You would think Leonid Slutsky would regret answering his door to the distressed young girl whose cat was stuck up a tree.
For what followed changed the life and destiny of an 18-year-old who was making his way as a goalkeeper in the Russian second division.
'I was very polite, I couldn't say no,' Hull City's coach recalls of that winter's day in Volgograd in 1989. Slutsky — the son of a boxer — hauled himself up the poplar but slipped and fell from 20 feet.
'Now, it is very funny, but not so back then,' he says.