I hope this finds you all well. I haven’t written anything since the 100th blog and to honest I was kind of waiting for inspiration. It’s a bit too early in the season to comment too much on the current product. Plus you’ve got the thought police on regular duty… we beat Oxford United and we’re heading for the play-offs… then when we concede seven in two games… we need to relax! (lol). I honestly can’t be arsed with all of the online nonsense at the present. I hope we’ll be better than last year and would like to see us in mid-table. I think Brandon Williams could do with a game now, and that when we have Belloumi and Millar back properly, I think we’ll do ok, but that’s about it.
Anyway, probably down to the International Week boredom (C) I started to think about my favourite “entertainers” at City over the years, five players who were mavericks and would be a little bit different from our usual product. Have a read, I hope you enjoy and add a comment, like, retweet, etc if you do. UTT and hopefully we’ll get a result Saturday at Swansea and my timeline will be full of Sergej in a chef’s hat stirring a chilli….
My top 5 maverick players to watch at Hull City…
5. Evandro. Strangely enough when I posted about him the other day (he’s coaching in Doha) lots of you agreed he was a wonderful talent and one bloke said he’s shit!? Ahhh… City fans.
When Marco Silva brought him in during the winter transfer window of 2017, he seemed to fit in well and certainly despite our ultimately unsuccessful escape campaign Evandro had won some fans with his clever touches, neat interplay and highly technical ability.
Injuries robbed us of seeing him enough but in his third and final season for us we saw some wonderful moments, not least the bicycle kick after a flowing move at Villa Park that put us ahead that day. Evandro just saw the game really quickly, and combined incredibly well with others. I’m pretty confident that if you spoke to Jarrod Bowen, Kamil Grosicki etc that they enjoyed playing with the Brazilian.
Sometimes you can come up with all kinds of clever ways of saying things, but I just liked Evandro, I loved the way he played and I was happy to part with my money to see what he was going to do.
4. Theo Whitmore. I think he’s been in “The boy was a larker” so I’ll keep it succinct. Theo was light years ahead of his time. If he played now, and was coached early, at an Ajax or top european academy, he’d be far and away the greatest West Indian footballer the world ever saw. Big words I know, but I do mean it.
In an era where everyone (often including us) kicked it, whacked it, hit the big man, played off… Theo was playing by another set of rules. Sometimes City played him in the ten, occasionally out wide, I think (city historians help me!?) he’s even played for us as an eight in advanced midfield. To be honest he wasn’t much use if you wanted him to win a header, or a tackle. But if you wanted the first touch of an international, Theo was your man. If you’re too young to remember him go have a looked at Tigertube.
He’s just a joy. He sees the whole pitch, his languid gait and long legs defy logic and gravity at times, the end to end goal he scores against Darlington (I think) at BP is just mesmerizing, you can watch it over and over, as City break from a corner and he exchanges passes with the diminutive Clint Marcelle before effortlessly slotting home.
Maybe I’ll take it on the chin that Theo was more special because we weren’t easy on the eye in this era, that’s probably true, but he really was something. Whether it was a scoop pass, a back heel, a flick flack, or a stepover Theo was your man. When Adam Pearson came in, we just simply spent too much money and had too many players, so Theo slipped off the radar. The reality was those early teams under the new owners should have been based around Theo, not with him on the periphery, maybe then we wouldn’t have underachieved so much in the early days of the new era.
3. Kamil Grosicki. I thought long and hard about this and like Theo, there’s a point where I think… “We were largely turgid when Kamil played… maybe that made him look better than he was”. Then I remember how John Uzzell would hunt me down and kill me if I didn’t include him… so I did.
In truth there’s something maverick about Kamil’s attitude. He could blow hot and cold, he was (and presumably still is) insanely quick and therefore in the blink of an eye could change a game. He’d be very busy online (did anyone ever have a can of “Turbo Grosik”?) and there’s obviously the time when David Meyler tells him to go to bed on the transfer window and that he’d see him in the morning.
One of my favourite moments was after he scored our third goal at Luton in 2019 and for reasons best known to himself, climbed on the advertising hoardings, held on to a pole that held up the net and saluted. Just Kamil doing Kamil things. The City fans loved it and went duly mad in the away end.
I guess that’s the way with a maverick player, he’s going to do something you don’t want to miss, and that’s the way Kamil made the fans feel.
It might have been the season before when he scored from fully 40 yards out from a free kick at Millwall, I was there and can assure you he meant it, he shot from 40 yards out and scored, like he’d just hit a side foot pass from a throw in. Amazing.
I saw him once in the Hilton Hotel in Hull before a game. I think he was in the dog house with Slutsky at the time and had only just been included in the squad. I got in a lift and there he was in his City tracksuit. There’s a photo of us somewhere on my phone. We had this mental broken English conversation where I asked if he was going to play and he kept saying “I hope, I hope” and I called him a hero, and he looked confused. Ah, happy days.
2. Jay Jay Okocha. He played 18 times for us. 18. It’s ridiculous. It’s almost a quiz question to other fans, because they don’t even remember him playing. But I don’t think I’ve ever been more entertained in so short a time.
From the torture he offered future tiger Alex Bruce for Ipswich to the cheeky skills and flicks, Jay Jay was just a joy. I do think that season he gave those around him a boost, the players, the fans and the management, because when he did play everything about him said “I’m better than you” and that goes a long long way.
My favourite memory is against Wolves though. I’m not sure it’s even on video but we beat them away 1-0 and they hammered us. They hit the bar, Bo saved everything, we didn’t deserve it. But if that wasn’t insult enough, Jay Jay towards the end of the game ran the ball into the corner to waste time. Apart from it wasn’t the corner but the halfway line, with it’s flag in place (do they still have them? Maybe not) anyway… Jay Jay attracts one and then two and then three angry Wolves players, but he spins away from them, pinballing it past a sea of legs, and then begins to run across the half way line being chased by the same players. The fans just cheered and laughed.
The only way it could have been any funnier was to add the “Benny Hill” theme music to it. Jay Jay was cut from a different cloth, and he joined in the Wembley celebrations in May, he’d been a big part of what went on and I think his time at City will always be cherished by the fans.
- Geovanni. It had to be him didn’t it? The genius from Brazil? From the moment he blew open the first ever Premier League game vs Fulham by cutting in and driving an unstoppable rocket into the bottom corner the love affair from us to Geo was set.
It was no surprise that in recent interview he shocked the journalist by saying he loved playing for City the most. Not Man City, not Benfica and not Barcelona, and you know he meant it. He said it was like a family at City and the fans loved him the most there, and we did.
People point to the Deano goal at Wembley as to changing our fortunes the most, but more of the general public will remember Geo’s gravity defying thunderbastard at the Emirates. And rightly so. It was something from another world. I’ve never seen anything like it from a City player and I’m not sure I ever will.
Geo was simply a delight, I saw him once of the pitch and although he couldn’t speak a word of the queens he didn’t disappoint, he lit up the players lounge, entertaining the mascots and putting Tom Cairney in a headlock to cheer him up. His personality on the pitch was matched off it.
For City, he simply had another second on the ball than anyone else. It really wasn’t more complex than saying Geo…. go do something good. And he did with regularity. The boy, like the above four, was a maverick and one who entertained us more than we could have ever wished for. What a player.
Thanks for reading gang and up the tigers. Cheers.