So Timbo Walts, has gone… it was more inevitable he was going than Terry Dolan’s hairline in 1994, we all knew and, deep down, I think he did too.
True story, I know the staff at a club we played recently through a mate and they said he couldn’t have been nicer, he had time for everyone after the game (we lost, unsurprisingly) he stayed for a drink, went above and beyond and was an absolute stand up guy. I do think we need to be careful not to pile on too much to him as a person, he clearly didn’t want to fail and in some respects we actually showed flashes of promise. Somewhere between a stubbornness with tactics, some relationships with players that were a little frosty and comments that may not have been intentionally incendiary, but were taken that way, it was just doomed to fail. I do believe (and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it) that the chaos of the transfer policy this summer didn’t help and the club and players must shoulder some blame.
Buuuuuuuut… it’s done now. Andy Dawson’s a great man and we all love him, he will no doubt raise the spirits of the players and we’ll look to appoint. This one we really, really have to get right. Two of three appointments so far by the new owners have been poor, if we don’t get the next one right, we might be doing the League One tour of shame next year like Birmingham City. This squad, this team, this club have enough to drag themselves to safety, but it starts now, and we all need to be onboard if we are going to be a Championship club next season.
Anyway, this failure by the club made me think of other things that you would file under “It didn’t work” and I’ve written about three. I hope you enjoy it and it might put a smile on your face during less than auspicious times, if not, send your hate tweets to @thelikesofhull on Twitter or @peterthornes.bsky.social on Blue Sky. Cheers everyone. Up the Andy Dawson Tigers…
- Red in the City kit
There’s a couple of different stories about this development in the early/mid eighties, I think (and it’s think, I don’t know) I choose to believe the second of the explanations. The first is that Don Robinson, wrestler, horse rider, chairman and maniac, put in Scarborough colours as it was his previous club. That doesn’t really make sense to me, but I get the logic.
The second was an intention to be like a northern version of Watford, (who played in yellow, black and red and had climbed the leagues to great acclaim), manager Brian Horton was around in this area, we took several players from them (Neil Williams, Richard Jobson, Charlie Palmer) and our programme circa 1986 had “The family club” emblazoned across each copy, this was the mantra of Watford in this era, so it made sense.
Truth is I don’t think people really knew, but the colours did change as Don left (all the kits 1983-88 had some red) and would never come back. What I don’t recall is any fans being unhappy with this new colour in our kit, but it’s fair to say it didn’t really take off either. We also didn’t fit the remit of a “family club” exactly in this era in the same sense of Watford, Elton John and a middle class fan base we weren’t despite Charlie Chaplin impersonators, chucking out free sweets and horse riding owners… so this new image went by the wayside too.
2. Phil Parkinson’s ice baths
I’ve written about slippery Phil before, there’s one City fan on Twitter that tends to come at me and defend him a little too much. Don’t get me wrong, much like Timmy Walto didn’t work either, I’m not sure Phil’s fairly disastrous reign is on him. He like the German perma-capped shouter has had success elsewhere, and clearly wasn’t untalented, but there was just something fundamentally wrong about his time at City and it was only going one way before Adam Pearson pulled the trigger.
Jon Parkin tells the story regularly that his fitness guru that Parkinson brought with him from Colchester (somebody remind me of his name please? Stuart someone?) was a source of supreme irritation to the senior players. They were probably in the wrong as under Peter Taylor, they were allowed to enjoy themselves, as long as they trained and played hard. This I think more than anything else led to Phil’s demise. This squad didn’t buy in to his modern approaches, including the dreaded ice baths, and that’s probably not on Phil.
The other thing you pick up from some of the football podcasts speaking to players of that era was that Parky didn’t like confrontation. Steven Davies on Undr the Cosh, swears blind he had a trap door in his office at Bradford, he describes how you’d follow him to his room, fuming you aren’t in the starting eleven and as soon as you opened the door… he was gone. He’s not the only one to allude to Parkinson’s lack of appetite for confrontation.
City in that era did have some big characters, Parkin, Ashbee, Barmby, Myhill, Windass etc. It was probably too much, too soon for a young manager and Adam Pearson released him of his services reluctantly. Perma tan Phil was in the wings waiting and the rest is history.
3. Hatem Ben Arfa
There’s been many false dawns in our club’s history. Points where we thought “That’s it… that’s the player (s), infinite success awaits” and the transfer window of September 2014 is a stand out example of just that. In came Mo Diame, Abel Hernandez, Gaston Ramirez and several more big names alongside them. Then the orange tied boring rumour mongers on Sky wet their pants at the 11th hour, because Hatem Ben Arfa was joining Hull City.
We won the transfer window. Yippy skippy.
We got relegated.
I still think it’s low key one of the biggest disasters the club has ever overseen, that a team with Jelavic, Hernandez, Dawson, McGregor, Roberston, Huddlestone, Diame, Brady, Davies etc etc could be in the bottom three of a league is absolute madness. But it happened and somehow the most talented squad this club has ever known headed to play in the second level.
Hatem became the flag holder for this underachievement, he wasn’t just bad, he was verging on playing like a look-a-like. He was unfit, overweight and disinterested. One game against Manchester United, he covered less ground than McGregor in goal before getting an early hook and on top of all that, he then disappeared without leave and Steve Bruce had to admit he didn’t know where he was. One of the places that was not on the list of locations to check, was the training ground.
Ben Arfa’s career path could be described as… promising, good, really good, top class, fat and rubbish, rehabilitated and good again and decent for an older player. It’s the most typical City of all typical city things that we got the fat and rubbish era. Cheers Hatem.
Thanks for reading, UTT.