With five games to go, there are a lot of teams still trying to fight off the spectre of relegation from the Premier League. Aside from Hull City, you can count eight others who would say they need more points than they currently have.
The media's attention to this season's relegation battle has been focussed largely on the north east. In one way this is understandable, as the possibility of all three clubs dropping into the Championship is a mega sports news story. The inevitable drop of West Bromwich Albion, thereby leaving at least one of the trio around Tyne, Wear and Tees safe, doesn't seem to have occurred to these feature reporters, who have used a theme of doom and gloom for all three.
For all that, the general tone of these reports has been that losing all three north east clubs would be A Bad Thing. Geography matters when it comes to choosing the team you support, but it has no relevance whatsoever when it comes to analysing where clubs have and haven't got it right. The expression "hotbed" and "passion" seems to get used to a level beyond parody when describing Newcastle United, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, and as a consequence their demise, as a trio or duo or even as just one, is somehow projected as more terrible a prospect than that of any other troubled side going down.
This, of course, is absolute garbage. Newcastle United are in the position they're in because they have a dreadful owner and have appointed comedy managers either to appease the fans (Keegan, Shearer) or because they literally could get nobody else (Kinnear). The expectation up there is ridiculous and is made more so by the utter lack of history. Whine on about Jackie Milburn all you like, but 40 years without a trophy represents the bald fact that Newcastle are an underachieving, panicky, impatient football club, a club its fans deserve. It won't be a tragedy if they go down, it may just be a wake-up call.
Sunderland are a club more deserving of sympathy, given the likeability of their owner, someone who played successfully for the club and felt at first hand what it meant for those seated in the Stadium of Light. Sunderland fans have won more than Newcastle United in the last two generations but, conversely, expect less. Where empathy may fall short lies in the crazy money spent by Roy Keane on second-class players prior to his act of toy throwing back in December. Ricky Sbragia seems to have had his head screwed on and may just be able to make Keane's excesses into a team just in time.
Middlesbrough is another club for which it is easier to empathise, though it's notable that due to being the alleged "poor relations" in the north east, due to their historic Yorkshireness and the Tyne-Tees or Wear-Tees derby not existing as a soundbite like the Tyne-Wear derby, they have had fewer apologists arguing their case. Like Sbragia, they have a manager in Gareth Southgate who is easy to like and who tends to open his heart and ultimately, aside from their unspeakable attitude towards noise at their stadium (telling fans to shut up during the game while playing abhorrent, ear-splitting music after goals), it's tough to find anything to dislike about them.
So despite Sunderland and Middlesbrough being the more deserving cases - or at least having more pros and fewer cons than their Tyneside neighbours - it's the Newcastle United factor that makes the emphasis on the north east viable. Newcastle United plus one other would have still been a story; Sunderland and Middlesbrough in trouble but Newcastle United safe would not. Somehow this badly-run, arrogant, egotistical club who appoint joke managers and execrable characters to unworkable jobs keep getting the headlines and the media support.
Where does that leave the rest of us? From Hull City's point of view, it's perhaps a blessing, given that our chairman and manager were happy to extol our virtues in public frequently when we were surprising everyone in the autumn, that we're not taking more of a media hammering as we scrap like billyo for what's left right now. Brown certainly gets some attention but it's all retrospective cobblers from pundits who don't understand hindsight and are claiming with glee and smugness that the Tigers' demise can be traced back to the on-pitch team talk at Manchester City on Boxing Day.
Any reasonably close assessment of City's performances since the dressing down at Eastlands would show that City largely played well, and only the irritating concentration issue or some hellish bad luck prevented more points coming our way. Four days after Boxing Day, we took a rampant Aston Villa team to the last minute with all players equal, only for Kamil Zayatte's stray foot and then the infamous U-turn by Steve Bennett ruining our night. In the initial weeks of the New Year, only the Everton away game saw us outdone entirely. We knocked that huge club Newcastle United out of the FA Cup - on their own turf, our second win there of the season - and took Arsenal level to the last ten minutes at the KC before succumbing to their class in the latest stages. With the odd bad day thrown in, we continued to show willing and count our blessings when getting a goalless draw at Chelsea, losing late on to Tottenham Hotspur at the KC and then get the much-needed win, dramatically, at Fulham. Only in the last five Premier League games have we looked less than likely to win.
I get the feeling that the media are a little torn on what they hope for regarding Hull City's fate. On the one hand, they'd like to see the upstarts from a city they are told to hate (even though they've likely never been) sent back down to the division from whence they came; yet we'll also take the semi-patronising but still more preferable argument that our pluckiness and positivity back in the autumn should be enough, both emotionally and mathematically, to earn us a second go next season. Meanwhile, irrespective of our fate, the north east will maintain the attention and, consequently, the national pressure and whether that can be translated into favouritism or not, I'd be happy for them to absorb it. Despite our media-friendliness through great results and helpful personnel earlier in the season, I suspect our best chance of staying up is to work hard on the pitch and keep away from the notebooks and cameras.
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