellotaped together?) and the Tiger nickname means our mascot’s link with the club is obvious (what the hell do owls have to do with Oldham? Or dinosaurs with Arsenal?). Hull City is mercifully light on the gimmicks that other football clubs seem to inflict on their supporters, with our lack of music after goals rightfully being a source of pride for many fans. But Roary doesn’t feel like a gimmick anymore. He’s part and parcel of the matchday experience these days. And go on, admit it, you’d kind of miss him if he wasn’t there.
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HULL CITY KITS 