Following on from Gary Clark’s excellent piece about supporting Hull City – to read it click here Pete Sixsmith remembers some of the sights and smells of previous matches between the Tigers and the Black Cats

It’s the title of an old Yorkshire folk song that links Hull with Hell, and in it the city on the Humber clearly comes up second best. Hull’s a city that has played quite an important role in my footballing life and, at the risk of upsetting any City fans reading this, I would like to share them with you.

It’s an odd place, a bit like Sunderland in some ways. You never pass though either city to get to anywhere else, unless it’s Rotterdam or South Shields, and both sets of inhabitants can be a little bit chippy. Hull people are fiercely independent, insular to the nth. point and always ready to question whatever decisions are made.

It’s a city built on bloody mindedness. Like Sunderland, it came out for Parliament against the foppery of the Stuart monarchy, it became the centre of the Anti Slave Trade movement of the early 19th Century and it kept on electing John Prescott as one of its MPs. And you don’t get much more bloody minded than that.

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