AP's man - AP's wealthy, but not wealthy enough to mount a PL push ............ I'd love to have seen him get the chance though. He was the first manager who assembled a team with a strong enough charachter to handle the expectation of getting Hull City from the fourth tier, no mean feat in itself.
However you define his tactics it got City two promotions so I don't see that as a reason to say another promotion couldn't have happened.
Impossible to say. As someone else alluded, the investment was the key thing. We'd have been unlikely to go up without the money Duffen blew.
We bought our first £1m player and significantly increased our wage bill signing the likes of Pedersen and Okocha and even Deano.
True, I suppose back then that was a big outlay for us, now it's seems mandatory to sign at least one player for a million!
Those are facts, but did we blow money? I don't think we did, we had wins and losses, same as all teams.
By today's standards we didn't blow a fortune, but we probably had the highest wage bill in the league that season (along with the other two promoted teams).
I was going to write "without Duffen's money" but that wouldn't really be right. Obviously it worked out, which was m point really, we wouldn't have been likely to go up without it.
