21/05/08 - Mis-Rule
Sharp had to go. In 2006 he was lucky enough to inherit a side with great talent, togetherness and momentum (from a coach who’d beaten Bradford, Saints and Leeds to put the Challenge Cup on the sideboard a few months earlier). My Mum could’ve coached that team to the Grand Final. And she’d have put on a decent spread at half-time to boot.
From second best side in the comp to second worst within a season and a half; from a side that had broken the ‘big four’ to a broken side; from irresistible force to shambolic farce.
After Hull’s ignominious home exit in last season’s Challenge Cup, I contrasted Sharp’s record with that of his predecessor, as follows:
Since Sharp’s Cup final (which, you may recall, Hull lost), Hull have won only six out of eighteen competitive matches against Super League opponents. Including two less than glorious draws (Catalans Dragons and Huddersfield at home), Sharp’s success rate is, in effect, 38.9% - identical to the post-Cup final record that cost Kear his job, yet over a longer time frame and without a trophy in the cabinet. At Wakefield meanwhile, Kear has achieved a 54.8% strike rate in twenty-one games against Super League sides.
In the twelve months since, that contrast has become ever more exaggerated; indeed, glaringly stark.
In short, and by any measure, Sharp failed as Hull coach.
Yet the concern remains that Sharp’s exit disguises the root cause of FC’s alarming decline. The powers that be at the KC lurched from one display of ineptitude to another in the time that Sharp occupied the hot-seat. Plummer took the rap in the light of the Cooke non-contract debacle, but the current regime, in the guise of Hetherington and Rule, continue to set new standards of incompetence.
The fruitless jaunt to Australia otherwise known as ‘the Dobson saga’ – only a fraction of which was revealed in public (unsurprising given the club’s breathtakingly arrogant and dismissive approach to the local media) – just the prelude to the subsequent ineligible Cup player fiasco – a cock-up which any right thinking observer knows should have resulted in Hull’s expulsion from that competition.
So the question must be; can any coach rescue Hull with the club so embarrassingly mismanaged?
