Wembley Again

(Photo: Hull Daily Mail)

Readers may not be aware that I am a football fan, a Hull City fan to be precise (yes, that counts as football). Next Saturday I’ll be at Wembley to watch my boyhood team play in the Championship playoff final against ... (*checks news*) Southampton, I guess. It’s a big moment for all kinds of reasons but it’s also exactly ten years since the last time Hull made the playoffs, the week before the EU referendum. So some mostly personal thoughts on the last decade.

I remember very clearly walking down Wembley Way with 80000 other Yorkshire football fans (our opponents were Sheffield Wednesday, allow myself a giggle at what has happened to them since). The demographics were overwhelmingly white, male, and a little bit older than I was then. I have a vivid memory of thinking ‘no way are any of these people going to vote to stay in the EU’. Although I hadn’t expected Leave to win, I found myself struggling to imagine Remain could. Having grown up in small town East Yorkshire, I knew perfectly well that in much of the country there was not much time for the EU or for the kinds of liberal cosmopolitan values that had attracted me away from there. I had a sense of trepidation about the game and the more important battle a week later.

The game was great, Hull deservedly won 1-0 thanks to a beautiful goal from Mo Diamé, and we were back in the Premier League again, notching a second playoff triumph out of two (the first being in 2008, when Hull legend Dean Windass volleyed home to beat Bristol City and take Hull into the top flight for the first time ever). Celebrations seemed muted - the Hull crowd at that time tended to be quiet and morose, quick to fall into despair. The Wednesday fans made a colossal noise, putting us to shame. It felt as if something was ending rather than beginning. Indeed, Hull’s unpopular owners, the Allam family, had decided for whatever reason that they had no interest in investing in a new squad, forcing manager Steve Bruce to resign and leading matchwinner Diamé, sensing the ship about to sink, to transfer to the then Championship team Newcastle United. The lack of summer transfer activity meant the team going on pre-season tour without 11 fit senior players. Rising star Moses Odubayo, a standout performer in the Championship, was denied (forever it turned out) his Premier League debut by a devastating knee injury in one of the pre-season games. Relegation was inevitable, the post-playoff optimism spent within a few short weeks.

We all know the story of Brexit. An institutional and economic catastrophe, blowing apart the progressive coalition that only a year earlier had seemed capable of winning power, entrenching all the deadweight features of the UK economy whilst straitjacketing many of our most dynamic sectors, liberating the social resentment that had been bubbling below the surface since the Conservative party decided its only hope of survival was to embrace geriatric ethno-nationalism. Six months later America turned the same way. A world order I had long been critical of was falling apart, to be replaced by something much much worse. The football hooligans of another age were now a weighty electoral constituency of bad-tempered boomers, ready to have one last fight outside the pub.

Hull City’s halfhearted attempt at Premier League survival failed but at least kickstarted the careers of Harry Maguire and Andy Robertson, both graduating to big clubs (via Leicester in the former case), and Marco Silva, taking his first job in English football. The descent to the Championship coincided with the death of my younger sister. My nephews, both brought up in the faith, were punished further with season tickets. There was no immediate return to the PL, but at least a 6-1 thrashing of Birmingham City to enjoy. My dad cried like a baby with each goal. It was to be his penultimate game, his last one a dull 1-1 home draw with Blackburn Rovers. I can still picture him chatting amiably to a couple of young Blackburn fans on our walk to the ground. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Within three years Hull were in League One after a collapse in form precipitated by the departure of Jared Bowen in the January transfer window. The stay in League One was a short one and the club won (before empty stadiums) its first title since 1966, the year before I was born. My dad passed away in the spring, meaning we never shared the experience of Hull City actually winning anything. Of course, that was never the point. Supporting a club like ours is not about winning, it’s about suffering and the meaning of tragedy and (occasionally) triumph. The glory punctuating the misery.

Like in Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, football has meant expressing emotions that my family has always had trouble confronting directly. My way of expressing my grief for my sister was to leverage contacts to get Hull City players to sign a card for my nephews. To mourn my dad, I would watch the Covid games on TV with my mum and my brother. And this time, Wembley offers a moment of respite from a world that seems to be collapsing around me. The scorer of the 2008 playoff winner, Dean Windass, is struggling with early onset dementia, but he’ll be there. Hull is turning to Reform just as it turned to Brexit, the long neglected angrily refusing to contemplate a future that actually revolves around higher education, wind turbines and cultural revival born out of diversity and openness. Can I see light at the end of tunnel? I don’t know. But until next Saturday, I don’t care.