Hello dear readers, I hope this finds you well and that you’re enjoying a relatively City free “spoiling everything” few days. You may be wondering …but this isn’t a strange clickbait mental health post today, despite the headline, instead it’s a short piece about an accidental and incremental gain I made a few weeks ago, and perhaps a little of me wondering why that was.
So I’m sure I’m not the only one who has realised that if you watch a streamed version of sport, Twitter/X is often quicker than it. So when I was watching our away win at Millwall a few weeks ago in the club offices before coaching, I took my updates off the the City twitter, as I didn’t want to know that George Honeyman had scored 18 seconds before he did. By the time we actually did score, our own warm up was underway and I only found out later. As happy as I was (and the team I coach won as well) the first half was pretty dreadful and somewhere along the line I forgot to put it back on.
Days turned into weeks and despite an infuriating 2-1 home loss to QPR and rabble rousing 3-0 destruction of Sheffield United led by old potato face himself, I haven’t turned it back on, even with all the flying rumours associated with the January transfer window and I have to say, I’m ok with it. City and the world of supporting us is a very intense watch, everyone seems to have a very strong opinion and like most people reading this, I probably broadly disagree with at least half of what is said.
A case in point…this week the ever brilliant Tiger tube shared a video from the local news about Brian Horton coming in as Hull manager and taking pre-season training in 1984, you can see it here https://x.com/TigerTubePlayer/status/1886692831042908390
This was following a heartbreaking and ultra “Typical city” glorious failure to get promoted to the second level the year before under Colin Appleton by one goal scored, and his subsequent resignation. It made me wonder looking back, what a lovely world that was. The season ended, the papers were printed, decisions were made and six weeks later, we re-started. No angry recriminations, no endless whataboutery, no endless chastising of the admin to announce something, just a new season under a new manager, with maybe a few editions of the truly beautiful green sports mail to give us the headlines.
I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere and in my usual long form convoluted sort of a way there’s a message I’m trying to highlight. Less is more, we live in a society where news and events are so instant on social media that often the world knows about them before they’re even announced. Instant gratification rules and part of me doesn’t love it or long for it to continue. I really do miss the days of the Sports mail arriving at 6.30pm and pouring over it’s content, and whilst I know that’s now gone, I don’t need to buy 100% into the modern ways of sports consumption.
All I have to do is add to stop looking at the #hcafc hashtag and I think I’ll be a reborn man. This may actually be an even darker and more ominous wormhole than the official source. A quick check on there and as well as the rumours, opinions and conjecture, we seem to have acquired some burger king sized whoppers sharing their silver foil hat opinions on the world or frankly speaking in an entirely new language that I neither understand or have the desire to translate, as well as the clickbait, some pretty unkind takedowns of fellow fans and opinions that even Elon Musk might think twice before going to share.
I’m sure there are some normal people with hcafc in their x/twitter names (and let’s be honest I’m leaving myself wide open to a feeding frenzy of gen z anger on here afterwards) but the “oddball conspiracy discussing indecipherable content quota” seems notably higher than in the general public at large, which is quite something on this app these days as it’s already a cesspool of misinformation of Brian Laws type proportions.
But fair play to them (I guess) it’s their world to explore as they wish and let’s let them crack on. What I guess my point is, is that I’m notably happier and less stressed about this wonderful batshit football club, when I’m not spending so much time exploring this bizarre world that’s now been created. In the meantime we signed John Egan, I quite like him and I’ll go in with an open mind to the rest of the season. I do like others think we lack a wide left footed defender of quality but after witnessing Ryan “cry baby no tackles” Giles impersonation of a left back on telly this week. I’m still glad he’s gone. But here’s the key… I’m ok. I’m not as invested perhaps, but just like the Kempton Stand diehards in 1984, I’m ambivalent about the future, although I think we’ll stay up and spending all day arguing back and forth with Asa_Hcafc from Heddon who is a “Pandur enthusiast” isn’t going to keep us up anyway.
Fingers crossed.
UTT.