Hull City are in China now, preparing for their first of two games in the flesh-pressing Barclays Asia Trophy. It's been known for months that the Tigers would be in the Far East for this mini-tournament, but right now one can't help but wish they weren't.
Aside from promoting the club name (which isn't a bad thing at all as a Premier League club; may as well make hay while the sun shines), this involvement in China will surely only serve as a hindrance to the club's ever more urgent need to get new bodies into the first team squad after a frustrating and supremely anger-inducing transfer window so far.
Nobody, and I include both Paul Duffen and Phil Brown in this, would have expected to travel halfway across the world, to the heat and smog of communist China, with a squad dented quite so substantially thanks to departures, injuries and a complete lack of fresh faces. Aside from Steven Mouyokolo, who was a January signing anyway, nobody new has been added. What feels like a thousand centre forwards have said no, while the hoped-for recruitment of extra midfield strength and - after the saddening sale of Sam Ricketts - a good full back, simply hasn't happened.
More than ever Brown needs to be chatting up fellow managers and sweet-talking agents and players whose services he has been granted permission to pursue. As he rightly says, he can do this by telephone in China, but it isn't the same. Being so impersonal and distant, figuratively and literally, from the object of his desire could act solely as a handicap to the progress in the market City desperately need to make. Four or five days of being stranded on the opposite side of the world may be enough to make a targeted player, reliant on feeling his ego swell, decide he isn't loved enough and join Portsmouth or Wolves instead.
There is every good intention within the trip to China and many of the players will enjoy the experience of playing for a madcap crowd who have been allowed in more enlightened political times to embrace something which is as westernised in its appraoch as most things associated with big, bad capitalist instinct. But maybe a week ago, the sanest thing to do in these trying circumstances to please fans, players and locals was for the squad to go under Brian Horton's stewardship while Brown stayed behind and got on with his primary role during the close-season - persuading footballers to join Hull City. It's going to be hard to do that in a place so unfamiliar and with so much else to occupy his attentions.
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