City return to the MKM Stadium on Saturday with their star striker set to see some familiar faces
John Egan and Oli McBurnie celebrate Hull City’s third goal at PNE(Image: Paul Currie/Shutterstock)
Oli McBurnie wants to turn a very good week into the perfect one for Hull City, as they look to make it nine points from nine against his former club Swansea City on Saturday.
In-form City have claimed two wins from two on the road in the past week, winning away at Southampton and then thumping play-off rivals Preston North End 3-0 at Deepdale on Tuesday.
McBurnie notched two more assists at St Mary’s and Deepdale, before getting his first goal in five games with a clever bicycle kick on Tuesday night to hit 10 league goals for the season, while taking his tally of assists to six in a Man of the Match display.
Attention now turns back to the MKM Stadium, with the resurgent Swans in town looking to halt the Tigers’ growing momentum in their race for promotion.
“I actually thought it looked better than what it did on the replays. In real time I thought I looked like Cristiano Ronaldo, I didn’t quite look like that, but, I’m getting a bit older now, a bit stiffer,” joked the Yorkshireman in conversation with Hull Live about his midweek strike.
“I knew Yu (Hirakawa) would want to get at his man and put in a cross and you can time your run off of that, it’s just a bit behind me and I’ve always kind of liked an overhead kick, a bicycle kick. I had a couple last year at Las Palmas, I hit the crossbar and stuff, so it was nice for it to just drop in. I think the timing of the goal was kind of key for us, coming out in the second half, we knew they were going to come out and give it a good go.
“I know what Hecky’s (Paul Heckingbottom) like, I know what would have been said in their half-time dressing room, so to kill the game off within five minutes of the second half was really good. The relentlessness, I think that’s due to the boys coming on. If you see the squad now, we’re bringing Joff (Joe Gelhardt) on, we’re bringing Lunny (John Lundstram) on. Joff just wants to come on and score, so he’s never going to stop being relentless.
“He (Gelhardt) just wants to get the ball and score every time he gets it, so I think you can really see the squad coming together now. Yu coming on with Lunny coming on with Joff coming on, you see the depth and the quality that we have in that dressing room, even with the 417 injuries that we have at the minute.”
McBurnie had been given a target of 15 goals by Sergej Jakirvoic at the start of the season, and despite missing eight games with a calf injury, the in-form Scotsman remain on course, though he’s not concerning himself too much with that.
“For me it’s more one of them things that people outside focus on more,” he said of reaching double figures. “I don’t think for me it’s like get to 10 or get to whatever, it’s just keep going. I had an interview the other day and the presenter before the game said to me, ‘You’ve not scored in 2026, is that playing on your mind? I said, ‘Well it wasn’t until you just told me that’. I said, give me a chance.
‘Nah, I think the more goals and the more assists that you get the better the team’s doing. If I didn’t score another goal till the end of the season and we got promoted, I’d take that.”
The in-form marksman will come against some familiar faces once again this weekend, when the Tigers host his former club at the MKM Stadium, and having already netted against the Swans in South Wales this season, he’ll be keen to do so again and cap off what’s already been a very good week.
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“I think they’ve done really well, you know, obviously they’ve got a new manager in, and they’ve started playing a little bit of different, and they’ve, they’ve picked up some good results, so it’ll be a really good game,” he said of his old club.
“I still know a lot of people behind the scenes and stuff there that I really have a lot of time for, so from a personal point, it’ll be a good day to see them, but then when we play on the pitch, it’s just all about trying to get another three points and turning this week into a really top week.”
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