No-one today would dream of calling their club Hotspur, North End or Hove Albion... so why risk your club for the sake of a name?

By Patrick Collins for The Mail on Sunday

Published: 18:33 EST, 13 September 2014 | Updated: 19:37 EST, 13 September 2014

Arsenal and Aston Villa, Leyton Orient and Accrington Stanley, West Bromwich Albion and Crewe Alexandra: the names flutter past like a flock of old friends. Distinctive names, evoking Saturday tea-time, BBC Radio, and the classified football results recited with the reverence of a well-loved poem.

Many of these names seem hopelessly archaic; if you were creating a football club today, you would not dream of calling it ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ or ‘Preston North End’, far less ‘Brighton and Hove Albion’. But the titles have been hallowed by custom, and football resists any attempt to modernise such ancient usage.

Other sports set rather less store by historic titles. In the mid-Nineties, those clever people from Sky gave rugby league a terminally tasteless makeover. Thus, Wigan became ‘Wigan Warriors’. Leeds were suddenly ‘Leeds Rhinos’. Widnes started to call themselves ‘Widnes Vikings’, while the much-loved Wakefield Trinity came out as ‘Wakefield Trinity Wildcats’, and became quite offended when people laughed out loud.

Owner Dr Assem Allam has threatened to sell up if he can't change name to Hull Tigers

Owner Dr Assem Allam has threatened to sell up if he can't change name to Hull Tigers

Rugby union — with its ‘Sale Sharks’, ‘Newcastle Falcons’ and the like — is equally guilty. Yet when it comes to sheer naffness, one-day cricket outstrips them all. Consider the gloriously inappropriate ‘Lancashire Lightning’, ‘Warwickshire Bears’ and ‘Nottinghamshire Outlaws’. And pity the player who, when asked which team he represents, has to mutter: ‘Northants Steelbacks.’

Now ask yourself this question: If your football club was forced to choose between adopting one of these comic-strip titles or risking the prospect of ruin, then which option should it select? And if you think the decision is patently obvious, then clearly you do not hail from the East Riding of Yorkshire.

At the centre of the current storm stands an extraordinarily wealthy individual named Dr Assem Allam. One estimate places his family fortune at £325 million, which is useful ammunition when he is seeking to win an argument. As owner of Hull City, Dr Allam has been involved in an extended, acrimonious argument, and the dispute is finally coming to a head.

Hull City fans are against changing the name of the club to Hull Tigers

Hull City fans are against changing the name of the club to Hull Tigers

The details are relatively well-known; the good doctor is determined to change the club’s name to ‘Hull Tigers’, a title which he believes carries global appeal. If he does not succeed, then he is threatening to sell up and get out. Since the club owes him something like £100m, this could cause certain problems.

The Hull fans — led by a pressure group called ‘City Till We Die’ — are equally determined to preserve the name of City, and are challenging Dr Allam to do his worst. The Football Association have rejected his plans, and the case currently rests with the Court of Arbitration. Here, I declare some small interest. Many years ago, I spent a chill winter evening in a public hall in Hull, watching a bunch of City fans launch a campaign to save the club from extinction. The rhetoric was desperate, the crisis urgent, and the effect was strangely moving. At one stage, collecting buckets were passed around and swiftly filled with notes and coins. Their club had been abused and neglected by all manner of chancers, and the only hope of survival lay with the supporters themselves.

History records how bravely they responded, how fortunes slowly changed and how, after long periods of uncertainty, Dr Allam came along in 2010 and started to sign his saving cheques.

The money was remarkable, and the results were startling. Hull’s Premier League place, their FA Cup final appearance, their first experience of European football: they all stemmed from that spectacular investment. And the owner’s ambition burns as brightly as ever: ‘Nobody works for ever,’ says the 75-year-old. ‘But I wanted to be here until I achieved my ambition of being in the top four ... if I told you three years ago there would be all this, you would have thought it was a joke. In a couple of years’ time you will find it’s not a joke, it’s a possibility — if I am still here.’

