Allam may sell up

Let’s stop this identity theft

YOU cannot call your home town a city merely because it is a biggish conurbation, or because it has a cathedral.

Since the 1500s, cities have been designated by Letters Patent from the monarch.

Two years ago, it was announced new cities were to be created to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Forty-two towns applied and each spent about £4million arguing their case. Only five were successful.

Kingston upon Hull became a city 116 years ago when its bustling port gave it a strategic significance which deserved recognition. But that same geographic importance led to Hull being bombed in both world wars. Adolf Hitler tried to blitz the place to smithereens and very nearly succeeded. Almost 95 per cent of Hull houses were destroyed or damaged.

The people of Hull have an historic rivalry with Scunthorpe, just across the Humber Bridge, but a more strident antipathy towards Grimsby, where rival fishing fleets were based. Neither Scunthorpe nor Grimsby is a city. In Grimsby’s case, that fact is confirmed by the name of the football club, Grimsby Town.

Do you start to understand why fans of Hull City AFC have a pronounced sense of identity and care so much about four letters in the title of their club?

That title has stood, unaltered, since the club was founded in 1904 and when owner Assem Allam decreed, without consulting anyone, that he will ditch the City bit and call the club Hull Tigers, there was a cleverness about a protest group’s decision to adapt a chant and call themselves City Till We Die.

Allam’s response, in an interview over the weekend, was to say “they can die as soon as they want” and to threaten to sell up.

The first part of that retort is just about the vilest thing I can remember a club owner saying about anyone, let alone those who pay to enter his ground. But the second part – the threat to sell – presents a conundrum.

The ownership model of English football – and the vast disparity of resources it has created – means that to have any hope of doing more than bobbing along in the lower reaches of the leagues, clubs have to acquire a mega-rich owner. But rich men tend to want to play with their toys.

Sometimes they do nothing more harmless than installing a naff statue of Michael Jackson, or a naff director of football called Joe Kinnear. But increasingly, they believe that “brands” and global marketing will be helped by ditching something important. At Cardiff, that has meant playing in red and replacing bluebirds on the badge with a dragon.

Yet the problem for those of us who think jettisoning tradition is profoundly misguided is that Cardiff and Hull are in football’s sunlit uplands because of the dosh dolled out by their owners.

Hull thrashed Liverpool on Sunday, for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t Allam deserve gratitude?

Of course he does. But gratitude does not equal unthinking servitude.

Last week, Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust won their campaign to get The Valley listed as an Asset of Community Value. Now the ground cannot be sold without them being consulted.

It is time for the Premier League, the Football League and the FA to recognise that names, badges and kit colours are community assets too.

In the meantime, there is something all proper football folk can do. There is an online petition to sign at citytillwedie.com or change.org.

Come on, we can overwhelm Allam. We can persuade him that the title City is not “common”, as he has said. It is anything but. It is about identity. It is about tradition. It is about a century of history, about justifiable pride. And it is a hard-won, special title.

It is not something to be discarded casually.

http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/mick-dennis/446461/Let-s-stop-this-identity-theft

 

Hull City will not die when Assem Allam likes

The campaign group City Till We Die is grateful to the owner, Assem Allam, for bailing out the club but unhappy about a plan to rebrand it as Hull Tigers and adverse comments about fans

On Sunday Hull City AFC, for the first time in their long and an often unlovely history, beat Liverpool FC. Imagine how that feels to fans who lived through the dark days of the 90s, of dubious owners, dreadful managers, dozy players, all against the backdrop of wondering whether the club would actually exist in the morning; if you had not been to at least two "last-ever Hull City games", frankly, you weren't that keen a supporter.

Given that, and given that we are in what is only the club's third season in the top tier of English football, then you would think that after finally – and rather gloriously – scalping one of the game's aristocrats, there would be no other topic of conversation in the pubs, clubs and pavement cafes of the country's latest City of Culture.

Sadly, you'd be wrong. There was a bristling atmosphere at "The Circle" (the local term for the KC Stadium) for the visit of Liverpool that had little to do with football. We had read in the Sunday papers that Hull City AFC's owner and chairman, Dr Assem Allam had referred to fans of the club as "hooligans" and "a militant minority". Most remarkably of all, he had suggested that these fans "can die as soon as they want, as long as they leave the club for the majority who just want to watch good football."

Allam wants to change the name of Hull City AFC to Hull Tigers, as he believes that this will allow him to tap into Far Eastern markets currently not available to him. To say the least, this is not a belief widely held outside the boardroom, so representatives of a wide range of supporters' organisations have formed a campaign group called City Till We Die (named after one of our songs) in an attempt to change the owner's mind on this and explore ways of developing Hull City AFC, while preserving the sense of history and community that we value and love in the club.

We determined at the start to run a campaign that would not have an impact on the team on the pitch and was not anti the Allam regime on any other issue. We are fans, we want to see our team do well, we are as gleeful as you'd expect at the opportunity of seeing our young, eager side lock horns – although not teeth – with Luis Suárez. We are delighted to be here, we believe in Steve Bruce as our manager and, as with all football fans, we have got the enthusiasm of 14-year-olds, despite our age. The reason for supporting the Allam regime is equally clear to fans. He is a philanthropist who has generously supported local hospitals and the university and, two years ago, he bailed out Hull City when the previous regime had saddled us with debts of more than £30m.

Despite this we've reached a point where we are called hooligans because fans carrying a flag in the previous game proclaiming "We are Hull City" so angered someone at the club that the stewards tried to wrestle it off them, producing an unseemly – if unremarkable – tussle. It wasn't even a flag produced by CTWD but that fact seems to have escaped Allam. We sing "City till I die" 19 minutes and four seconds into every game to mark the year the club was formed and named; and so the chairman talks as if he wishes us dead. It is hard to convey the misery and anger that this has stirred in so many.

"We are Hull City, we'll die when we want" we sang at the start of the game and then 20 minutes later we were cavorting with joy as we scored the opener, immediately after our usual rendition of City Till I Die, which, according to the chairman, was a distraction to the team. Perhaps he will now credit us with an assist.

This issue will not go away. At CTWD, despite fans' anger at Allam's words, we remain committed to preventing the name change and willing to work with him as we explore our options with the Football Association and look at more fan involvement in running the club.

We received support from an unlikely source when Bruce, interviewed after the game, said that he felt the chairman didn't quite understand the fans' identification with the traditions of the game and that he was going to speak to him about this. God love him for that as well as everything else but Allam will have to see that, whatever he says, our campaign will continue. It will not die when he likes. And we'll remain fans; peaceful, committed, passionate supporters of our club, because that's what we've always been.

http://www.theguardian.com/football...verpool-campaign-group-assem-allam?CMP=twt_gu