It is unrealistic to expect one player’s feats can guarantee his club Premier League safety, a fact Hull City supporters were reminded of when Sunderland’s Jack Rodwell bundled in what may yet be a vital second-half equaliser at the KC Stadium on Tuesday. However, Dame N’Doye is giving it a try and his cutely improvised opener, his third goal in as many starts for the home team, added to the feeling that Steve Bruce’s deadline-day brinkmanship may have brought Hull the most important signing of their present Premier League stint.
Bruce was prepared to play a risky game in courting N’Doye, who had joined up with Senegal for the Africa Cup of Nations by the time negotiations with his former club Lokomotiv Moscow began in mid-January. There were no deals in the offing for any other centre-forwards and certainly no other balls in the air when, a few hours after the window had officially closed at 11pm on 2 February, all parties finally concluded matters at a meeting in Paris. N’Doye’s presence had serendipitously been guaranteed by an early exit in Equatorial Guinea, ruling out any need for further-flung travel for those involved, and Hull had their man.
Any last-minute glitches and a Hull side that had lost 10 of their previous 14 league games, scoring only seven times, would likely be in far deeper trouble now. In the event Hull have lost only once since N’Doye’s arrival. He has been eased in gently, starting in his three home games but coming off the bench at Manchester City and Stoke, and his early impact underlines that the right January signing can make a difference that resounds for years – even if the impact on the goalscoring charts is short-term.
The five goals from Christophe Dugarry that helped haul Birmingham clear of relegation trouble in 2003, the January transfer window’s first year, are the first example of a winter quick fix that worked. If N’Doye’s form continues then he will be a good bet to see out his two-and-a-half-year contract but it is a curiosity that, having just turned 30, he is only a year younger than the Dugarry who virtually walked on water at St Andrew’s but had been viewed as a spent force after disappointing in a second spell at Bordeaux.
However, careers are often defined by well-timed momentum and it is remarkable to think N’Doye was still representing Jeanne d’Arc, back then the Senegalese league’s leading force but nowadays barely a going concern, at the age of 21. The Qatari club Al-Sadd gave him a first move abroad but it was at FC Copenhagen, via modest spells at Académica de Coimbra, Panathinaikos and OFI Crete, that he settled and, between 2009 and 2012, scored 93 goals in 154 appearances. There was little likelihood of his equalling that record over two and a half seasons in Russia but N’Doye continued to score frequently and has since backed up the impression long held by Bruce – who had followed him closely when in charge at Sunderland – that, at nearly 6ft 1in and with a respectable turn of pace, his physical attributes would be a sufficient platform for his finishing ability in the Premier League.
He has to keep it up now and maybe there is a lesson in the form of his sometime Senegal strike partner Papiss Cissé, another relatively late developer whose immediate impact after moving to Newcastle in January 2012 was astonishing – 13 goals in 14 games – but preceded a two-year trough from which he has only recently emerged. It is highly unusual for a player’s shock value to last more than a few weeks or months but far from a singular occurrence for him to become lost in the toiling mediocrity of a side constantly scraping to avoid the bottom three.
There is an argument N’Doye’s longer-term form is not of huge consequence to Hull. They were not spending an eight-figure sum on a younger, relatively unproven option such as, say, Abel Hernández; January is rarely the time for that and instead Hull cut a deal that said plenty for the player’s willingness to leave Lokomotiv Moscow six months before the end of his contract.
“I’ve never known of a player who has taken a bigger wage cut than Dame,” said Bruce of N’Doye, who some sources suggest earned as much as £80,000 a week in Russia. A low transfer fee of around £3m, a manageable wage and a relatively short contract combine to mean that N’Doye’s contribution will have justified the outlay in spades should Hull, who were 18th when he arrived, stay up again. Would it matter if, in an age where joined-up thinking is nearly impossible for those at the wrong end of the table, he faded from view after that?
N’Doye would certainly care and, while football increasingly attempts to smooth its young prospects’ career paths, it is heartening to see a genuinely talented individual in the autumn of his career arrive in the Premier League via the most circuitous of routes. And perhaps it is positive, too, to see Hull bide their time and play the January transfer window in exactly the manner for which – for better or for worse – it was intended.
