Our Hull City fan columnist Natalie Murphy jokes she’s experiencing a new Tigers concern, mainly competition for a European place
Hull City critic Joe Cole and captain Lewie Coyle
Are you reading, Joe Cole? We may be three games in but we’re not only third in the table, we’re also the only team of the 92 in the Football League that are yet to have conceded a goal.
Ok, so we didn’t make it past Sunderland in the Carabao Cup – though, after missing it on TV after being caught up in the air traffic control nightmare this week, I’m told we should have had a penalty and seen their captain sent off. But Premier League survival? Hold my beer, because the invincible season is still on.
Not that I’m making any predictions. In the media, these should be left to the horoscope writers. Just ask our friend Joe, whose outburst looks set to backfire as spectacularly as Alan Hanson’s infamous ‘you can’t win anything with kids’ line about Manchester United.
Because isn’t that the beauty of sport? It’s endless capacity to surprise and delight with shocking results and dramatic turns of events. It’s barely September and yet the list of unexpected things to have happened on this adventure so far gets longer and longer. I didn’t, for example, anticipate watching Arsenal v Chelsea last Sunday with a genuine interest in how the result might affect our standing.
Nor did I think that my mind would start to wonder about how other sides’ European commitments might be capitalised upon. There’s a part of every fan, I think, where the flame of eternal optimism burns. It has to. What else keeps you going through long runs of defeats and disappointments than the belief, somewhere and somehow, that things will get better.
The difficulty for Tigers fans this season is adjusting to what ‘better’ now means for us. It’s like when an athlete breaks a long-held world record barrier only to watch their rivals quickly start to smash through the new time. The general feeling around us in the West Stand at the Villa game before kick-off was that a draw would be a good result. And, of course, it was. It’s also exactly the sort of measured assessment that stops you looking like an idiot. (Hello, Joe.)
At the end of the match, however, I couldn’t help but think that if that had been our opening game, we might well have won it. The highlights told a different story, with minute after minute of footage showing one squandered Villa chance after another. But we did finish the better of the two sides, and as we all know, there’s only one match stat we care about and that’s the final score.
Perhaps it was only towards the end of the game that we started to believe we deserved to even wish for anything more than a point. These are new and exciting times and we’re not here to make up the numbers. We’ve already challenged what’s possible for a promoted team in the early stages.
We’ve waved black and amber flags declaring our will to ‘dare to dream’. The question now is, do we dare to dream even bigger?