Football: Lloyd's Tigers face the threat of extinction

Hull City on the brink: Incredibly, England's seventh-biggest city seems unable to sustain a League football team

THE JUXTAPOSITION of normality and the absurd could have been from a Fawlty Towers script. Outside Hull City's Boothferry Park ground was buzzing with people coming and going to Kwik Save next door. Inside children's pictures of tigers adorned the reception walls with "Thank you for football training" messages attached.

It was a backcloth to a conversation that was anything but usual. "I can't tell you anything because I don't know anything," an exasperated woman was telling a phone caller. "I don't even know if I'll have a job here next week." Then, hopefully, she changed tack. "You're not someone trying to buy the club are you?"

Sadly not. Even David Lloyd, whose rages against the people of Hull have become more like Basil Fawlty as the week has progressed, advised potential purchasers to keep away on Radio Five Live last weekend. And this is the man trying to offload the club for around pounds 2m.

With that kind of sales pitch little wonder no one yet has been forthcoming and Lloyd's threat to pull the financial plug on the Third Division club today is becoming more real. After tonight's game against Cardiff, Hull City, who are bottom of the Third Division, may exist no more.

The contrast to when Lloyd arrived in Hull in the summer of 1997 could not be more stark. Then, attached to the pounds 2.4m cheque for the club, was the dream of a super stadium (also hosting rugby league) and a football team worthy of a city that is the seventh biggest in England. For a place starved of success it sounded like a utopia akin to Jack Walker's wonder at Blackburn.

To put it mildly, that vision has soured. "The club is for sale," Lloyd, also the British Davis Cup tennis captain, said this week. "There is not one single more penny of my money going into the club." So, from tomorrow, the club begins a hand-to- mouth existence, providing it can find someone to provide the funds to pay wages and interest on loans. Money is bleeding at the rate of pounds 7,000 a week so starvation is the likely prognosis

"How can they generate money?" Lloyd asked. "I've been their Father Christmas for the last two years. And they want to get rid of Father Christmas."

Others would dispute the Santa Claus image. Mark Hateley is furious after Lloyd revealed the player-manager received a salary of pounds 250,000 a year - a figure Hateley disputes - while the fans have become so disillusioned with Lloyd they pelted him with tennis balls when he took to the pitch.

His ownership of the rugby league club Hull Sharks has involved him in a long-running feud with a former chairman Roy Waudby over a new shares' issue and this week he also threatened to quit that, too. "I don't want to sell the Sharks, but if the fans start to hurl abuse at me like they have done at Hull City then I will have to think again. People are either behind me or against me. They can't have it both ways."

How Hull City got in this mess is debatable but no one, not even their most fervent supporters, would describe their past as glorious. Hull is the largest city in Europe not to have had a team in the top division of a national league and their honours list is more of a footnote than a litany of glory, comprising three Third Division championships and an FA Cup semi-final in 1930.

Yet their record attendance is 55,019 (against Manchester United in 1949) and even last season, when they finished third bottom, their average of 4,684 was bettered in the Third Division by only two clubs. The evidence suggests people, in a catchment area of a million, would support a successful team.

That seems unlikely now and the silence from a confused and angry Boothferry Park is deafening. Hateley is refusing to give interviews and Lloyd is firing his broadsides from a distance, on a golfing holiday in Spain. In a city fearing the worst, the only noises are coming from dissident supporters anxiously trying to save the club.

"We haven't a cat in hell's chance of raising the money by the Friday deadline," Angie Rowe, spokesman for the supporters group Tigers Co-Operative, said. "I've tried through several sources to get hold of David Lloyd to give us a timescale with which to work, but his response was: `Right. You've got five days'.

"That's totally unrealistic, totally unfair. It's a response derived from temper rather than thought and all I can do is and try to raise this money and hope and pray he sees sense and gives us more time."

Rowe, who worked for the club for five months last year as a fans liaison officer and then personal assistant to Hateley, fears that time will not be forthcoming and has been in touch with the Football League to take over the club's registration if necessary to complete the fixtures this season.

"Cardiff could be the last game Hull City play at Boothferry Park," she said, "but it's my intention it will not be the last game they play. Somehow, somebody, somewhere has got to help us, they have got to feel that pang of guilt because they have done nothing to save the club.

"It's not just football I'm talking about. If Hull City closes it will affect trade and the city in a dramatic way and I think people are only just waking up to the fact. We've had David Lloyd's threats and temper tantrums before and we've always thought that's how the guy is, but this time everyone is taking it seriously. We think he really means it."

Rowe and the other supporters are scanning the horizon for a white knight to either keep the club going until they raise the pounds 1.8m Lloyd wants or to buy Hull City outright. So far the only figure who has emerged is the former chairman Don Robinson whose offer is understood to be considerably short of what Lloyd wants.

Robinson, a Scarborough businessman and a former wrestler, was chairman for eight years after he rescued the club from receivership in 1982 and presided over the period when Hull rose from the Fourth to the Second Division in three seasons. His intention is to form a consortium of local businessmen but that will not be ready by tonight, even if he and Lloyd can reach a deal.

The supporters are left to hope while all the evidence points to hopelessness. "David Lloyd has made so many rash decisions and had to go back on them because he hasn't thought of the consequences," Rowe said.

"This time he has gone too far, he's brought about his own downfall by his unwillingness to listen to advice and his total lack of respect for the people of Hull. We've got brains but he thinks we still race whippets and wear flat caps.

"Look at the Manchester United situation. If someone told their fans they needed pounds 1.8m to save the club you would raise it within the hour. The story is so different in Hull. It's such a large amount. It's the earth."

Moving the earth might be easier than dislodging Lloyd from his mountain of pique. "I've had enough," he said. "Certain people in Hull don't want to listen to facts. All the fans shout at me is `get your chequebook out' but I'm the only person who has ever got his chequebook out. They don't realise how much I've spent. Or they don't want to realise."

An icy realisation of how tenuous the link can be between a community and its football club will come tonight. The Tigers are in fear of extinction.