NOW IT’S TIME FOR HUNTED TIGERS TO STEP UP

FOR Hull City to lose both Kamil Grosicki and Jarrod Bowen in the January window was a devastating blow.

Results have nosedived, and I’m not surprised. To have the guts ripped out of your side like that is a blow to everyone involved.

I remember when we were in the Championship with Brighton. We had hardly any money and so few strikers that I was being made to play as a makeshift centre-forward!

We had Danny Cullip, who’d been our captain for four years. He went to Sheffield United for £200,000. We then signed Darren Currie, who’d been released from Wycombe and came to us on trial. He was brilliant - but within four months Ipswich had snapped him up for £250,000.

Just like that we’d lost our captain and leader, plus our most creative midfielder. As a player, you do panic.

We were fighting relegation and you’re thinking to yourself

‘s***, we’ve lost our best players and I know we don’t have the money to buy like-for-like. How are we getting out of this?’.

For the manager, too, it’s very tough.

If you lose players in the summer, you have back-up plans. Time to change your system. In January, that’s gone.

In the end, it’s down to the mentality of your players. In that situation, it’s very easy to make excuses. You lose a game and you think ‘Oh well, it’s because we haven’t got this player or that player’. You can shirk responsibility.

At Brighton we had a really good dressing room. It almost galvanised us, and made us want to show that we weren’t just a one or two-man team. We fought like hell and ended up staying up on the final day of the season.

Fortunately, Hull aren’t in such a desperate situation. I don’t think they can get relegated and they aren’t going to make the play-offs. The onus is on the players to prove there is more to this Hull side than Bowen and Grosicki.