Hull City Chairman Paul Duffen has ridden to the defence of his beleaguered, battered and bruised manager after another capitulation on Saturday saw Hull brushed aside 6-1 at Anfield. 7 games into the season and Hull City have just 4 points, with a solitary win against Bolton and a point gained away at Wolverhampton Wanderers.  Since the turn of the year, Hull have now played 24 Premiership games, winning just two, and losing 17.

Now that’s not relegation form, that’s dead and buried form. 11 points from a possible 72 is an astounding return and one that beggars belief. Already this season they’ve conceded more than 4 goals in three different matches and that for me sets alarm bells ringing. I’m completely at a loss as to how Brown can address this dreadful run of form. It’s not the worst Premiership record, as recent history will testify with Derby County’s year of hell probably cemented in the record books for some time to come, but surely someone at Hull City must be worried.

Now, I’m still surprised as to how far Phil Browns star has faded since the Tigers burst on to the Premiership scene last year. People seem to be enjoying Hull getting mauled every week so they get to see Browns saddened face after every match. I’m not one of them, I actually really feel for Brown and the Hull fans. When you’re facing what appears such an insurmountable task, even little hiccups seem like mountains in the black light of football induced depression.

It makes you face every game with a level of pessimism that even the Grim Reaper may think a tad depressing. Going to a match begins to resemble spending two hours on death row, where even the prospect of contracting the black death seems preferable to watching your team get stuffed once again.

Fair play to Hull City’s chairman, he stopped short of giving the dreaded vote of confidence, but even Brown must realise something has to give eventually. I’m certainly not advocating any manager getting sacked, especially one that has taken a club to a level they have never been to before but sometimes you have to hold your hands up, say enough is enough and walk away. The chairman’s statement included one of those comments were you think Hmmmmm.

“Only a few points separate us from the middle of the league, and I am really pleased with the signs I see developing in the squad” Now it’s easy to be churlish about a Chairman when he comes out with a statement like that. Is it damage limitation? Is it spin? Is it delusion? Or is it a manager receiving a level of support that should be applauded.Duffen knows that Hull City are in the Premiership more or less due to Brown’s skills as a manager.

All the additional revenue, coverage and publicity is down to a manager taking an unfancied team in to the Premiership. Moments like this don’t come around very often and after 104 years of trying, you tend to give the man who got you there a little more support than perhaps other club chairman may do. Bigger clubs than Hull City have treated better managers worse than the support Phil Brown is currently getting.

Hull are about to embark on a run of six games that will show everyone exactly where Hull City are in the scheme of things. A run of 4 home games against Wigan Athletic, Portsmouth, Stoke City and West Ham United book ending away games at Fulham and Burnley will offer us an exact dissection of Hull City in the scheme of things. Once that run is over, things may look a whole lot rosier than they currently do at the K.C. Stadium. I just hope Phil Brown doesn’t get the karaoke machine out!

Looking at the predictions that are currently flooding the world of Premiership football, two teams are entrenched in a dogfight for who will finish bottom. No-one, but no-one thinks both Hull City or Burnley will stay up. One if not both of them, in the eyes of everyone think they’re dead and buried before a ball is kicked.

I have to say, I’m more concerned about Hull staying up than Burnley. The run that they embarked upon from the win against Middlesbrough on December 6th was frightening. 9 points from 22 games was relegation form, no doubt about it, but thankfully Newcastle, Boro and West Brom were worse. Yet were Hull that bad? Only 3 teams put more than 2 goals past them during the last 22 games, Arsenal, Liverpool and Middlesbrough and lost 9 games by just one goal.

That cries out that all the Tigers needed was a consistent goalscorer, someone who could nick a goal off a shin, a backside or a deflection. Phil Brown has made no secret of his desire to add to the firepower at his disposal, but saw moves for Michael Owen, Bobby Zamora, Frazier Campbell and Marlon Harewood fail. In the last week though, he seems to have had more luck in his attempts and he’s taken the promising American striker Jozy Altidore on loan and is close to signing former Wigan striker Henri Camara.

Ideally though, looking at the Tigers front line, even with the two additions, looks still weak. Cousin, Fagan, Garcia, Folan and Kendall don’t seem to have the prowess between them to win matches. Why are Hull struggling to bring the required players to the club? The loss of Craig Fagan after Danny Guthrie’s cowardly tackle broke his leg was a big loss. Fagan’s pace can cause most teams problems, but that alone won’t keep them up. Geovanni has the skill and guile, but lacks the consistency. He needs to show more for the cause for longer. The attempts to sign Ross McCormack from Cardiff City seem to have stalled, the clubs a couple of million apart in their valuations. McCormack was immense for the Bluebirds on Saturday and City will be loath to lose him.

