Fans irate as Hull's tailspin towards League One turns toxic
It has not been the best of weeks for Hull. On Tuesday the Championship strugglers succumbed to their worst defeat for more than a century, on Thursday club executives were rebutting rumours that Grant McCann was no longer in charge and on Saturday they face a future-defining home game against their relegation rivals Luton.
The 8-0 defeat at Wigan not only left McCann’s side third-bottom but has made victory against a Luton side below them only on goal difference seem imperative if a fall into League One is to be avoided.
Given Hull have won only one of their past 18 games, this looks a far from straightforward task. “The important thing is how we respond to Tuesday,” said Cliff Byrne, McCann’s assistant as, via Zoom, he assumed media duties normally shouldered by the manager.
“He’s good, he’s good, we’re just sharing the workload,” said Byrne when asked whether the 40-year-old McCann had quit before the season’s penultimate fixture. “The manager’s leading from the front; pressure comes naturally to him.”
McCann’s technical area stress could be exacerbated should increasingly disgruntled fans succeed in a plan to gather, complete with protest banners, in the parkland outside the KCOM Stadium on Saturday. They intend to lob balls over the stands and into the ground in complaint at the club’s stewardship.
Although McCann’s popularity has waned considerably, the real target of their ire remains Hull’s owners. The Allam family are held responsible for a steady decline at a club which, as recently as 2017, were part of the Premier League.
On New Year’s Day this year Hull were eighth in the Championship and McCann was not shy about talking up his promotion hopes. Such plans were quickly left in tatters when Ehab Allam – who has run the club since his father, Assem, retired from day-to-day involvement following a serious illness – sold the team’s two outstanding players, Jarrod Bowen and Kamil Grosicki, during the January transfer window.
Bowen, McCann’s leading scorer, joined West Ham for £22m, and Grosicki, a gifted if high-maintenance winger, cost West Brom £800,000.
The wins immediately dried up, and the crisis deepened when Eric Lichaj, Hull’s influential captain and United States right-back, and his deputy, the Australia midfielder Jackson Irvine, failed to agree short post-lockdown contract extensions once their deals expired in June.
Their exits have left Hull bereft of on-pitch leadership among a somewhat motley band of loanees and free transfers. With Lichaj no longer around, McCann lacks a player over 30 and the resultant amalgam of inexperience and acute lack of team spirit threatens to prove extremely costly.
Admittedly £1.3m was spent on signing the forward Mallik Wilks from Barnsley following a sporadically promising six-month loan. The 21-year-old has scored twice in five appearances since the restart but even Wilks’s talent for drawing fouls and winning dangerous free-kicks appears to be the equivalent of trying to mitigate the damage flowing from a significant leak in a ceiling with a washing-up bowl.
All things considered, it is probably for the best that physical distancing rules dictate Luton’s visit must take place behind closed doors at a ground latterly no stranger to crowd mutinies. Discontent originally sparked by the Allam’s failed attempt to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers has been festering in east Yorkshire for the past seven years.
By the time, in 2015, the Football Association vetoed this rebrand plan, Assem Allam had resolved to sell Hull. Although mooted Chinese buyers failed the Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ test, the £40m asking price has deterred other potential purchasers who would need to invest significantly in updating the club’s tranquil but tired training ground in the pretty market town of Cottingham.
Since Steve Bruce walked out of the manager’s office in despair in July 2016, Mike Phelan, Marco Silva, Leonid Slutsky, Nigel Adkins and McCann have been disillusioned by the board’s refusal to speculate to accumulate.
The local mood is so toxic and the disconnect between club and fans so great that the Hull Daily Mail is banned from matches and press conferences. The reason cited was “negative coverage” but it is hard to see how any sort of positive spin could be applied to a tailspin described as “just awful” by Phil Brown, the manager who in 2008 led Hull into the Premier League for the first time.
Twelve years on the unbridled joy of that elevation feels a distant
memory. “I was really, really horrified by the Wigan scoreline,” Brown says. “It’s something those involved will never forget.”
Byrne prefers to concentrate on redemption, preferably by the end of the Luton game. “There’s no sugar-coating anything but football’s beauty is that Saturday’s an opportunity for us to improve,” McCann’s assistant said. “An opportunity to embrace and enjoy the challenge – and to perform.”