A Bridge Too Far: A sporting saga of loyalty and treachery

Two small boys are playing rugby in the street. This is Hull, where rugby is the default. They are aged about six. "I'm Paul Cooke," says one, as he drop-kicks. "We bleedin' 'ate him in our 'ouse, Cookey," says the other.

Hull is a city riven with bitter discord today, in the run-up to Saturday's derby match between its two rugby league sides, Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers. At the centre of it is the 26-year-old England star, Paul Cooke, who until last week wore the black-and-white hoops of FC but who on Saturday will - scandalously to half the city - pull on the red-and-white shirt of Rovers.

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There has long been a fierce joshing between the two teams, but amiable banter has turned to rancorous emotion. Local folk search for metaphors to convey the intensity of what has occurred.

"It's like Steven Gerrard announcing, overnight, that he was leaving Liverpool for Everton," says one male fan.

"It's like your husband running off with another woman - and the other woman is your sister," says his female counterpart.

The divide goes deep. For this tale of cupidity and incompetence, half-truth and double-dealing, loyalty and treachery, drink and violence, has reached into the very soul of the city.

"It's gone much further than the rival rugby camps," says one of the rugby league writers of the Hull Daily Mail, the gloriously named Dick Tingle. "People who aren't sports-minded have been sucked in."

The protagonist is larger than life in more ways than his 6ft 5in stature implies. A playmaker on the field, Paul Cooke is a headline-maker off it. There was the incident in which he crashed into a car driven, he claimed, by a fan who was harassing him. There was the nightclub brawl in which he admitted assaulting a man and a woman, for which he faced jail but escaped with a £500 fine and 100 hours' community service.

"When people drink in this town they fight," says a pony-tailed man propping up the bar in the Springbank Tavern. "Beer cheaper on match days", says a sign outside.

But none of Cooke's behaviour has drawn headlines so big as those which announced his shock transfer from one Hull team to the other. The two clubs have been reticent about giving details but the word on the street is that it all began when a routine check of paperwork disclosed that Cooke had never actually signed his contract. When asked to complete the formality he demurred, asking why, since he was universally regarded as the creative driver of the team, he was not paid as much as three Hull players who were former or current internationals. If they gave him more money, then he would sign.

It is then said that the management, whose total salary bill had reached the cap allowed by the rugby league authorities, were irked by the fact that they had trained Cooke up through the club academy, nursed him through a recent injury and lent him £60,000 to pay London lawyers he hired for the nightclub case: they told him to get on his bike. So "Cookey" slung his leg over the crossbar and pedalled across the river to east Hull.

Crossing the river is more than a physical journey in Hull. In the old days the east was the land of the dockers, and Rovers, and the west that of the fishermen and Hull FC. The old industries have withered - most of the fish sold in Hull chippies is flown in from the victors of the Cod War in Iceland - but the divide remains.

Today the east, which contains the biggest council estate in Europe, is poor, a place of high unemployment and low expectation. The west, which has the city centre and the university, is posh and prosperous. In the Nineties when both teams were not doing well, and the obvious thing to the money men was a merger, the response from both sides was the same: "We're black, we're white, we'll never merge with shite".

The Cooke saga has only entrenched that. "It's the biggest story in Hull since 1974 when Clive Sullivan moved from FC to Rovers," says Tingle.

By curious happenstance a play about Sullivan is due to open at the Hull Truck Theatre Company next Thursday. It tells the story of how Sullivan, who resigned at FC after a distinguished career, then came out of retirement to join Rovers.

"Sully got tomatoes thrown at his windows at first," says the playwright, Dave Windass, in a break from rehearsals, "but, after his tragically early death at 42, huge throngs in the colours of both teams mingled in the streets for his funeral." The main road into the city from the Humber Bridge is now named after him.

"The trouble is Sully united a community but Cookey is hammering a wedge into it," said one of the play's directors, Gareth Tudor Price. Even the theatre has to echo sporting reality in Hull. Tudor Price is an FC supporter; the other director, Martin Barrass, supports KR. "Cookey's had his car done in today," one of the actors, Lee Green, an FC fan, tells Barrass, who winces.

The play does its best to send out a rather different message. At the end, the imposing actor playing Sully, Fidel Nanton, delivers a moving peroration about how both sides are the same beneath their shirts. "It's about the community, strong and up on its feet," says Windass, "about Hull as the best place in the country." You had better believe it.

"These people are pleasant but queer," J B Priestley once said about Hull folk, but then he was from Bradford. Hull - which had the worst-performing police force in the United Kingdom last year and whose city council was designated as the UK's worst-performing authority in both 2004 and 2005 - was recently named, by the Channel 4 series Location, Location, Location as the worst place to live in the UK.

Such judgements bring out a sense of unity in the people of Hull. What reasons did Channel 4 give, I asked my informant. "Dunno," she replied. "I wouldn't watch something like that."

Yet by contrast with cities with two soccer teams - where fans always prefer to see anybody defeat the near neighbour - in Hull there is a curious affection for the rival rugby league team.

"Rovers is my second team," says the Lord Mayor, Councillor Trevor Larsen, as he welcomes me into the mahogany-panelled splendour of the city's Victorian Guildhall. It is a place of great aldermanic grandeur and the Lord Mayor, who is also Admiral of the Humber, sits ensconced in a high-backed chair, wearing the chains and insignia of office. Beneath them, however, lurks the black-and-white of an FC fan.

He begins in neutral enough mode. "The saga has had a very negative impact on the psychology of the city," he says, but swiftly his colours show. "A lot of people feel let down by Cooke. Why didn't he leave at the end of the season, or at the beginning, instead of going in the middle when he's virtually impossible to replace with a buy-in?"

In the background his uniformed beadle hovers nervously, but the mayor is off. "He's generated a lot of ill will and left a really nasty taste in the mouth. He's done the unthinkable. We'll experience the repercussions for years. This is a family argument and family feuds can go on and on."

Over at Craven Park, Phil Lowe, a former Great Britain international and now a Rovers director, offers a counter-view. "We didn't buy him at the beginning of the season because he wasn't available then. If Hull FC had done their job properly, he wouldn't have been available now."

There is more to it than that. Rovers have this year been promoted to the Super League. It is a Rubicon season. Next year franchises will be given out which will set the league virtually in stone. KR need to stay up to ensure that they are there when that happens.

"We're struggling in the Super League," says Lowe candidly, "and Cooke might just make all the difference. In five years he'll always have been a KR player. All this fuss is just tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper." He needs to keep up with the times. The city's chippies serve their fare these days on plastic trays.

Paul Cooke has no such illusions. At his first post-transfer press conference the local radio station asked him how long he thought it would take for the dust to settle. "Twenty-five years," said Cooke, drily, "if ever".