‘I miss Burnsy’s match commentary - we need it now more than ever’

Eye Of The Tigers, a column by Sam Hawcroft

A fan’s thoughts on Hull City

At last, something to moan about.

I soon realised, after last month’s ‘reasons to be cheerful’ column, that there was no way I could keep up that sort of happy-clappy content. I’m a City fan. It’s my default position to be depressed.

We remain, as I write this, top of League One, so everything is still pretty rosy overall – but the one blot in City’s copybook of late was the rather lacklustre performance that saw them exit the FA Cup in the second round at the hands of “League Two strugglers Stevenage” (© every sports hack).

A 6-5 win on penalties for the Hertfordshire club (argh, another ground tick kyboshed by Covid) made it look closer than it was; we’d not done anywhere near enough before Sean McLoughlin’s limp spot-kick eventually ensured we wouldn’t be in the third-round draw, which always provides a few minutes of excitement before we’re inevitably paired with Wigan Athletic. In the end, Stevenage were drawn at home to Swansea. Meh.

However, the whole thing got me thinking. One reason I didn’t feel all that gutted about being knocked out of the Cup so early on is that promotion is clearly Grant McCann’s main focus, and that’s going pretty well, obviously.

We desperately need to get out of this division, and I don’t think anyone would prize a Cup run over that. But I think it goes deeper than that, and it raises the question of engagement during the pandemic era.

NOT ALLOWED IN: But will fans return to the KCOM when Covid restrictions are lifted?

The iFollow service is, for me, the televisual equivalent of watching the reserves on a wet Wednesday night at Boothferry Park, when there would be so few people in attendance you could hear every instruction shouted from the sidelines, even if you were at the back of the crumbling stands.

On iFollow, unlike Sky or the BBC, there’s nothing so lavish as a crowd soundtrack, and it has just the one camera angle, which appears to be oddly zoomed in so the less-than-smooth back and forth movement hurts your eyes after a while.

I appreciate it’s a service that’s been somewhat hastily organised to fulfil an unprecedented demand for remote coverage, but still… quite a few months in and there are still too many annoying technical glitches.

Despite the commentators’ best efforts, all this serves to put you at a bit of a remove from the action; you’re a passive viewer without even the pretend roar of the fans to get you going. This isn’t City’s fault, of course – as I said last month, this situation has been imposed on every fan up and down the land.

What I do find strange, though, is City’s decision not to give Radio Humberside the commentary rights this season. A significant proportion of fans are among the more vintage variety and, although some of them are tech-savvy, a great many more are not, and they have effectively been cut off from the team they love – during the one period when they can’t get into the stadium.

The BBC’s David Burns photographed here by Sam on an away trip to Lokeren in 2014

It will also have disenfranchised blind and disabled fans, many of whom have long relied on Burnsy and Swanny week in, week out. It’s quite poignant that the duo’s first outing on iPlayer (for the televised Stevenage game) is likely to have been their last for the foreseeable. Did you know that punk-poet John Cooper Clarke briefly lived in Stevenage? No, neither did I… but I definitely did by the end of the match.

The decision to give Burnsy the boot might have been in some way understandable if it had been set in stone long before the pandemic, but it seems to have been done with the full knowledge that fans wouldn’t be able to attend matches for quite some time.

‘Treat fans like consumers and they have every right to respond as such’

If it was a cynical ploy to push more people into watching online, I fear that may have backfired. Many can’t – or won’t – engage at all, and they may not come back when this is all over.

Recent weeks have seen fans in some areas of the country allowed to return to matches, although people from Hull, which is in Tier 3, were not allowed to travel to Tier 2 Oxford for their first post-Covid match in front of fans; thus the atmosphere for those watching online at home was still a bit flat – marginally more 1990s Auto Windscreens Shield than 1990s reserves.

But what should have been a day for muted celebration after months of behind-closed-doors games was completely overshadowed by the behaviour of Millwall fans who booed the now-customary ‘taking the knee’ before kick-off.

Those defending them argue they’re not racist – they just don’t want to see ‘divisive, political gestures’ in football. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that.

Firstly, ‘political’ gestures are everywhere; the remembrance poppy has, sadly, been turned into one, too – should we get rid of that? Secondly, I see taking the knee as a simple gesture of solidarity, nothing more.

If you think it’s divisive, if you don’t like being ‘preached to’, I think you need to ‘give your head a wobble’ (© Burnsy) and ask yourself why it’s making you feel so uncomfortable. As for criticising the gesture because it’s associated with the ‘Marxist organisation’ that is BLM UK… well, I doubt the average Millwall fan is all that familiar with Das Kapital – and neither, for that matter, are the lads on the pitch.

Well, I think I need a drink after that… but of course, when I finally do return to the KCOM, the law as it stands will not allow me to take my pint back to my seat – something the EFL is hoping to change.

‘It’s time to rethink football’s booze ban’

Concourses crammed with people queuing to buy beer at half-time (unavoidable even with the most efficient of retail systems) do not make for a Covid-safe situation, of course. They had a crack two years ago at overturning what is now a 35-year-old booze ban, and it came to nothing, but surely this now needs to be looked at seriously.

I’ve never understood why a Hull FC fan can sit in my seat and enjoy a beer just because they follow the rugby. City fans have long taken umbrage at the suggestion, oft-peddled down the years, that rugby fans behave like saints and any trouble at the egg-ball must be due to those pesky Hull City hooligans infiltrating the crowd.

Fact is, crowd violence tends to occur wherever there’s a bitter, long-standing rivalry, and most of the perpetrators get well tanked-up before they ever come near the ground. There’s hardly time during a match to drink enough to get proper lairy, and what else do they think we’d be doing with our overpriced pints of distinctly average ale? Throwing it all over the empty seats every time someone scores? There’s a recession on!

It’s time that this outdated law, which penalises the responsible majority for the behaviour of a minority of idiots, was overturned – or at the very least suspended – to reflect the modern game. Much has changed since 1985… just not at Millwall.