‘This group was special, they weren’t the most talented, but put their heart and soul into it ‘
20 YEARS ON, GREAT ESCAPE ARCHITECT WARREN JOYCE PAYS TRIBUTE TO CITY’S BAND OF BROTHERS
In the days that followed Hull City completing their Great Escape on May 1, 1999, Warren Joyce found himself in a pickle unbefitting the man who had inspired a footballing miracle. “We’d all been invited out for a meal after we’d survived and I thought it could be messy so I decided to offer some of them a lift in this people carrier I had,” said Joyce.
“It was Brabs (Gary Brabin) who grabbed my tie, pulled it back and tied it around the headrest. It was one of those awful silk ties and the knot was so tight I couldn’t get it off.
“In the end I had to cut myself free from being tied to the headrest of a people carrier. God knows how that must have looked to anyone walking past.”
Joyce would not have been short on offers had he asked for help. At the tender age of 34 he was the driving force behind City avoiding relegation out of the Football League.
A cast of heroes had dragged an ailing football club back from the brink but Joyce was the one who brought them all together.
“We had some great laughs and it’s only now you realise how good the chemistry was in that group,” Joyce told the Mail from his home in Melbourne, Australia.
“I’ve been in the game a long time now and it’s unique getting that type of men together. You strive for it but it’s not easy to find.
“When you look at sportsmen, the ones that are really worth their salt, it’s the ones who
deep down want the grind, they want the work, they want the discipline. They want to put themselves out for a battle. They love the head-to-head combat. You don’t find that all the time but there was so many players like that in the group we had. Some of the memories I’ve got after they’d ground results out and they were all knackered in the dressing room afterwards, they’re special.
“I’ve seen a lot of things at Manchester United but that group at Hull was special. They weren’t the most talented, there was things they could do better, but as people they put their heart and soul into it.”
Twenty years on, Joyce and his players still command a special place in City’s history. Initially signed by Terry Dolan and beginning the 1998-99 season in Mark Hateley’s midfield, Joyce was the man tasked with preventing a sinking ship from going under when appointed player-manager in the November of that campaign.
“I think I got the job by default,” he said. “I was probably naive because I didn’t really grasp the enormity of the situation at the time.
“I was new to management and I’m sure a few older managers might not have taken the job on. There was no guarantees the club would come back up, no way.”
By the end of a pointless December the Tigers had slipped six points adrift of safety at the foot of the table but a squad transformed by Joyce’s clever dealings in the transfer market began to turn things around.
“You were persuading people to come to a club that might drop out of the league but we went to other teams and signed all the problem players they didn’t want,” he said.
“Maybe it was because they were strong characters that they were perceived to be bad apples.
“They spoke their mind and were competitive and that doesn’t suit all people.
“Jon Whitney and Jason Perry, Lincoln were desperate to get rid of them. Justin Whittle was another, Stoke just didn’t think he could play.”
The tale of Whittle’s recruitment still has Joyce beaming.
“I remember coming out of a reserve game, Everton v Stoke, and I was running down to the steps to catch up with Lou Macari. I asked if he’d worked with Justin at Celtic and he said ‘Yeah, I signed him out of the army.’
“So I asked what he was like and he said ‘You’d love him. You see those houses over there? If you told him to break into them, steal all the furniture and walk 15 miles with it on his back, that’s what he’d do. Without question. You’d not get a better lad.’
“I rang up the next day and asked what it would take to sign him. It was fifty grand and