Steve Cotterill, Paul Simpson and our own Peter Taylor find themselves in World Cup winning company today after Chelsea chose to dispense with the services of Luiz Felipe Scolari.
All four of these men have been sacked by their clubs in the last 18 months due to their employers believing the last result was the last straw. In each of their cases, the last result was against Hull City.
This means that the directors of Burnley, Preston North End and Crystal Palace all believed that dropping two or all three points against mere Hull City was unacceptable, belittling, a stick with which the manager should be heavily beaten all the way to the jobseeker's allowance application form. Chelsea clearly now feel likewise.
Chelsea must be nuts to sack their manager just ahead of the Champions League's resumption, but that's a debate which interests me only mildly and is certainly not for discussion here. Somehow, even the most partisan member of the Tiger Nation should be able to understand how Chelsea's supporters and aloof owner must feel. Hull City? Who the hell...? If we can't beat them at our own gaff, something's clearly amiss. Heads must roll!
However, it was a mixture of faintly amusing and deeply, deeply patronising for the Tigers to be seen as the final straw for clubs as insignificant as Burnley, Preston and Palace last season. Each may have a grander history than us but they were certainly no grander in the present last season, and to assume that past glories somehow make you better than a team with next to no history at all before a ball has been kicked is deeply flawed.
Palace were first to act, dispensing with Taylor after Dean Marney's injury time penalty earned City a 1-1 draw at Selhurst Park in October. Palace were pedestrian and predictable, and given that Taylor was our manager of magnificence for three and a half years prior to joining the club where his playing name was made, it was easier for us than any other adversary that season to make those predictions. Nevertheless, the Tigers weren't much better and it brought joy to nobody in Hull except one minuscule pocket of imbecilic City fans when the next day Palace announced on their website, curtly and blankly, that Taylor had left the club. Not beating Hull City on their own turf was the last nail in the coffin for Taylor.
One month later, Burnley were in a bad run of form but still seemed to have faith in their exuberant, likeable manager in Steve Cotterill. The game wasn't thrilling though City were again the dominant outfit, and once more an injury time goal - a memorable header from Michael Turner - did the dirty on Cotterill as the Tigers went back across the Pennines with a 1-0 win. Despite no audible clamour from the home support for action to be taken (unlike at Palace, where the regulars were not shrinking violets in levelling their disgust at Taylor's existence), Cotterill's departure was confirmed within 48 hours.
Within another 48 hours, Preston North End visited the KC Stadium. This was probably the most predictable sacking of the lot, given that Preston fans were already making it plain through various media sources that their manager had shot his bolt and the club was in deepening trouble for as long as he was retained.
Preston were absolutely dreadful and City attained a 3-0 win without breaking sweat, with a close-range header from Dean Windass, a smart turn and shot from Fraizer Campbell and a peach of a free kick from Andy Dawson. The "sacked in the morning" chant rose in volume from the East Stand at the wretched, spotlit Simpson, whose spirit seemed to visibly evaporate before everyone's eyes when the Preston fans, humiliated and furious, joined in. There was another 48-hour period of avoidable agony before the inevitable cull of Simpson was made public. Hull City had, directly and indirectly, forced two Lancashire clubs to change their management personnel.
All three of these dismissals last season appeared to dictate that dropping all or some of the points available to Hull City, a club that counted one Associate Members Cup final appearance and a couple of sixth-placed positions in the second tier as its finest moments, was simply unacceptable and punishable by removal of livelihood instantly. By not wishing to sound too much like a victim in all this, it seemed to only briefly hurt the Tiger Nation, as quickly this sense of wronging transformed itself into tuneful amusement. Each time City looked set to win a match, the "sacked in the morning" song began and on a few occasions there seemed to be potential for the song to prove prophetic - the likes of Brian Laws at Sheffield Wednesday and Iain Dowie at Coventry City seemed vulnerable after each lost at the KC, but clung on. Unfortunately, attempts to oust Nigel Adkins from the Scunthorpe United job also fell on deaf ears. Still, promotion in the most glorious of fashions seemed, perversely, to provide some consolation to the ousted managers in question that perhaps his team was simply out-thought by a better team and his directors were too blinkered to see this.
This season, the song has been playfully sung at Arsene Wenger during and after the 2-1 win at Arsenal, and more vociferously at the hapless Juande Ramos on the occasion of City's 1-0 win at Tottenham Hotspur. Ramos could easily have gone after losing to the Tigers, though ultimately managed three further weeks in the job.
So now Scolari has left his role after failing to attain the required number of points - ie, all three of them - against Hull City. The problems at Chelsea go beyond a meagre goalless draw with the Tigers though, and certainly there has been a paucity - though not a total absence - of opinion from the columnists and pundits which claimed that not defeating tiny Hull City was the final straw. If a goalless draw with Hull City is seen as worse as a defeat against some other clubs, then imagine if either Marney or Craig Fagan had taken one of those big, big chances created by the Tigers at Stamford Bridge. Scolari could have been packing his bags and collecting his pay-off cheque while the players were still in the bath.
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