The Tigers’ eagerly anticipated return to the top-flight gets underway this weekend
Hull City’s fans haven’t stopped celebrating since Wembley three months ago(Image: Lee Keuneke/PA Wire)
The heatwave is over, the World Cup wallchart has long since been torn up and put in the recycling, and this morning I received an email inviting me to join a ‘waitlist’ for a £275 advent calendar.
Summer is slipping away, but the end of one season brings the start of another. The Premier League is back. And Hull City are back in it.
So, after ten years away from the top flight, how will it feel? The first home game of any new campaign is always a highlight. The concourse and terraces take on the atmosphere of a convivial wedding as you greet fellow supporters not seen since May. There’s catching up to do, predictions to be made, and anxieties aired before a ball is even kicked.
It’s also the one game of the season where the result genuinely doesn’t matter. Of course, a win is what everyone wants. But on the opening day, it’s simply too soon to be overly troubled by a loss or a draw.
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There’s too much else going on to appreciate before we start worrying about that. The sold-out stadium for a start. New players on the pitch. That feeling of being back in somewhere totally familiar that somehow seems fresh once again.
I’ll be listening out for updated songs among the crowd too after our last Premier League season of 2016/17 brought with it a selection of chants related to our UK City of Culture status of the time. I still consider ‘You’re only here for the culture’ to be the absolute peak of our repertoire, but I am happy to be proved wrong.
‘You’re only here for the recently re-opened £20m revamped Hull Maritime Museum’, anyone? Or, in honour of the Arctic Corsair finding its permanent home, ‘We move what we want, we move what we want, we love our trawler, we’ll move what we want’, perhaps?
As for our first opponents, do I even need to name them? Does it matter that it’s Man Utd? It’s a great way to begin, as I talked about when the fixtures were released, but the opening game vibes are such that if this really was a wedding, they would very much be on the evening guest list only. Tomorrow is about us, at our house, celebrating our promotion, and we’ll be keeping the party going at least until the final whistle.
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