SPORT
All Hail Hull City
/ Pete Hausler
11.18.08
On a recent Sunday morning in November, I found myself at Nevada Smiths, Lower Manhattan’s church of televised European soccer. I was there for one reason, and it wasn’t the restorative Guinness I nursed, delicious though it was, even at that early hour. I wanted to watch Hull City A.F.C. (Association Football Club) face off against a talented, if mercurial, Manchester City. I had been following the feel-good story of Hull since the start of the season (mid-August), but had yet to actually watch a game; it was high time I checked out a match for real.
Hunched up to the bar, I derived a full-circle thrill in recalling that the only live English football match I have ever seen was this same Manchester City club, twenty years ago on Boxing Day, away at Stoke-on-Trent, a small, working-class city in the West Midlands. That cold December day, I had piled into the world’s smallest van with a half-dozen rabid Man City fans—including my best friend from high school, a Mancunian by birth who had since moved back to his home-town—sporting large, fluorescent-yellow, blow-up bananas (don’t ask), eventually cramming shoulder-to-shoulder into the fenced-in, “look-ma-no seats,” away-fan terrace, trying to learn the dozens of Man City fight songs. Cliché though it may be, I was completely taken aback, intimidated even, by the intensity of the fans, both home and away. I can truly say I had never, before or since, experienced anything like it at any sporting event.
One-third of the way into this 2008 version of the madness that is the English Football season, Hull City’s scrappy, overachieving soccer has been nothing short of inspirational. Having now reached the point of full-on sartorial identification, i.e., hoping to dress in Hull finery, I went to the club’s website to order their distinctive black-and-amber-striped home jersey. I wasn’t too surprised to see they were out of stock. I reasoned that if a guy like me—a relative neophyte to the burning passions of the Premiership, England’s top-flight soccer league—if a guy like me wanted to purchase a fetching Hull jersey and couldn’t get one, then they probably hadn’t made enough of the things at the start of the season.
As a sporting city, Hull is perhaps better known for rugby, and specifically for a fierce rivalry between its two Super League sides Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers. Maybe this is because the soccer team, Hull City A.F.C., has been around since 1904, but this is their first-ever season in the top-flight league. Every single one of their 104 previous seasons had come and gone playing in the lower leagues of the Football Association (FA). Until last year, that is, when they earned the right to play in the English Premier League (EPL).
Hunched up to the bar, I derived a full-circle thrill in recalling that the only live English football match I have ever seen was this same Manchester City club, twenty years ago on Boxing Day, away at Stoke-on-Trent, a small, working-class city in the West Midlands. That cold December day, I had piled into the world’s smallest van with a half-dozen rabid Man City fans—including my best friend from high school, a Mancunian by birth who had since moved back to his home-town—sporting large, fluorescent-yellow, blow-up bananas (don’t ask), eventually cramming shoulder-to-shoulder into the fenced-in, “look-ma-no seats,” away-fan terrace, trying to learn the dozens of Man City fight songs. Cliché though it may be, I was completely taken aback, intimidated even, by the intensity of the fans, both home and away. I can truly say I had never, before or since, experienced anything like it at any sporting event.
One-third of the way into this 2008 version of the madness that is the English Football season, Hull City’s scrappy, overachieving soccer has been nothing short of inspirational. Having now reached the point of full-on sartorial identification, i.e., hoping to dress in Hull finery, I went to the club’s website to order their distinctive black-and-amber-striped home jersey. I wasn’t too surprised to see they were out of stock. I reasoned that if a guy like me—a relative neophyte to the burning passions of the Premiership, England’s top-flight soccer league—if a guy like me wanted to purchase a fetching Hull jersey and couldn’t get one, then they probably hadn’t made enough of the things at the start of the season.
As a sporting city, Hull is perhaps better known for rugby, and specifically for a fierce rivalry between its two Super League sides Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers. Maybe this is because the soccer team, Hull City A.F.C., has been around since 1904, but this is their first-ever season in the top-flight league. Every single one of their 104 previous seasons had come and gone playing in the lower leagues of the Football Association (FA). Until last year, that is, when they earned the right to play in the English Premier League (EPL).