When humour and hope created a bond between players and fans

EVERY football fan knows that at times you either laugh or cry. For several years during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hull City fans would weep.

But sometimes during those dank, dismal days of depression, we’d laugh. We had to. Any fleeting ray of light which shone through the fog of financial folly was seized on with relish.

Like the time one of our substitutes drove himself to an away game. And got lost. And drove round the streets, his boots in a supermarket carrier bag on the passenger seat.

Each time he spotted a Hull fan he would pull over and yell: “Where’s the ground?” He finally found it but he didn’t get off the bench and we lost – again.

There were hoots of derision from the national press. when we had a coach which wasn’t deemed fit to get the team to an away game at Barnet. The papers printed maps so our players could reach north London by cab, by bus, or even on foot.

We were a laughing stock, and the pantomime seemed to last for years, our club slowly dying in front of our very eyes.

From the mid-1990s, the writing had been on the wall. And as we slid down the leagues, we plumbed new depths.

True, there were high points. The 8-4 Cup win over Whitby, Duane Derby scoring six, in front of less than 3,000 under the lights at the rusting relic of Boothferry Park.

The Great Escape season, spared from almost certain oblivion by Warren Joyce, and his team of no-nonsense workhorses who became Hull City legends to a man. Justin Whittle, Jon Whitney, Colin Alcide. “He used to be a bouncer,” the tannoy man would yell as Gary Brabin bustled out of the changing rooms on to the pitch. All muscle and brawn, and, like the fans, desperate for the Tigers to survive.

And survive we did. Just. But it seemed, by late 2000, to have been a short stay of execution.

By then, David Lloyd’s patience was wearing thin. The tennis star’s football dream had long failed. He no longer owned the club but he did own its ground and he wanted his rent.

Earlier, shortly into the 1998-99 season, the fans had fired off a volley of tennis balls, hundreds of them raining down onto the pitch at the Reebok in a League Cup game at Bolton, to show their displeasure at the tennis star.

He had fired off a volley of his own, labelling Hull folk as “crap”.

In one interview he had said: “I have had my fill of certain people in Hull and am going. It will be the end of professional football in this city.”

The next game, at home to Cardiff, in October, 1998, had been dubbed the Tigers “last match ever”. We lost. 2-1.

So, the threat of extinction had been hanging in the air for a couple of years when, in February 2001, the club was again locked out of Boothferry Park. Lloyd wanted his rent, and the taxman wanted his cash as well, and yet through all of this, Hull City’s long suffering fans were still hopeful of clinching a place in the play-offs.

The more the misery mounted off the pitch, the more consistent the team became on it.

With City in the High Court on February 7, it seemed the home game with Orient three days later may be cancelled. But there was another stay of execution, an entry into administration, and to celebrate more than 8,000 saw City beat Orient 1-0, Rodney Rowe grabbing the goal.

While the administrator sorted out the mess and strove to find a credible buyer, Brian Little won Manager of the Month.

Strange, strange days. The players, not being paid, put their all into every game, and then came news of the saviour, Adam Pearson, taking on a job few in football would have dared to even think about.

What he did for Hull City is almost beyond words, turning a national joke of a club into one that would grace the Premier League within seven years.

And what those players did that year under Brian Little deserves similar recognition. True, we lost in the play-off semi-finals, but to have got there despite the constant financial mayhem was astonishing.

What it means to Hull fans is also hard to describe. Imagine if your football club was about to be extinguished. All those years of support wiped out, those daydreams dying in front of your eyes.

For a while in those not so distant days, only 10 years ago but almost from another world, it seemed each game could be Hull City’s last. But we survived, we began to prosper and we reached heights none of us really believed we could ever scale.

The power of football. More important than life or death, as Bill Shankly claimed?

You bet.