One of the the last significant moments of John Welsh's bizarre Hull City career came against this weekend's opponents, West Bromwich Albion, a whole two seasons ago.
The future had looked good for Welsh. New manager Phil Parkinson had paired him up in the centre of midfield with fresh signing Dean Marney, making a bright young English pairing from two of the biggest academies in football.
City were outfoxed for periods of the game, but played superbly at times. Positive, vibrant, committed attacking football at the Hawthorns heralded, it seemed, a new era.
We'd failed to score but come close frequently. The Baggies, under Bryan Robson, were 1-0 up but clinging on as injury time approached. Then Welsh made a late run into the box and was clearly felled. It was as clear-cut a foul as you could ever see.
No penalty was given. Unhelpfully, a supporter ran on to the pitch to attempt a physical remonstration with the referee and he was stupendously rugby tackled by Craig Fagan as he neared his target.
That was in August 2006. More than two years on, Welsh is still on Hull City's books, but as forgotten and as peripheral a member that any squad player could be. Only his presence on the back of the match programme ever reminds people he remains under contract at his club.
And yet he is a clear talent. A Liverpudlian who emerged from the Anfield academy, he was heralded, perhaps dangerously, as "the next Steven Gerrard". He made occasional appearances in lesser games for the Liverpool first team but it was clear that being the next Steven Gerrard was not going to make him anything like the actual Steven Gerrard. So, conscious of the player's worth to his England under 21 squads, Peter Taylor was allowed to take the lad on loan during City's first season back in English football's second tier.
Welsh was excellent at times, frustrating at others. His crowning moment at Hull City remains a great victory at Coventry City at their (then) newly-opened, part-finished and (still) architecturally unconvincing Ricoh Arena. City won 2-0 and Welsh scored both. The first was a cross which took a deflection and turned into a shot as a result; the second a memorable piece of individuality which took him beyond two players with quick feet before steering a curling, chipped effort round the goalkeeper and in at the far post. It was one of those shots that seemed to take forever to find its target.
City had just lost Ian Ashbee to his career-threatening bone complaint and Welsh's presence as a ballwinner who happened to be able to play, really play, proved ample consolation in the skipper's absence. Yet Taylor, in his charmingly unpredictable and sometimes pig-headed way, soon dropped him as City went through the Christmas period in peculiar form. There seemed to be no explanation for it at all; Taylor just preferred other candidates for the City engine room and only when City travelled to Stoke early in the New Year was Welsh restored. Perhaps there was only coincidence to blame when City duly won 3-0 at the Britannia, a tremendously satisfying result which also saw Boaz Myhill save two penalties and Stoke fans start fighting each other in the home end.
Welsh was in and out thanks to knocks for the rest of the season, although his move was crucially made permanent when Liverpool decided they liked the look of 17 year old protégé Paul Anderson and offered Welsh as bait. Gleefully, City took it.
Taylor's departure and Parkinson's arrival seemed, initially, to re-invigorate Welsh. He played in the aforementioned opener at West Brom and played well. A decision different to the one actually given by the referee when the player was dumped to the ground may have produced a different result and different fortunes for Welsh. But once City lost the next game against Barnsley at the KC, after taking a 2-0 lead too, Parkinson began to panic. His experiments, his desire to change stuff to quickly and confusingly, got up everyone's noses, on and off the pitch, and Welsh was frequently dropped or substituted. More often than not, his omission before the game or removal during it was greeted with incredulity, certainly until Ashbee's return after a year's treatment and new signing David Livermore's eventual settlement, and all Welsh could show for it was a solitary goal - a consolation at that - in a dreadful 3-1 defeat at Preston.
Parkinson's dismissal and Phil Brown's arrival allowed Welsh a little more leeway, although Ashbee's welcome return - for leadership reasons, mainly - meant that Welsh's nose was occasionally out of joint, not helped further by the dogged belief shown in the expensive but underperforming Marney. Then, when Welsh went two-footed into a tackle on his fellow Liverpool academy alumnus Neil Mellor, breaking his own leg, his season was instantly over. He was carried off while Mellor luckily emerged unscathed. It remains quite astonishing to think that he didn't have a red card waved in his face to rub further salt in to the fresh, self-inflicted wound.
That was in March 2007. A whole 18 months - and a tad more - have since passed and Welsh has not figured on a first team pitch since, but here he remains. A lad of his obvious promise seems to have been a victim twice over; of his own occasional unreliability and of at least one, possibly two, managers' prejudices against him. City's success since he gave up playing - survival in 2007, promotion last season, Premier League entertainers now - suggests that he hasn't been missed and, of course, he hasn't. Brown didn't even pick him for the "do we have to play these games?" Cup ties last season at Crewe and Plymouth, while other participants on the cusp like Sam Collins, Ryan France, Stuart Elliott, Michael Bridges and Nathan Doyle all got their chance. Welsh featured on the bench in the Championship at Norwich City last season when the injury crisis was so bad that Brown was wholly lacking in choice, but even then everyone knew that his hopes for getting on to the pitch were precisely nil.
Welsh will be given a free transfer in the summer, undoubtedly. This is assuming he doesn't move before then, although a short loan spell at Chester last season was cut short, allegedly due to Welsh's own poor attitude. He has done a lot of spectating in the last 18 months and seen his team-mates become eternal heroes to the city of Hull, the like of which the club had never produced before. For a man of his obvious ability, it's a crying shame that he didn't play even the tiniest of roles in this success. That's down purely to him, the forgotten man under Parkinson, the ignored man under Brown. And for all that Parkinson could have treated him better, Brown was certainly proved right.
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