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Posted by Andrew Harrison on 5 October 2008 - 6:59pm.
First Arsenal, then Spurs... Could this prediction from 1986 finally be coming true before our very eyes?
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it's Happy Hour again
..... your boys took a Hull of a beating etc.
Good chant
According to the BBC live scores update today*, the Hull fans were singing "Are you Arsenal in disguise?" to Spurs, which is quite brilliant (and I say that as a slightly worried Gooner)!
* See the entry at 1510 here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/7653372.stm
Its terrible
I'm from Grimsby and this is the stuff of nightmares.
"Fourth best band in Hull"...
..."Third best team in England".
Let's hope so
Have they played Chelsea yet?
Hull for the Champions League!
Go, Hull, go!
Reading ended up only one place off UEFA cup...
in their first ever season in the Premier League so you never know, Hull could be playing in the Nou Camp soon!
It was only last week that
It was only last week that you couldn't read an article about City without reading "Derby County" somewhere in it. I'm just happy to have got beyond that particular comparison - but it's a little bit early for us to be thinking about Europe.
Mick Ronson
There. Someone had to say it.
Plus
Roland off Fine Young Cannibals is a native son, and Everything But The Girl formed there. Rock legends all.
He is indeed
I saw Roland doing star-jumps on Pearson Park in an ill-fitting grey flannel tracksuit.
Kingmaker, anyone? No, thought not. Poor chaps.
Well done to the Tigers (they've come a long way since Dolan's era) and Broony (I'm a Bolton boy so he was already a legend).
Great
Nippy little winger
Happy indeed
As readers of my waffle will recognise I come from the Hull area, Barton-upon-Humber is just over the river and I used to trek over to Boothferry Park in my early years. Blow me if last year a pal of mine said he had bought the club, so now I get to the VIP places. I happened to be at White Hart LAne yesterday and they were indeed singing "Are you Arsenal in disguise", brilliant. Mind you the team is 50% changed since last season but the new guys have been melded so well by Phil Brown. Their success seems to be warming everyone's hearts. Long may it continue. Next game, home against West Ham - pity as our away record is the best in the league.
it must have been your mate on "today" this morning
one of those annoying BBC sport interviews where the beeb reporter kept asking the Hull chairmen questions about spurs and newcastle not about his own club. This was because the reporter wasn't really interested in Hull(plus knew nowt about them) and just wanted to talk about the "big" clubs. We had the same when Barnsley beat Liverpool and chelsea last year all the talk was of the big clubs losing not us winning.
Same happened to Reading
when we beat Liverpool - it was all Rafa's bad tactics and his fault for subbing Torres and Gerrard blah blah...no credit to us for playing bloody well and beating them fair and square.
I think it's the lot of supporting a smaller club - one thing I will say to Hull fans - enjoy your moment in the spotlight, it's great while it lasts. BUT if (I won't say when) you get relegated it's back to being ignored by everyone - all the broadsheets, no more MOTD - just a little bit of TV first thing on Sunday morning on bloody ITV.
Still no more cheating, diving t**ts like Drogba to deal with!
Belated sympathy
my *rse - As a life time Brentford supporter (yeah, yeah, I know, give it your best shot!) who lives in the Reading area, I was getting just a little sick and tired of suddenly seeing Reading shirts on the streets of Wokingham and not being able to pick up the local paper without hearing of Leroy Lita's latest break in.
So you'll forgive me if I don't feel the slightest sympathy for your loss!
Sorry but I won't rise to the bait!
Don't worry, Reading shirts in Wokingham have disappeared since we got relegated into the oblivion that is non-Premiership football.
Anyway, I have a lot of time for Brentford, mainly 'cos good mate is also a lifetime fan, lives by the ground and we take your best Manager and players!
Can I just hark back to an earlier age and say...
Hereford United
Mind you, the stand had a new sponsor banner mailed up last week so things are looking up again.
'The Marches Will Rise Again'
Hull in Voice
The best I've heard in a long time, at Newcastle -
'Worse than Grimsby, you lot are worse than Grimsby...'
I'm from south of the Humber and Iron 'til I die,
but it has to be said that the Hull are mighty.
The East Coast will rise again.
"The East Coast will rise again"
As King Canute found out to his cost.
Eye-yunnnnnnnnnnn
This past weekend saw me return to my Scunnie fastness for the usual slap-up spam, fritter supper, and obligatory discussion of stratospheric London house prices. Sadly this meant missing the mighty Iron playing down't road from one's Essex gaffe.
However, the Tigers' victory over molly-coddled Cockerney costermongers fair brought a shimmering tear to me jaundiced eyes.
Mind you, I could never applaud the Grimsby Codheads. Some shibboleths can never be recanted...
Grimsby are the "England" of the east coast
Everybody (ie Scumthorpe & Hooll City) hates us and wants to beat us.
And we aren't very good at football.
(eeyore voice) Enjoy it while it lasts
As an Ipswich fan, we had a nosebleed-inducing season in the top-flight not so long ago (2001). Newly promoted, we finished 5th after having spent most of the season in the top 3. We then secured a UEFA place and beat Inter Milan at home but lost narrowly by 4 goals at the San Siro. I defy even The Fonz and Potsie to have had happier days than these.
