Michael Turner comes back to the KC Stadium tomorrow in the unenviable position of being within a team that could relegate all his old muckers by the time 5pm comes round.
Turner has been a success at Sunderland, to whom Paul Duffen practically gave him away in August while brazenly telling all and sundry that the fee was huge, and he will be given the warmest of welcomes by the bedraggled Tiger Nation that never forgets a hero.
Oddly, while we'd kill to have Turner in our side again, the centre of defence has largely had not much wrong with it beyond the actual absence of the best player ever to wear Hull City colours in that - or any - position. Anthony Gardner and Kamil Zayatte have each had good, sturdy spells in the side, albeit with an isolated error each, while Steven Mouyokolo has been a terrific find and even Ibrahima Sonko, brought in as an unwanted temporary replacement for Turner as much to appease unrest as to plug any gaps, has been able to restore a soupcon of his crushed reputation.
But Turner, oh how we miss him. How we miss that reliability, that positional accuracy, that immense reading of the game, that step or two in his head that makes up for a lack of sheer pace. How me miss all of those things. How he will be loved forever for what he achieved at the club, and how his sale will always go down as the day Hull City's supporters and the hierarchy that secured Premier League status fell out of love.
The same can't be said of Fraizer Campbell, of course. He will be booed and barracked to high heaven by unforgiving types who recall the number of occasions he seemed set to rejoin us and then never did. Campbell has, worryingly, begun to find some scoring form at last for the club he eschewed the Tigers for last summer. If he finds a winning goal that sends us back to the Championship this weekend, it'll complete the most gruesome of turnarounds, given that he set up the goal at Wembley that got us out of there in the first place.
If Turner plays a blinder at the back, if Campbell scores a goal at the front, neither will be blamed. They're Sunderland players and a job is required of them. But in this bitterest of bitter, hateful campaigns, it'd be the icing on a deeply tasteless cake if one of these two heroes of such recent memory actively confirmed our descent back to the footballing abyss. At least with Turner, it'd be easily forgiven, and he won't celebrate at all. With Campbell, it'd be a different matter entirely.
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