Dan: Hull — Season Finale 2010/11

Hi there!

Welcome to what will be the final instalment of the 2010/11 season with Hull City! I left you last time with Hull almost guaranteed automatic promotion and after checking my backroom staff we were only 10 points away from sealing the title despite Burnley constantly tailing us throughout the season. So, time to find out whether the Hull squad became heroes or villains.

I’m going to run through our results from the start of the season just to give some perspective of how the season went…

August — Amazing start to the campaign only conceding 1 goal in 6 games!

September — We faced our first slip ups after another promising month…

October — Difficult month resulted in a slight tactics change…

November — Tactics change completely turns results around!

December — Defeat by Burnley causes us to lose top spot…

January — Hull fail to make an impact in transfer market, but soldier on…

February — Burnley suffer shaky form and Hull reclaim top spot before going 5 points clear!

March — Hull tactics are tweaked again after Coventry loss, removing extra creative freedom…

April & May — Read on to find out…

As you can see we had another great month despite 2 losses which could have been avoided. Before the Watford game I found out that we needed 10 points to guarantee the title and only 1 point to guarantee automatic promotion! My team talk before each the Watford, Crystal Palace, and Reading game was ‘expect a win’ followed up by ‘for the fans’ if we weren’t winning at half time. We stormed through all 3 games and gained 9 points, 1 away from securing the title…

Then we travelled to Cardiff and suffered a shock defeat thanks to a 35 yard Darcy Blake pile driver, gutted. Or so I thought! After the match I didn’t even look at the other results I just miserably pressed continue and was then confronted by this…

We had done it! Burnley had hit a rotten vein of form lately and it had finally cost them, they lost on the same day as we did which meant that by default, Hull City AFC win the npower Championship for the first time in their history! Woohoo!

After that we then went on to rub salt in Burnley’s wounds by coming back from 1-0 down to win 2-1 before losing to Preston which didn’t bother me too much, we were playing for nothing and they were playing for pride since they were already relegated. We ended the season in style by destroying Barnsley. Overall I was pleased that since the tactics tweak (for the second time) we’ve finally got our cutting edge back, scoring 16 goals in 7 games for our final run in.

So, I guess you’re wondering what the final table looked like, before you read on brace yourself for a little bit of a shock…

Yeah, Burnley completely blew any chance of being promoted, firstly being replaced by Leicester before Doncaster made my achievement look pretty rubbish, their manager must be a genius! Well he’ll have to be to keep them in the Premier League! At the other end Leeds and Portsmouth suffered shock relegations whereas less surprisingly they were joined by Preston. The only thing left now was the play-offs…

This is the strangest group of teams I’ve ever seen get promoted on FM!?! Hull City, Doncaster Rovers, and Nottingham Forest will be the teams pitting themselves against Premier League elite next season, so who will they be replacing…

Newcastle finished bottom, West Brom 19th, and Wigan Athletic 18th. Newcastle have already begun the clear out and Joey Barton, Coloccini, and Gutierrez have joined Guthrie, Alan Smith, and a bunch of other on the transfer list. They would be good players for me were they not earning insane amounts of money for their ability. Liverpool also had a shocker and since promotion I seem to be hot property in Spain:

Of course I distanced myself from both jobs but have also rejected Getafe, Osasuna, and 2 offers from Italy from Brescia and a rather more tempting one from Palermo.

So at the end of the season all my players have gone off on holiday while I sit at home and try to work out how to spend the remaining £3.9million I hoarded back from the seasons budget, but before I look for players, I needed to figure out who should leave…

Matt Duke and Nolberto Solano will be released when their contracts run down in June. Evans, Mannone, and Turan will return to their parent clubs with Cullen returning to Hull. Koren and Harper will be sold since neither did anything on note this season to warrant their high wages. The biggest problem I face is bunch of rubbish players returning from loan, Gardner, Olofinjana, Ghilas, and others, I will try to offload as many as possible but I can’t really see anyone wanting these players because of the wages. Jay Simpson, Paul McShane, and Tom Cairney have been the stars of the season while Aaron McLean has been the surprise package, 10 assists and 17 goals is amazing for someone of his ability. Abeid will probably find himself out on loan since I’ve already secured a very good trequartista for next season and hopefully Turan would be interested in joining Hull City permanently.

With all the important stuff out of the way we can start to look at some of the extras the pop up at the end of the season…

I won manager of the year but if I was Sean O’Driscoll I’d be a little annoyed about that considering he’s taken a relegation candidate into the Premier League, it’s like what Holloway did with Blackpool just more impressive!

As for Team of the Year…

No surprise to see the backbone of my team in Lewis, Cairney, and Simpson representing the Championship XI but obviously Bikey and Kilgallon were amazing since McShane didn’t get a sniff.

So with me running out of things to talk about we’ll move onto finances, I don’t like to end on a miserably note but hopefully it’ll have a happy ending…

It looks like the worlds best slide! We’ve got £400k left in the bank and every single month our biggest expenditure is £1.39million on loan repayments, plus the extra £700k of other club expenses don’t help. Although our finances are terrible the chairman is a wealthy man so hopefully he’ll be generous with the cash out of his own pocket when it comes to next seasons expectations. We have signed a new kit sponsor which is more than double what it was in the Championship so that should help too.

Well that’s all for now! Hopefully you’re all looking forward to pre-season where I’ll be using Hull’s new found status to lure the players I couldn’t last season!

Thanks for reading!