Fettis was the youthful Ulsterman who was plucked from his local league as a teenager and became one of the few bright, worthy performers in a 1990s Hull City set-up which just lurched from crisis to crisis. He played in a variety of hideously mulit-coloured goalkeeper shirts for five seasons at Boothferry Park, impressively enough to earn full international honours for Northern Ireland and eventually seal a big-money move, the sort which was keeping the profligate, badly-run Tigers alive for the whole decade.
Yet as fine a keeper as he was, it was his goalscoring feats as a City player which will forever endear him to the Tiger Nation who suffered, week in week out, back in those days. Just before Christmas 1994, the dually desperate Terry Dolan was so devoid of fit players that he named Fettis as an outfield substitute for the visit of Oxford United to Boothferry Park.
City were overperforming that season, relying as much on team spirit and the general poor quality of the third tier at the time as they were on any alleged footballing excellence. Under Dolan, there was rarely any of this, despite the invaluable presence of Dean Windass as goalscorer in chief.
City were 2-1 up thanks to a Windass brace when Fettis was slung on as a replacement for Linton Brown up front with the now notorious instruction from Dolan to "make a nuisance of yourself" ringing in his ears. What Dolan expected to achieve from putting a goalkeeper on as a striker is anyone's guess, but it surely can't have been the goal that Fettis promptly scored from a Craig Lawford cross to seal a 3-1 victory. It will be one of the most obvious "I was there" moments in the life of a City fan for as long as anyone who remembers it remains on this earth.
Fettis had just returned from injury and Steve Wilson was having one of his regular flurries between the sticks. We didn't see him again until he returned between the posts a month later, but as if taking the mickey out of the opposition was now acceptable when you were a club with City's plight, Dolan picked him to play up front from the start on the final day at Blackpool, by which time an unlikely quest for a play-off place had been curtailed.
And yes, he scored. The clinching goal in a 2-1 win, in fact, with Windass again getting the other.
Fettis made thousands of good saves in his five initial years at City - a stunning performance between the sticks as City won 1-0 at Darlington in 1992 leaps to mind - and was welcomed back for a second spell under Peter Taylor as Paul Musselwhite's back-up as City's long-awaited climb back up the divisions got underway at the beginning of this decade. But for all his goalkeeping prowess, his shot-stopping ability, his bravery, he will almost exclusively be remembered for the two isolated occasions when he had to swap saving for scoring - and succeeded on both occasions.
Sunderland will need to make a big decision on Fettis, who is now 38, if Craig Gordon and Marton Fulop, the two first-team keepers, continue to struggle with injuries that has kept Fulop out for a while and forced Gordon out of Scotland's squad for their World Cup qualifier against the Netherlands. Should both of these injuries fail to heal, it'll be either Fettis or a rookie keeper who has never played for the first team. For reasons far beyond wanting to win the match, we simply have to hope it's Fettis.
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