Actually no, when I think about it - it was just a win at home against weakened opposition. But listening to Radio Humberside on the way home I was beginning to wonder.
Reality doesn’t bite very often over the water. Talk to any Hull fan, and I have many friends of that persuasion, and before you can count to ten they will mention the ‘P’ word – potential. They are forever going on about what they might be and forgetting what they are, a third division team. And a trophy cabinet full of potential looks to me suspiciously like a trophy cabinet jam packed with sod all.
Listening to Burns slavering on about the forward line made me smile. Yes they have effectively four First Division strikers who could wreak havoc in the basement division. But going into Saturday’s game their top scorer was a midfield player with five goals. If you looked at the top scorers in Division Three (and sorry lads but when compiling the table they actually only count goals that have been scored rather than ones that could or might get scored) two out of the top five scorers in the division played for Scunthorpe.
Maybe they are about to go into overdrive. They have the manager and the resources to do it. But it ain’t happened yet. Yes they played us off the park at times on Saturday. But the United side was badly depleted and was never going to be at the races – and we still held them for 85 minutes.
Which reminds me – why do people always applaud cross-field balls? It’s hardly brain surgery if a player decides for once that instead of lumping it upfield he will pass across the width of the pitch to a player in space. But if he does the crowd always starts to coo and applauds warmly. They’re saying ‘Look at that – total football, brilliant eh?’ and ‘Look at me – I’m a connoisseur - I must be because I’m applauding’. Well it’s dumb. Especially when they’re applauding the seventeenth cross-field ball of the afternoon as they were yesterday. If it’s that brilliant a gambit why is the score still 0-0 when you’ve already done it sixteen times already?
Anyway back to the Tigers. Yes it was a very good performance and the crowd and the atmosphere were excellent. But on the other hand they’ve got a new manager and now the rugby has finished people are turning out for the last games at Boothferry Park. I cannot see that atmosphere being recreated in the new ground when it is a third full. I remember when we went to Wigan for the opening day of our ill-fated season in Division Two. They were in a similar position and the atmosphere was rubbish. The pitch was awful too because of the rugby and that’s a problem Hull will have at the beginning of next season. Whatever you say about Boothferry Park (the supermarket etc) the pitch has always been one of the best.
So maybe it is about to happen for them, but check the table – it hasn’t happened yet. We couldn’t complain about Saturday’s result on balance. What you can complain about is being made to wait almost half an hour before being let out. As we stood in the pissing rain, depressed and miserable, the tannoy played Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. A nice sadistic touch – made me smile anyway.
Up the Iron