It was only the 25th June when I wrote on the blog last folks, and Nostradamus himself would have struggled to best me when the end of my introductory tweet before my piece read.. “Such positivity won’t last”. I mean my expectations weren’t huge, but boy have the club taken this literally.
It’s been yet another mess of an offseason and potentially more messy than we’ve seen in a while. We’re currently under a three transfer window restriction which means at this time we can’t pay a fee or loan fee for a player until 2027. We’ve appealed this and blah blah blah. Let’s be honest if you’re reading this, you know very well what’s happened and don’t need me to retell it. Although do you?
City twitter is still awash with the tin hat brigade shouting anyone down who dares to be unhappy about said turmoil, and I’ve even read those saying that until we know “the facts” we shouldn’t comment, and that people seem “happy to see us fail”. Good grief. So with that in mind, let’s cover some facts we know. We twice didn’t pay fees in time, once to Villa and once to known rule abiders Man City, and this has brought about these restrictions, we also have been running up unpaid debts to other local and national companies, which may or may not be now paid off. We’ve appealed but people who know a lot more than me have basically said “Good luck with that”.
So here we are, the fan base seems very conflicted with a lot of people voicing frustration at the owner, some people defending them to an extent, and some still fully waterboarded and singing his praises like a latter day saint. Myself? I’m probably about a cup quarter full, as I said on the old X/Twitter/Musk mail this week. It’s been coming for a while and although I can see that Acun might still want to succeed and probably didn’t foresee this coming, that’s still not ok, if anything it points towards incompetence over not caring and I’m not sure which is worse.
Edit, today Phil Buckingham did a piece (unpopular opinion, not a big fan, he phoned it in towards the end of his tenure and literally only pops up to write articles on us when it’s going badly) which points even more to serious holes in the club’s finances, although it does suggest the owner may be open to moving on. However…
The whole idea of an owner as some sort of saviour is all a bit strange anyway? Isn’t it. They aren’t the football Bob Geldof turning up to help us out of some sort of god given sense of charity, they’re all doing these things for very specific reasons and a love of Stan McEwan, Patty and Chips and Maureen Lipman isn’t likely to be near the top of their list. When did we realistically last have someone who actually supported the club as an owner?
The Allams weren’t fans of Hull City clearly.
Don Robinson wasn’t a fan.
That tennis whopper wasn’t.
Russell Bartlett or Adam Pearson weren’t fans.
Christopher Needler wasn’t.
Was Harrold? Help me historians, I think he was.
Paul Duffen definitely wasn’t or isn’t.
Ironically I think Martin Fish might have been.
This is my point. Old Fishy, fell into the job when the previous Chairman was ill, he didn’t really want to do it. Most if not all of our owners were taking over the club to try to oversee some sort of success/profit/build something, with a potentially very large club, serving a large city with a huge catchment. Acun said a lovely speech about the Humber being like the Bosphorus, but unless you’re a grown man, who is retired and invites people over for sausage and chips for tea, I’d hope you didn’t get suckered in by that.
He sees like we all do the potential for success, and he has indeed had a go. He’s not done particularly well, but you could say the difference between him and Duffen was a couple of league places two years ago and a successful play off campaign. They both made big plays to get to the big leagues and one “succeeded”… kind of. Although that didn’t end great either.
I guess what I’m trying to say in a long winded way, that you know and love, is that everyone who has ran this club wasn’t doing it for some sort of selfless quest to end up in heaven, and most of them didn’t really manage to get what they were trying to achieve in the first place, although I for one solidly believe Don Robinson would have eventually got us to play on the moon.
We have a clear choice, going boom and bust a lot, like the last fifty years, or living to our means which means almost certainly not being in contention for the top league in the country, or maybe going down a kind of moneyball stat based approach like Brighton or Brentford. That’s the choices really, because if we roll the dice and spend, it’s almost certainly going to bite us on the arse unless we strike gold with one of the players. The players who we have sold for the most in the last decade have tended to come through the academy (Potter, Bowen kind of, Greaves) so the lack of investment in the current batch doesn’t seem overly clever either. Ho hum.
So you might be asking? Hang on you bedwetting, lefty, misery loving twatbucket, I thought you said this was going to be a positive take. Well here goes. Hold my beer.
I can’t be the only person impressed by Sergej Jakirovic. The way he conducts himself, his calmness, the professional manner in which he displays. His experience is wide, he’s a winner and you get the impression he’s the calmest man in the room. The one thing we can all agree on (I mean most of us, City fans couldn’t ALL agree the day ended in y) is that we did/do have better players than the league showed last year. We really shouldn’t have been so far down, whilst Millwall almost made the play-offs. Therefore, before a fire sale, he’s got some real talent in this squad in Hughes, Miller, Egan, Alzate, Puerta, Belloumi, Pandur, Drameh, Kamara etc. I’d also argue he has players who have struggled that could turn around under him, like Slater, Burstow, Joseph, Giles. I’m not saying they will, but they are clearly better than they’ve shown.
Sergej went into Carrierbagspur (C) who were under an embargo and expected to go down, he didn’t just keep them up, he did it easily and I think had like the third or fourth best record in the league from when he arrived. He’s canny, he’s experienced and I don’t think the current plight has bothered him. He’s the good news. A great manager at this level trumps everything. You can give old ham sandwich face Wilder millions and millions and he’ll still fail, meanwhile Cifuentes or Rohl were at dysfunctional clubs (like us) and they were never in danger. If and I know it’s an if, Sergej gets a tune out of this team, and we’re just ok in the league, then either Acun can sort out his books or ship out and the most interesting coverage will be off the pitch. Potentially on the pitch, we could just be ticking on. Like I said, you can’t say I’m a complete pessimist.
It’s a sad reality, that this blog will either have people hating on me like that curly haired lad who does you tube videos and ranting like Cornflake Chris watching GB news. or telling me I’m wildy optimistic and I’m drinking the Hopium. In truth, like the rest of us, I’m trying to just make sense of it all and hope that we can emerge from this mess with something to cheer. I wish we could just have normal off-season, and just you know… play football and that. But unfortunately that doesn’t look likely. Sergej is my hope in this, he’s the antidote to our current issues and he’s the silver lining to this cloud. Let’s back him.
UTT. Keep the faith.