Hull City will face Southampton in the Championship play-off final for a place in the Premier League
Curtis Davies working pitch side as a TV pundit(Image: PA)
Curtis Davies believes Hull City will have achieved even more than the 2016 side if they beat Southampton to win promotion to the Premier League.
The former centre back was part of the Tigers team which, ten years ago, finished fourth and came through the play-offs to defeat sixth-placed Sheffield Wednesday at Wembley.
Now a pundit the 41-year-old, who partnered Michael Dawson to a 1-0 win over the Owls a decade ago, has praised boss Sergej Jakirovic for picking up the pieces of a difficult summer and taking the promotion charge down to the final game of his first season in English football.
“This time I’ll be rooting for sixth to beat fourth, to be honest, if I’m nailing my colours to the mast,” he told Sky Sports.
“It’s a real heart versus head in terms of when you go into that final, obviously I’d love Hull City. I fancied Southampton before the ties even started. But what an occasion.
“With the job that Jakirovic has done at that football club, with the embargo, with everything that’s gone on, fantastic job.
“The squad that I was promoted with, we should have got promoted, we should have gone up automatically because we had a Premier League squad, but the job he’s done with the squad that they’ve got, absolutely fantastic job and a fantastic man.”
The Tigers now have ten days before they face Southampton in the showpiece event and Davies says it will be unfamiliar territory for a club that is enjoying its highest finish since dropping out of the top flight.
“I think the big thing is, first and foremost, get the tickets out of the way, because that’s the most annoying bit, you get 25 tickets and everyone and their dog comes out of the woodwork to ask for a ticket.
“So get that bit out of the way and then it’s the preparation of getting down there. I think for Southampton, they would have done this a couple of years ago, so maybe their preparations are a little bit simpler.
“They know the logistics, they know where they want to stay, they know what day they’re going to go down, whereas Hull haven’t done it for ten years.”
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