Adam

I hope Adam Pearson has made the right appointment by giving the manager's job at Derby County to Nigel Clough. Football as a whole feels goodwill towards Clough because of his abilities as a player, his thoughtful, sportsmanlike demeanour and his determination to serve a proper managerial apprenticeship in the non-league game prior to re-entering the full-time professional ranks. And, of course, because his dad was such an important, life-enhancing part of the game for so long.

The goodwill for Adam Pearson, meanwhile, exists unequivocally here in the city of Hull for his single-minded rescue act. Because we've packed so much drama and achievement into our last season and a half, it seems ages ago that Pearson declared his intention to sell. In fact, it was a mere 18 months ago that he first announced his decision. Two months later, he had flogged the club to Paul Duffen and, after briefly taking another seat on the board, had gone.

Players and managers get the plaudits when things go right for a football club, and quite right too. But ultimately Hull City were never going to get good enough players and managers to take the club away from the non-league trapdoor until somebody who was able to put the club's interests and the fans' interests ahead of his own was found. That man was Pearson and it was a joy to get him, even though we had just about frayed the bones of our backsides and become the laughing stock of sport before he finally arrived with his rescue package.

Prior to Pearson, we'd had some really shoddy chairmen and owners. Between Don Robinson's departure in 1989 and Pearson's arrival in 2001 we had a characterless introvert who threw stupid money at his manager and then sacked him; an incompetent, over-cheerful accountant whose blind faith in an awful manager and diabolical decision-making took us down two divisions; a hopeful communicator whose apparent sensibility was quickly dissolved by a takeover; a pair of thieves working in cahoots; and a spiteful tennis-loving pillar of impatience who tried to strip the club of all history and locality - and, eventually, all existence - to satisfy his own ego.

Then along came Pearson. He put the money in, oversaw Brian Little's fruitful attempt to get an unpaid side into the play-offs, and began rebuilding the club.

Pearson was a chairman who was forever learning, and his dismissal of Little the season after the play-off campaign was certainly hasty, and made all the more unappetising by his appointment of Danish waster Jan Molby as successor, getting rid of the supersized Scandinavian after merely three months at the helm. Accepting his error, he then went for real experience and kudos - not to mention history in getting clubs promoted - in Peter Taylor, who was basking in the glory of his unblemished record at the helm of the England Under 21s and for almost four years took Hull City nowhere but upwards, earning two promotions in his first two full seasons and consolidating the club as a Championship presence prior to the club of his heart, Crystal Palace, offering him something new.

Even that could have been prevented, as the sometimes fractious (but always professional) relationship Taylor had with his chairman finally boiled over when Taylor expressed interest in the vacancy at Charlton Athletic and Pearson publicly questioned his dedication as a result. This was a poor, unprofessional decision by Pearson, and City nearly went backwards as a result when, as Taylor closed the door behind him, the vastly inexperienced Phil Parkinson walked in the other way and proceeded to find himself mightily out of his depth.

Colchester United dug their heels in over Parkinson and Pearson had to pay a small fortune to get his man, only to realise in December that, like Molby, he was the wrong appointment at the wrong time and got rid. Phil Brown, asked in as first team coach by Parkinson after a restructuring of the original coaching set-up left a gap, was given a simple task by Pearson - keep the club in the Championship, please. Though it was a rather narrow squeak in the end, Brown did as requested.

By now Pearson had realised that he didn't possess the financial clout, either personally or through his anonymous backers, to invest the sort of money in the club which allows Premier League ambitions to be realised. Knowing that sticking around was more likely to turn the club stagnant and risk relegation rather than maintain a consistent presence in the Championship, and aware of the club's burning desire to ditch the monkey on its back for a whole century regarding top flight football, he began to tout it around. Paul Duffen, who had already pondered buying West Ham United prior to the Icelandic takeover, surreptitiously came in and shadowed Pearson for the remainder of the season as Brown (introduced to Duffen simply as "my friend" by Pearson to keep the cloak on) and his players strived and scrapped, successfully, to avoid the drop.

