Fin end of the wedge

Other rugby league teams must be shaking with terror when the big lads from Hull take the field. As if the sight of them wasn't intimidating enough, Hull have enhanced their formidable reputation by adopting a name to have rivals quaking before they even put their gumshields in.

Hull are now called the Sharks. A good choice, if Australian research is anything to go by. The clipboarders connected suitably susceptible subjects to electrodes, whispered frightening words in their victims' ears and recorded the reaction. There were slight variations between male and female to words like snake, death, spider, murder, rape and wombat, but both sexes were agreed on one word. At the mention of "shark", the gauges flickered like a rev counter on a Formula One car.

I would have found it interesting to know what sort of sharks are considered the most frightening. There are, after all, more than 200 kinds. A moot point, perhaps, but a great white is infinitely more scary than, say, a blue shark or a thresher or a wobbegong.

Another with a taste for swimmers is the tiger shark, which probably eats more people in Australia than great whites. There are several others that have chewed a leg or two, but it's only tigers and great whites that are the real bad guys. At the other end of the scale are softies like the epaulette shark, whose most fearsome characteristic is to wriggle strongly if you grab it.

So what sort of shark are the Hull lads? Bit embarrassing, this. To hammer home the point, journalists were confronted with a fish tank as they entered a press conference to announce the name change. What was in the tank? You've guessed it: sharks. At least, that's what it should have been. But it's not easy to wheel out a great white to order. Not many of them swimming around in the Humber in early March. So instead, the masterminds organising things came up with, er, members of the shark family instead. And so, rather than being confronted by the terror of the seas, the hacks were bemused by a fish tank containing ... lesser spotted dogfish.

Before the days of the Trades Descriptions Act, dogfish were sold as rock salmon, along with other things so ugly that they had to be skinned and gutted before housewives would buy them. But spotties are the least palatable of the ugly brigade. Even the French, who will eat anything with fins, are curiously reticent on cooking dogfish.

What else can I say in the lesser spotted dogfish's favour? Well, its skin is very rough, like coarse sandpaper, and is made up of hundreds of very fine, backward-pointing "teeth". Its eggs are very very interesting. you find their tough, leathery sacs on beaches, we used to call them mermaids' purses.

Their only real link to sharkdom is that Americans call them cat sharks, though chihuahua sharks might be more appropriate because they are the smallest of all dogfish. The British record is only a little over 4lb. Frightening, huh?

It gets worse. They are lousy fighters (a plastic bag gives better sport), they're smelly and they are generally hated by both trawlers and anglers. Spotties travel in big shoals and are so greedy that anglers who start catching them generally move elsewhere, knowing that no other fish will get near the bait when the dogs are out.

So there you have it. Other rugby league sides may be slightly less fearful when they realise Hull has chosen as its symbol a small, weak, greedy fish with scratchy skin. And you have to feel that few clubs will be overawed by meeting Hull Lesser Spotted Dogfish.