Of course in addition to the striker issues, Hull now face the fact that Liverpool have begun to unsettle Michael Turner in their usual way. Once again Benitez has begun to court a player in the media before making a bid, so no doubt Turner’s head will be turned. Most players would be delighted to play for Liverpool, so it would seem a matter of when Turner leaves. That would be a big blow for Brown’s men, but with Benitez claiming that he now has very little to spend, Hull need to try and get the price they want.

Strikers are always a premium in football, but surely it can’t be this hard to recruit one? Perhaps the solution to Browns issue is a quick one hour drive westwards on the M62 to Leeds. Would risking £3-£4 million on Jermaine Beckford at Leeds United be such a risk for the Tigers? 56 goals in less than 100 games for Leeds shouldn’t be sniffed at, regardless that he plays in League One. He doesn’t have to up root to Hull, living within easy distance of the K.C. Stadium and it surprise me that Brown hasn’t gone after him. He scored two on Saturday, both pure predatory goals, something Hull miss.

Sometimes you have to cut your cloth accordingly and sometimes the obvious solution can be staring you in the face and you miss it.To preserve Hull’s Premiership status, Beckford could be a hugely important signing. Worst case scenario, Beckford signs for Hull and they go down. Then they have the perfect striker to score the goals to fire them back to the Premiership. Take a risk Phil, what’s £4 million when a £50 million carrot is waiting for them once again if they stay up.

EPL Talk’s ex-pat and Anglophile readers familiar with the classic British sitcom Only Fools and Horses will likely remember the program’s 1985 Christmas special, “To Hull and Back,” in which Del Boy and Rodney unwittingly end up in the northern English city of Hull on their way to picking up smuggled diamonds in Holland.  When it dawns on Del Boy that he’s ended up in Humberside, though, he angrily demands that his brother rush him back to London as “otherwise I’ll be saying ‘Hey-up’ and breeding whippets before I’m very much older.”

Now, Yorkshire accents, sighthound-breeding and shipping ports as far as the eye can see are all well and good, but OFAH’s depiction of Hull doesn’t give the impression that there’s much else going on in the town.  It’s a picture that many North American soccer fans following the English game probably presumed out of ignorance up until Dean Windass’ volley in last season’s Coca-Cola Championship promotion play-off final against Bristol City brought England’s largest city previously without having ever tasted top-flight football into the Premier League.

Now that Hull City A.F.C. is finally in the limelight, however, the Tigers are milking it for all its worth, and that apparently includes making inroads on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Following the lead of Oldham Athletic chairman Simon Blitz, Hull have launched a publicity campaign in North America in an apparent bid to build the Tigers’ name recognition abroad and, with any luck, also bring in potential new supporters.  The bulk of the campaign so far seems to be emanating from Los Angeles, where, in recent days, both manager Phil Brown and club chairman Paul Duffen have been interviewed at length on World Soccer Daily, a popular caller-driven satellite radio program that is also downloaded by approximately 290,000 listeners worldwide each weekday.

Bringing Brown and Duffen onto the show has been a major coup for WSD – which in recent months has been unveiling increasingly high-profile regular guests such as Robbie Earle, Tim Vickery and Andy Brassell – but it also stands to pay dividends for Hull City, a club vying for fans’ attention on two fronts: Not just abroad, but also even in its own stadium.

In terms of support, the Tigers face the same problem that Premier League rivals Wigan Athletic have been made to endure: They play in a city that is crazy about rugby league.  It is perhaps not such a big surprise, given that rugby league originated in Yorkshire, but have fun telling that to Hull City, who share the Kingston Communications Stadium with Hull F.C., the city’s Super League rugby side.  Both the Tigers and Latics play in multi-purpose stadia, which theoretically keep the football teams on par with their rugby league counterparts where facilities are concerned, but when it’s butts in seats that means more to the clubs financially – which is where the football clubs are getting the short end of the stick – it’s hard to blame either for branching out to recruit new supporters wherever they can.

Bearing that in mind, what Hull City have done in building bridges over the Pennines, across the Atlantic and into North America is perhaps as wise a PR move as we have seen from any Premier League side in a good while, and they stand to add to their fan base because of it. They probably would have had a little more luck with the campaign had they launched it earlier in the season when their place in the Premiership table indicated more feast than (the current) famine, but nevertheless, given the club’s apparent enthusiasm to embrace the North American market, new fans to the game on this side of the pond could do much worse than to hop onto the black and amber bandwagon.