The plot thickens, and not pleasantly either. The American surgeon who has looked over Jimmy Bullard's poorly knee in the past has decided that there has been fresh damage to the midfielder's anterior cruciate ligament and has operated on it, thereby ruling the £5m signing out for the rest of the season with the stroke of a scalpel.
It doesn't make the club look good at all. While there is every chance that the damage was caused by the challenge on Bullard at West Ham United, his only action for the club, the fact is that he managed to finish the game before any severe injury was suspected. Any player with a cruciate injury will tell you that as soon as it happens, you know it and you go straight off the pitch.
Therefore it seems surely more likely that the injury is the original one, so horrifically and publicly suffered early in his Fulham days. If so, then the medical procedures in assessing the fitness of potential new signings must be flawed at the KC. Either that, or the management and board took a calculated but still major risk by ignoring the advice or seeking best case scenarios prior to agreeing to Bullard's record transfer.
The fact is that we've paid £5m and committed to a whopping wage structure on top of it for a player who will be kicking no further balls in Hull City's season. The doom-mongers will say, cretinously, that this puts paid to City's hopes of survival, overlooking the bald facts that a) City are still only a skip and jump away from the top half of the Premier League; and b) all this season's achievements have been attained without Bullard so far and can be continued without him.
As painful as it may seem, the time has come to wish Bullard well but then make him as unimportant as John Welsh or Michael Bridges in the minds of the supporters, and concentrate on the performers who are available to keep the Tigers from the fire. Perhaps a start could be made on finding the Geovanni we had in September and October, as he is now, again, our best single hope for playing our way out of peril.
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