Like The Fonz though, we jumped the shark. The following season was humiliating and then relegation and then the receivers were called in. We haven't really troubled anyone since then.
Yes, probably not a helpful post for Tigers fans to read but I just like Ipswich getting a mention because it makes me feel that they may still be a little bit relevant. I'm off to cry bitter, bitter tears.
Thank you, Austin.
I, too, like to see Ipswich mentioned, and I, too, think back to those days whenever a newly-promoted side has a similarly vertiginous start to the season. I'm hoping a similar fate doesn't await Hull, as it does the heart good to see a smaller club do well at the expense of the fat cats. My ITFC happy days, though, go back a little further to the 1978 cup final win - I was there, courtesy of a free ticket, mistakenly handed over when I queued for my younger brother's for him (Chris still at school, me on the dole.) - and then the side getting even better with the introduction of Muhren and Thijssen. Predictably, it all went downhill once Robson was offered the England job, but the memory of the breath-taking beauty of our football at that time will (have to) sustain me down the years.
Proper foopball clubs
I think our idea of what constitutes a proper foopball club is closely linked to which ones happened to be in the middling-to-upper reaches of whatever the Premiership was called when we were kids and yooves - in my case the Sixties and Seventies. On that basis, I'm with Nigel, Ipswich is a proper club - as are QPR (Stan Bowles), Fulham (George Cohen and past-it George Best), Wolves (Dougan), West Brom (Asa "Hole-Hearted" Hartford), Notts Forest (European Cups under Cloughie), Stoke and Leicester (how could Gordon Banks have played for a non-proper club?)
Blackburn, on the other hand aren't proper, because by the time they hit their stride in the Nineties, I'd lost interest in swapping football cards with my mates and my favourite magazine was no longer Shoot!
I'm waiting...
...for a response fom Leedsboy any minute now.
Oh, they're proper too
Getting through The Revie Years was a significant part of my character-forming experience.
Now then Young Man
That'll be Nottingham Forest, as Cloughie never tired of saying.
Notts County, but Nottm Forest.
Not Sforest?
Next you'll be telling us it's not Manstya Knighted either.
United
Oh you can call them what you like, except "United". It bugs me when pundits refer to them as "United", as if none of the other Uniteds in the country count...
Good to see...
... standards being maintained - Mr. Clough would be proud. People forget his astonishing goal-scoring stats, and just think of him as the greatest manager England never had.
Proud to have him as a former manager of Hartlepool(s) United.
Agreed
My Ipswich attachment started in 1975 and the 10-ish years after that were indeed the Glory Years. Too young to go the 1978 cup final but boy it felt good to be the Only Ipswich Supporter In The Whole School on the following Monday. Probably the only time I have ever felt like the Alpha Male in any group.
Sorry - that was meant to be a reply to Nigel's thread but I stuffed it up.
Cup Final 1978
Oh, Austin (BTW, where were you at school to be the Only Ipswich Supporter... ?), you should've been there - truly one of the greatest days of my life. The easiest hitch to (and back from) London ever - stayed overnight with friends in Ipswich for an easier start, on the road early with my scarf, picked up almost instantly by fellow supporters. The walk to the stadium - handed a beer by Ken and Gerry when the minibus they were in drove by. The match : a one-sided one-nil drubbing (we hit the woodwork three times.) Hugging complete strangers and losing my glasses when Roger Osborne finally scored (the specs reappeared soon after, undamaged, six or seven tiers down - ah, terraces!). The journey back - round the N Circular with a Hammer who was pleased Arsenal had lost, then homewards with an Ipswich coachload, all the bridges up the A12 festooned with ITFC banners. And back home in Woodbridge, before my brother who'd gone by coach, in time to see the highlights on Match of the Day. Thanks for giving me the impetus to reminisce like this, Austin. Having lived in Norwich for the past twenty-two years, I don't get the chance that often. (Note to self : must phone my brother tonight.)
Marvellous
That's a great story and I am glad to be backed up on the one-sided nature of the game. I have only seen the game once and my memory is of total and complete Ipswich domination. Arsenal fans I have discussed this with put it down to a childish bias in my memory.
At that time, I went to school in Surrey. I remember no-one else supporting Ipswich. I would have known if there were.
BTW, Ipswich fans should read this book. Written by a New Zealand-based Ipswich fan about his unhealthy obsession with football and the World Cup:
http://www.theworldcupbaby.com/home.php
It's to his credit that
Nick Hornby, notorious Gooner that he is, acknowledges Ipswich's dominance of the match in his memoir Fever Pitch. (Although he's inexplicably quiet on the subject of how I got to the match. Time for a revised edition, methinks....). And thanks, Austin, for the link. Surrey is impressive enough, but New Zealand? The extracts look most entertaining, and I intend to investigate further.
Humber-lievable!
As a member of the congregation at the church of St Harry McNally in Chester in the 80's (RIP), I can remember the above mentioned 'orrible 'ull coming to these parts and causing WWIII with the local "casuals". Never been overkeen since. Boothferry Park hardly held the welcome that the Hull Tourist Board would have wished on visitors either.
Saying that, the beating of Spurs and Arsenal do raise a smile!