City could be just 90 minutes from the Premier League on Saturday afternoon
Ryan Giles celebrates the win over Millwall in the play-off semi-final(Image: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
Kevin Phillips believes that if Hull City win promotion to the Premier League at Wembley on Saturday, it would be an achievement to rank alongside Leicester City winning the Premier League.
City face Southampton at the national stadium for a place in the top flight this weekend, having gone from relegation candidates to promotion possibles in the space of a year.
Twelve months ago, the Tigers survived relegation to League One on the final day of the Championship season thanks to Matt Crooks’ goal at Portsmouth.
Last summer, following the arrival of Sergej Jakirovic, the club were hit by transfer restrictions which meant they were unable to pay loan or transfer fees, and were reliant on free transfers.
Winning promotion back to the top-flight a decade on from their last visit to English football’s top table, would rival the Foxes’ 5000/1 success in the same season, Phillips believes.
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“Hull City are a big football club; they’ve experienced the Premier League down the years, and arguably, they should be in the Premier League with the infrastructure they’ve got there, but they’re not,” Phillips told Best Betting Sites. “They’ve had a tough time. The sanctions and the embargoes have been put in place there. The manager has done an incredible job. The recruitment, the squad he’s put together, and the form they’ve shown this season. They’ve stood up against everyone. No one expected them to go to Millwall and win. And they went there and showed what a quality team they are.
“So, yeah, if they were to go that one step further and get to the dreamland of the Premier League, you probably would have to say it’s certainly up there as one of the stories from the Championship, maybe not ever, but right up there as one of them. It probably goes alongside maybe a Leicester winning the Premier League; it’s an incredible story. And I think a lot of neutrals from the journey that they’ve had this season would want to see Hull in the Premier League purely for what they’ve done.”
Uncertainty remains about whether the game will actually go ahead, with Phillips’ former club in the dock over breaching spying rules. Middlesbrough want Southampton kicked out of the play-offs, with an independent panel hearing the case.
“You want to know who you’re playing because the preparation, I know, after they’ve won, they’d have probably had a couple of days to relax and recover, but the staff wouldn’t,” he continued. “Their focus would be turned on to, obviously, after Southampton going through straight on to Southampton, and they’ll be prepping, they’ll be looking at videos again, they’ll be analysing that play-off game, and it’s hard to do that when in the back of your mind you know you might be doing all that work knowing that you might not be playing them.
“So I think for their sake it’s a tough one, but they’ve still got, I’m hoping independent people will make the decision very, very quickly for Hull’s sake because it’s a tough situation for them. Whichever the outcome is, Hull have done fantastically this season; they’re in a great position.”
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