Hull City travel to West Ham on Sunday needing points – they have slipped into the bottom three – and goals. Steve Bruce is exploring the possibility of signing a striker on loan since discovering Nikica Jelavic and Abel Hernández could both be out for more than a month, and has already begun to hint that the club’s location – out on the east coast, that is, not near the foot of the Premier League table – is a hindrance when trying to persuade London-based players to join.
If Hull supporters think they have heard all this before, they probably have. Sunderland fans definitely have. Certain events have proved cyclical in Bruce’s managerial career. He will always be associated with vacancies at Newcastle, he will always deny being interested and he will not generally be believed, although on this occasion it would be a surprise were Mike Ashley to recruit a manager actively involved in a relegation struggle.
Bruce has a decent reputation for going into clubs and making an improvement. As he showed at Wigan, before moving on to Sunderland, he can usually sort out the defence and improve a team’s overall organisation. It is continuing the upswing the following season that frequently proves difficult. When supporters are hoping to build upon what has already been achieved, and often when Bruce has been given a little more money to spend, performances obstinately flatline instead.
That happened at Sunderland. Bruce wryly suggested his eventual dismissal was because he was a Newcastle fan, though he knew as much as anyone that under his stewardship the team appeared to have run out of ideas and action needed to be taken. Now the same thing is happening at Hull, barely recognisable these days as the team that gave Arsenal such a fright in last season’s FA Cup final.
Perhaps things might have been different had Bruce’s gamble on Hatem Ben Arfa worked out. Plenty of people wanted it to, but to no one’s enormous surprise it backfired. Even Bruce must have been half expecting that. He said at the time of signing the enigmatic Frenchman that the only reason a player of such quality would end up at Hull was because he had experienced problems with his previous clubs. Hull are now added to that list of Ben Arfa’s previous clubs, Bruce evidently unable to make the breakthrough that had eluded Alan Pardew at Newcastle, and in hindsight it is tempting to conclude that the only reason a manager in Bruce’s position took such a chance was the relative rarity of hearing a player say he was happy to try his luck on Humberside.
Hull were in the hunt for Jermain Defoe before Sunderland knocked them out of the running by offering the former Spurs striker a three-and-a-half-year contract, an almost unbelievable incentive for a 32-year-old who had already moved out of the Premier League to the less competitive MLS.
Bruce was also interested in the possibility of taking Adnan Januzaj on loan until Manchester United ruled out any temporary release of a player who is struggling for game time under Louis van Gaal, and would have liked Yaya Sanogo but discovered the Arsenal striker just loaned to Crystal Palace preferred to stay in London.
Creatively turning his attention instead to Blackburn’s Rudy Gestede, who has just three appearances for Cardiff in the Premier League but is a reliable enough goalscorer at Championship level at Ewood, it appears an asking price of around £4m was too high. “I did enquire about him but it’s not going to happen,” Bruce said. “The club spent quite a lot of money in summer and it is just unfortunate that some of the players we bought are now injured. I’m still hopeful of bringing someone in this month, but we won’t be spending like we did in summer and for the moment we will have to go with what we’ve got.”
That in turn puts the spotlight on the owner, Assem Allam, whose commitment to the club has been questioned since the day he threatened to sell should he fail to get his way over the proposed name change. Allam backed Bruce in the market in the summer and if he sees a long-term future in the Premier League he possibly needs to do so again.
Certainly Bruce needs to buy goals from somewhere. Palace have just added Sanogo to their roster, Sunderland have Defoe, QPR have Charlie Austin and Burnley are arguably best-equipped of all in the goalscoring department with Danny Ings, Ashley Barnes and Sam Vokes. If Allam’s policy is to sit tight and hope for the best it is a risky one. Bruce needs goals now.
