THIS book could serve as a reality check for those Hull City FC supporters who are clamouring for the head of manager Phil Brown, below.

Such is the disparity between Hull and near neighbours York City, these days, that many of the Tigers’ Johnny-come-lately fans might be blissfully unaware that the two clubs shared the same division only five years ago.

Former Hull Daily Mail journalist John Fieldhouse, who now works for the club’s media department, uses the Minstermen on several occasions to illustrate how far the Humbersiders have travelled in such a short space of time.

But that’s a minor irritation during an excellently recounted, rags-to-riches tale laden with good humour.

Fieldhouse charts the club’s meteoric rise to the Premier League, but not from their League Two promotion-winning campaign of 2003/04. Instead, he goes back to the dark days of the 1990s and the book is so much the better for that decision.

Whereas now the KC Stadium’s car park is over-brimming with Bentleys, Fieldhouse tells of a time when he ferried players to matches in his old Ford Sierra, while hotel stays were cut short by bouncing cheques.

He also recalls previous regimes, including the ill-fated David Lloyd era, which saw the one-time tennis professional label the people of Hull as “crap” and living in the “dark ages”.

At one stage, players were even instructed not to swap shirts with Liverpool stars after a cup tie because the club could not afford replacements.

All the pitfalls of being the local paper’s football club reporter, meanwhile, are touched on, such as the perilous marks out of ten.

The anonymous threat of “Print that story and you’ll be floating down the Humber in a concrete coffin”, however, takes the customary threat of press box bans to another level.

Those earlier years when Fieldhouse was writing about the club rather than for it are inevitably more entertaining, although his first-hand accounts of the Championship play-off final victory at Wembley and the final game of last season’s Premier League are later highlights.

Bootham Crescent regulars will also be interested in Hull supporters’ derogatory attitude towards Terry Dolan, as well as the revelation that former Minsterman Jon “The Beast” Parkin never wears socks.

Details on how the council led the swift move to a new community stadium will, meanwhile, be the cause for much envy in these parts.