Since then, the club's sudden and showbiz progress has been down to Duffen's bluster and Brown's tactical and recruitment nous. Duffen, like Pearson, is a media-friendly chairman, happy to partake in discussions about his club or the game as a whole without turning it into any form of ego trip. Pearson, along with Taylor, laid the vital paving on which Duffen and Brown duly parked their Premier League limousines, and both men were quick to mention the role their respective predecessors (or, in Brown's case, predecessor but one) had played in City's elevation via Wembley.

Pearson's legacy at Hull City is present and resplendent forever in the shape of the KC Stadium, the home we had begged for as a club for years. Pearson's smart persuasion and business acumen, along with the local council's major windfall via the telephone company sell-off, made the project possible. A plaque is affixed to the wall of the main stadium foyer, close to the symbolic Premier League bell, which very simply and earnestly logs and lauds Pearson's contribution to the very existence, not to mention progress, of Hull City.

Beyond bankrolling and rehoming, Pearson's other great contribution was in allowing the fans to play a major role in the club's future plans. The conception of the Fans Liaison Committee was a smart move by Pearson, allowing 20 or so supporters, representing various areas of the community, areas of the stadium, age groups, fanzines and exiles to informally discuss matters involving ticketing, merchandise, travel to matches, stadium facilities and even the design of the next season's kit with the chairman and his associates. This was not only welcome, it was also eerie after suffering under a succession of bad, uncaring chairmen who treated the supporter purely as a paying customer and not any representative of the club's very lifeblood. The FLC continued under Duffen last season but has been disbanded since promotion. Some believe this discontinuance of the FLC is ominous, but that's what years of neglect from over-powerful shysters does to the mindset of the ardently cynical City supporter. So far, Duffen has been nothing but a good chairman.

Pearson's main copybook blot comes via his record with managers. Taylor was his ace card appointment, but the two evidently had issues with one another, even though ultimately it only went severely wrong when Taylor, understandably, chose to speak with Charlton and Pearson failed to engage brain prior to opening his mouth. Beyond and before that, Pearson fired an unlucky Little and appointed the astonishingly unequipped Molby, then after Taylor went, he opted for Parkinson. Brown was his temporary appointment, but ultimately it was Parkinson who brought Brown into the club and Duffen who finally gave him a managerial contract and a blueprint for the future.

So now, at Derby, he finds himself again hoping that his managerial antennae hasn't deserted him. Not long after becoming executive chairman at Derby, he sacked Billy Davies, a man who got the club into the Premier League and then had pretty much zero money to spend to even bother considering trying to stay there, and appointed Paul Jewell, a manager who had taken two deeply unfashionable clubs into the top flight and proceeded to keep them for at least a year. Jewell was, on paper, a perfectly acceptable appointment but the parasite feeding off Derby's disgraceful anti-presence in the Premier League and inability to fight back after relegation eventually ate into his own resolve, despite remarkable Carling Cup progress, and he quit the club.

And so to Clough. Pearson told the media this week that there isn't even the remotest smidgeon of nostalgia or romance attached to Clough's appointment. He may believe that, but ultimately a man who had managed Burton Albion through the pyramid and on to the cusp of the Football League wasn't going to be on his radar unless he was called Clough (or another family surname synonymous with either Derby County or football as a whole). Clough has had a long apprenticeship in the non-league game and deserves his chance, but his surname will have been, even sub-consciously, a factor in his appointment, in the same way that the blindingly under-prepared Roy Keane and Paul Ince have gone into Premier League management on their playing careers alone - and since left it as failures.

Although there isn't much about Derby County which makes Hull City fans send any real empathy their way - our achievements as play-off winners in the Premier League this season compared to theirs the year before are as comparable as a badger is to a wasp, and let's not forget the way Brown was treated as manager of Derby too - the presence of our saviour at the helm provokes a degree of warmth and sentimentality, not to mention lifelong gratitude, which means that we hope, for Pearson's own sake first and last, that his decision to give Clough the top job at Pride Park proves a good one.