Barmby more?

So what role now exists for the city's most famous footballing son, Nick Barmby?

The continued presence of Barmby in the Hull City first team squad is a great reassurance, if mainly now for his experience and integrity among younger, wider-eyed players. The trick of "fulfilling a lifetime's ambition" by joining City in League One (even though he could have fulfilled that ambition by signing schoolboy forms in 1988 when he was at Wolfreton, rather than going to Lilleshall and being wooed by Terry Venables) has been neatly pulled off and now he is regarded, at a slightly lower level than the media assumes, as a Hull City legend.

Barmby is 34 and has two issues to deal with in these twilight years of his. Firstly, it would appear that nobody, including himself and his manager, knows any more where his best position on the field is. The withdrawn schemer was his halcyon role at Spurs, Middlesbrough and either side of the Merseyside divide, but ultimately he was never the best option for that position exclusively at any of his clubs prior to joining Leeds United and being told he was too expensive to be picked at all.

Since Peter Taylor signed him in time for City's second successive promotion, he has enjoyed the "hole" role (he also played in the hole most weeks in League One simply due to the standard of ground we often turned up at - hello Valley Parade) but also had equally as elongated spells on the left flank. It is in this latter role, the position he most occupied in his 22 England appearances (when the left side was the much-debated "problem" position for Hoddle, Keegan and Eriksson), that Barmby's usefulness to Hull City is maintained, even with quicker, younger and less injury-prone players (though not necessarily better ones) competing for it.

Barmby started against Fulham on the opening day and played well, creating chances for others and seeing one long-range header give Mark Schwarzer a panic attack but drift just past the far post. However, he was substituted on the hour - a policy previously undertaken by Peter Taylor on an almost obsessive basis, irrespective of how well he or the team was performing - and along with the subsequent tactical alterations, City looked better equipped to win the game. And did.

Since then, barring the half-arsed Carling Cup exit at Swansea, Barmby hasn't started a match, instead being used as a late sub when the game was petering out (Blackburn) or already lost (Wigan). He was injured, news which went unheralded, prior to the Newcastle game. Although his straight replacement against Fulham, Peter Halmosi, is a proper flatpack already-assembled left-sided midfielder, (left-footed and everything), it's been the form of Craig Fagan and Richard Garcia that has initially convinced Phil Brown to reserve Barmby's fitness for needier occasions than early season outings against Blackburn and Wigan.

This leads us to Barmby's second issue - that of becoming more important as an ambassador for the club and the city rather than an actual player within the squad. He had lots of attention heaped on him by one-eyed media types during the play-offs because of his localness, though gratefully Dean Windass - less celebrated nationally but practically canonised in Hull - still took most of the focus thanks to his Wembley volley. Barmby missed almost all of last season with one injury after another, but despite being still unfit for Ipswich away in the final Championship match, was ready and willing for Watford in the play-offs. This extraordinary timing, coupled with Dean Marney's sad injury between Ipswich and Watford, gave him a lifeline to gatecrash the party. He scored in both semi-finals - his only other goal that season had been an equaliser at Coventry back in August - and then started the move which led to Fraizer Campbell chipping the ball on to the immortal Windass right instep at Wembley.

Thus the fawning from outlets beyond Hull City became totally without context. Barmby was portrayed as some kind of troubleshooter, kept secretly under hibernatory shelter through the colder months before emerging into the sunlight (and there was lots of that at Watford and Wembley) as the ballast within the week-in, week-out camp began to flag. The truth was that Barmby was, both through his return to fitness and the vacancy simultaneously created by Marney's knee problem, extremely fortunate to play. That he did play, and made such an impact, is to his utmost credit and I for one don't wish to sound like a churl nor devalue his contribution. But Hull City won the play-offs with Barmby, not because of him. If Bryan Hughes and Dean Marney had been in our midfield (Hughes on the left, Marney in the centre) for Watford, like they were much of the preceding weeks and months, City would still have been the best team in the play-offs. And had either of these players scored a crucial early opener at Watford, then bravely dived in to make sure the ball got over the line in the home leg four days later and curtail the Hornets' brief hopes of a comeback, they wouldn't have had half the attention that Barmby, the former England player and therefore someone the wider media had heard of, duly received. Indeed, they'd have had none. Aside from Windass, the real heroes of the play-offs were the clubmen, the guys who'd got City there by playing stunningly all season - Myhill, Ricketts, Turner, Ashbee - but none of them, not even Ashbee, can claim to be a) from Hull; and b) an ex-England player whose high-profile history (yes, let's mention he played in that England game in Munich again, shall we?) doesn't necessitate lots of research.

Phil Brown has a lot of time for Barmby, as player and man, and indeed his first decision upon inheriting the shambles Phil Parkinson had created in December 2006 was to restore Barmby back to the side. Taylor had forever substituted Barmby or switched him around; Parkinson just didn't have him in his thoughts at all, possibly due to his power as a local individual hero as much as any tactical or personal differences going on. Parkinson's indecision was final - though not just on Barmby, but also on John Welsh and Damien Delaney. Brown, meanwhile, allowed Barmby to claim a form of iconic status at City, especially during a campaign against relegation which made us believe that with Barmby and Windass, the two best footballers the Hull boundaries have ever produced, we were crazy to be in such a lowly position. But it was Windass who rescued us more than Barmby, and indeed Windass who did more to elevate us than Barmby a year later.

Somehow though, Barmby retains a level of mystique about his impact and status which, through no fault of his own, he doesn't entirely merit. A fantastic player, who could wear his dinner jacket in League One but has been nothing more than fleeting in his impact-making in the Championship, especially since Peter Taylor left, and yet away from Hull his status remains sky-high. Now he's back in the Premier League, where his lack of games this season - and yes, it is early days - could suggest that Brown is cherry-picking the occasions where Barmby's guile is required, but it could also suggest that his time as a player of any real regularity - and therefore any real use - is about to come to an end. He'll always be loved by Hull City fans for being "one of us" (despite being a multi-millionaire by the time he finally decided to play for the Tigers) but it will be outside sources which will maintain his name more than those who saw the team play.