Dan: Hull — So The Season Has Begun…

Hi there!

Welcome to the 2nd instalment of my Hull City adventure. Last time we saw how my friendlies and transfer activity went but now comes the real stuff, league football with a place in the Premier League up for grabs. The media had us predicted 6th so we should be up there come the end of the season, but how did we kick things off in early August…

August Results

What a start! We went unbeaten, but almost didn’t concede too. The game against Middlesbrough was supposed to be a close defeat for us, but instead we dominated and McLean and Horava scored debut goals. Leeds (our 1st derby of the season) couldn’t have gone better, just take a look…

Not the domination you would expect to have at your rivals stadium, I would be livid if Sunderland came to St. James and did that! As for the other games, it was left up to Matty Fryatt to dispatch his old club Leicester before we came up against Stevenage in the League Cup, winning that game easily meant I’d already fulfilled the season expectation for that competition. Next up came Milwall who did not put up a fight at all and finally Ipswich who took the silver lining off the month by scoring a freekick against me, gutted…

As for rewards, we did quite well in that department as you would expect…

McShane’s 3 goals in 5 outings at centre back were enough to see him win PofM while Cairney was leading the charts with assists at this point so he also claimed an award. Our final award came to me for having an overall win percentage of 100% and a goal difference +12 from 5 games. However we weren’t top! QPR were sitting pretty in 1st and wrecking a brilliant month for Hull. However 1 more piece of good news came out of this month…

This can surely only benefit Hull City. We’ll be paid £100K a year for Arsenal to ‘test drive’ their players in the Championship (even though I hope to not be in this division next season). We also get an annual friendly with The Gunners but that will be nothing more than their reserves.

September Results

This month was going so well until the Derby game so we’ll focus on the bad things first. This is how the Derby game went, Paul McShane was given an early shower for 2-footing Davies on 16 minutes and we went in 1-0 down at half time. I told the team they could win, they seemed to believe me and went out and took a 2-1 lead through Simpson 10 minutes into the 2nd half. After that I can’t actually explain what happened, Derby became Barcelona and we became Accrington Stanley (sorry Stanley fans, it’s just the biggest mismatch I could think of). The man advantage showed and we were destroyed, suddenly our conceded record looks pretty average. After that we faced Sheffield United in a derby match and this happened…

We had plenty of shots on target, but far too many off target. This wasn’t the team I knew from the start of the season and it seems like the Derby result has seriously dented confidence. Anyway, enough moaning, onto the good things in September. McLean finally ended his goal drought against Reading in the League Cup which has handed us a glamour tie against Man City at the Etihad Stadium (lucky us) while Craig Fagan came on as a sub after recovering from his torn calf muscle and won the game against QPR with a great 20 yard volley which pushed us into 1st place. Simpson also continued his fine scoring run this month along with Fryatt chipping in with a few.

Player of the Post

So, Jay Simpson has the honour of being my first player of the post winner. His ability in front of goal has been brilliant during my first 2 months in charge and he has torn teams apart single handedly. You can tell how good he has been simply by looking at his price tag, when I joined Hull, Simpson was worth £900K, now his value has almost doubled to £1.6million! Hopefully he can steer clear of injury and fire us into the Premier League.

Now onto the rest of the squad…

This is everyone but my 4 worst performers and those who are yet to play since the screenshot scrolling screen button on PicPick has decided not to work today. No surprise that Simpson leads the way in ratings with 10 goals and 5 assists in 12 appearances. My other 2 strikers aren’t far behind while Devitt (on loan at Crewe Alexandra) seems to be having a great season in League 2. Disappointingly Lewis is bottom on this list but that’s because he rarely has much to do, he has performed well in a couple of game but most of the time he just stands there and organises the defence. His rating is lower that expected because of our last 2 games where he didn’t play too well.

So after all that, I guess your wondering where we are in the table. Well, if you guessed 2nd…you’d be wrong because we’re sitting pretty in 1st place!

For now I’ll just show the top 6 since it’s far too early to be talking about final positions and at the moment this is the only area of the table I’m interested in. We may be top but only by 1 goal! Same points and goal difference as Burnley, the difference is that we’ve scored 22 to their 21 so we can’t afford slip ups. Other than Burnley and early challengers QPR there don’t seem to be any teams pushing for automatic promotion with Doncaster!?! sitting in 4th place but 5 points off the top 2. Cardiff and Forest are also up there but there’s still over half a season for things to change. I know I said we’d only focus on the top but the bottom 3 at the moment is too strange not to mention. I haven’t got a screenshot but the teams in the bottom 3 are:

Leeds 24th, 6pts

Portsmouth 23rd, 7pts

Middlesbrough 22nd, 9pts

Not the start any of those teams would have wanted and to be honest they’ll probably be changing managers soon since I’m now in October and that’s prime sacking time in the football world.

Well that’s all for now!

Thanks for reading!