Mark Bateman
With the new Premier League season just weeks away, one manager, above all others, looks to be under increasing pressure and is desperately scouring the transfer market to make a belated impact.
This time last year, his club were gearing up for their first season in the top flight, fans of the side had waited over 100 years for this moment and now it had finally arrived. With a mixture of free agents and hungry young players keen to cut their teeth in the Premier League, this club managed to stay up on the last day of the season, following Newcastle’s failure to win at Aston Villa.
The manager is Phil Brown and the club is Hull City.
After a blistering start to last season, where even thoughts of Europe entered Tigers fans heads, even though just managing achieving Premier League survival, Brown was hailed as a hero. The fans of the East Yorkshire club would be forgiven for having thought that the hard part was done.
Wrong.
Survival is merely the start, the second season syndrome has seen a number of teams that came up, go down, just ask the fans of Reading. 12 months on and the club’s position hasn’t really changed. Brown surely has the money to spend, but can’t seem to sign the players he wants. The situation is growing worrying. But what most fans of the club won’t say is that it is arguably the most successful manager in the club’s history fault.
Brown is targeting all the wrong players; he is trying to compete for established Premier League players. They won’t risk coming to a club that could be relegated by the time May 2010 comes around. Michael Owen, Bobby Zamora, Marc-Antoine Fortune, Frazier Campbell. All of them have no desire to be fighting for survival when they have offers from other more established clubs. And sure enough none arrived on Humberside.
The infamous dressing down handed out by the Hull boss to his players in the pitch at Manchester City could be another reason some stars are hesitant to move to the KC Stadium. Whilst Hull’s location also cannot be ruled out as a disadvantage. Bigger clubs than Hull have struggled to overcome their location handicap when it comes to persuading foreign talents to swap the sun for anything other than London’s bright lights.
Perhaps the best option open to Brown would be to sign the best players in the Championship, all would come at reasonable prices and all would have something to prove. They don’t have to benefit the club in the long term, just long enough for the Tigers to establish themselves as Premier League main-stays, then the better players will be more likely to take an offer from Hull more seriously.
But it seems that Brown is becoming an increasingly desperate man, a man who could become the first managerial casualty of the Premier League this season, because rather than looking at his options, he would rather argue the odds over the transfer window system and bid for players who are not interested in coming to the Tigers.
Everyone knows that the transfer window system is a poor idea, which encourages panic buying and puts more money in agent’s pockets. But until that system is changed clubs up and down the land just have to get on with it. Hull City are no different. And should Phil Brown make the wrong moves between now and the slamming shut of the window at the end of August then Hull will have a desperate season ahead.
Maybe the man who shocked the league last season has a couple of surprises up his sleeve. Only time will tell.
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