One of the two security guards stationed outside Hull City’s training ground on Friday clutched a sheet of densely scripted A4 paper. It detailed the names of journalists permitted entry to Marco Silva’s unveiling as the club’s manager and proved something of a novelty.
“This is the first time we’ve ever needed a list,” joked one sentry, pulling his collar up against the driving rain and raw wind on one of those bleak January days which never seems to become properly light.
Inside the slightly old-fashioned clubhouse which serves as Hull’s weekday HQ, the reason for all this fuss sat behind a table, stressing that the weather really was the least of his problems before deflecting repeated invitations to liken himself to José Mourinho.
The 39-year-old Portuguese charged with somehow lifting Hull off the bottom of the Premier League and rescuing them from relegation is not only a good friend of Manchester United’s manager but looks a bit like a cross between a younger Mourinho and Luís Figo. Yet if Silva’s appearance alone invites parallels, the former Estoril, Sporting Lisbon and Olympiakos manager prefers to avoid them.
“I don’t like the comparison with José,” says a man more concerned with pulling off what he readily acknowledges would be “a miracle” in east Yorkshire. “It’s not a bad one and José’s a fantastic, open person but I don’t like it.” Yet if Mourinho is the “special one” how does he describe himself? “As Marco Silva,” he replies. “That’s my name.”
Despite winning last season’s Greek title with Olympiakos, lifting the Portuguese cup at Sporting and, earlier, leading Estoril into Portugal’s top tier, Silva was very much a shock choice to succeed the sacked Mike Phelan.
On his part, though, this was very much a planned move. It is no accident that his English, honed during that year in Athens, is much better than advertised and reduced Friday’s interpreter to a peripheral role. “In Greece I was already thinking about the next step – learning English was part of that,” he says. “The Premier League is the biggest league. Now my biggest ambition is this miracle.”
Despite signing merely a six-month contract at a club very much up for sale, his calm courtesy and humour-tinged charm are underpinned by considerable self-assurance and he stresses longevity is the ambition. “My aim,” he says. “Is to stay many more years in the Premier League.”
Doing so may well require the completion of that “miracle” and, as he prepared for Saturday’s FA Cup tie at home to Swansea City, Silva will doubtless have been relieved to learn that the Allam family, Hull’s owners, had turned down a £3m bid for Robert Snodgrass from West Ham. The Scotland winger is the team’s most gifted player and Silva desperately needs him on his side.
“Of course, this job is a risk,” he says. “But a coach’s life always has risks and I believe it’s possible to change this situation. I know we don’t have a lot of time but I would tell fans to believe, like I believe.”
A coach who although represented by Carlos Gonçalves is close to Jorge Mendes, the Portuguese super-agent, has faith an understaffed squad will shortly be restocked. “I know what the team needs,” he says. “The owners know what the team needs; you wait until we do our business. But it’s clear we need to improve our roster. Today I have only 14 or 15 fit players.”
Apart from working his contacts to import talent, he indicated Hull’s all-Portuguese backroom could soon be supplemented by an English coach – “maybe next week” – hired to help accelerate his integration to British life.
Silva certainly could be forgiven for feeling a certain culture shock after being parachuted into possibly the Premier League’s most modest training facility. “It’s true, it’s different from Olympiakos and Sporting,” he agrees, surveying the cloud shrouding the bottom of the long, narrow, semi-rural lane in Cottingham leading to his new workplace.
Situated a few miles west of Hull, resolutely middle-class Cottingham – among England’s safest Conservative seats, local MP key Brexiteer David Davis – is one of those places which cannot quite decide whether it is a large country village or a leafy suburban dormitory. It may initially seem a slightly puzzling habitat to a lifelong urbanite accustomed to Lisbon and Athens but Silva will not have to venture far to feel oddly at home.
After all, a reminder of the Vasco da Gama bridge – Europe’s longest – arcing imperiously, and seemingly endlessly, over the Tagus is merely a long goal-kick away. The Humber bridge possesses marginally less wow factor but remains an impressive, similarly evocative, sight.
Whereas Da Gama, one of the great Portuguese explorers, was the first European to reach India by sea, Silva follows in the footsteps of, among others, Mourinho, André Villas-Boas and Sheffield Wednesday’s Carlos Carvalhal in attempting to conquer England.
Hull’s status as the UK’s city of culture for 2017 may reflect a changing image and spirit of regeneration but its football club remains one of the country’s toughest outposts.
Indeed, many believe even his friend Mourinho – whom he will shortly meet in the EFL Cup semi-finals – might struggle to keep Hull in the top tier. “Sometimes miracles do happen, though,” Silva counters. “Maybe in May the miracle happens here.”