The distinctive name of Aston Villa has stood the test of time

The distinctive name of Aston Villa has stood the test of time

But he stands by his threat to sell if his plans are frustrated. And he adds: ‘People who know me know that I do not go back on what I say.’ The situation is genuinely acute, and as they all trundle towards the precipice, I find myself thinking of those people who made their modest donations on that long-ago winter evening.

Their struggle was for simple survival, and I wonder what they would have made of a situation which sees Hull’s future as a football club put at stake for a tenuous point of principle. Because that is how the dispute appears to the outside world.

It must be said that, as a breed, football fans tend to be systematically exploited, which is why some of us instinctively take their side in most of their disputes with club owners.

But, occasionally, their passion seems misdirected and their cause misconceived. And this, I suspect, is such an occasion.

For all the petitions and protests, the shrill campaigns and the earnest invocations of ‘the historic identity of Hull City AFC’, a name is just a name, nothing more.

So it is time for a touch of healing compromise, with Dr Allam pledging his continued support for the club, and the pressure group abandoning its misguided protest. In any case, is ‘Hull Tigers’ really so terrible? After all, they could be called far worse things. Just ask the Vikings of Widnes, or the Wildcats of dear old Wakefield.

Read between the lines, Jonny

In an age when sports people are all too ready to blast and bawl at the sight of a microphone, the art of elegant skewering has fallen into disrepair. Our thanks, therefore, to Chris Read (below), captain of Nottinghamshire.

As Yorkshire toiled towards the victory which would secure them the County Championship, they encountered some obdurate resistance from Samit Patel at Trent Bridge. Then Jonny Bairstow, the Yorkshire wicketkeeper, collected a delivery down leg side, held it in his gloves for a few moments and realised that Patel, believing the ball to be ‘dead’, had almost imperceptibly lifted his back foot. Bairstow whipped off the bails and screeched a successful appeal.

It seemed the sharpest of sharp practice; an act which was within the laws of the game, but far outside the spirit. And Read might have been expected to make a fuss.

Instead, he contented himself with this observation: ‘It’s not something I’ve ever done in 16 years of first-class cricket. It’s always a questionable one: how long should you hold the ball before it’s dead? I wouldn’t necessarily be too comfortable with it, but each to his own.’

It was a splendidly stylish exercise in controlled contempt. We must hope that Bairstow got the message.

Jimmy must be warned

The most curious question of the sporting week was posed by Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, once a footballer, now a newly unemployed football manager.

Former Leeds striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink wants the manager's job at Elland Road

Former Leeds striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink wants the manager's job at Elland Road

‘Who doesn’t want to manage Leeds United?’ asked Jim. Since Hasselbaink has never seemed an especially naïve character, we assumed he was aware of the track record of the club’s owner, Massimo Cellino. In the course of his exotic career, Cellino has acquired a bewildering number of managers — about 38 at the last count — as well as two convictions for fraud. His most recent employee, Dave Hockaday, was pitifully paid, regularly humiliated and lasted just 70 days. According to Shaun Harvey, chief executive of the Football League, Cellino could still be barred from ownership, pending the written judgment of his latest tax appeal.

One suspects that the Football League are not entirely convinced that Cellino is a ‘fit and proper’ person to control one of their clubs. Yet Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink can still innocently inquire: ‘Who doesn’t want to manage Leeds United?’ Somebody really ought to tell him.

P.S.

Last Sunday morning, Roy Hodgson was being widely reviled as a tactically naïve, strategically inept, inspirationally inadequate manager of England. One victory, two goals and three Euro 2016 qualifying points later and he is credited with the perspicacity of a Ferguson, the sagacity of a Shankly and the flair of a Guardiola. The first assessment was cruelly unjust, the second is absurdly inflated. For the essential reality is unchanged: Hodgson is simply a thoughtful, imaginative football coach. He is also, by some distance, the man best qualified to manage England. 

 


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