Thursday 2 April 2009

Pompey circumstance

As nostalgic as this blog likes to be, there appears to be next to no cause for nostalgia in the fixture of Hull City versus Portsmouth. Switch the fixture round, however, and we get Stan Ternent's appalling swansong match at Fratton Park on New Years Day 1991. We lost 5-1, he was fired. That's an instant recollection.

This season's hard-fought 2-2 draw, and Dean Windass' record-busting goal (that really wasn't) will also be remembered for a good while.

But when the game has been in Hull? Little.

The best we can come up with is a 1967 FA Cup third round tie. Both sides were in the old second division, with the Tigers having won promotion as champions the year before, and already seemed to be making steady progress as January came round.



At Boothferry Park, Ken Houghton scored an injury time equaliser in a 1-1 draw, then he and Chris Chilton got one each in a 2-2 replay stalemate. Both goals came in the last three minutes of normal time to put City ahead, yet somehow Portsmouth managed an injury-time leveller, apeing City's self-saving act in the first leg.

Houghton's achievements were more remarkable as he played with torn stomach muscles, with the aid of cortisone, and wasn't training at all. A second replay was always held neutrally in that era and Portsmouth won 3-1 at Highfield Road, the then home of Coventry City. Chilton got City's goal to make it 1-1 but ultimately City could not prevail. Portsmouth lost to eventual Cup winners Tottenham Hotspur in the fourth round.

The 80,000+ crowd from the three games represents the highest post-war attendance, albeit a combined one, of any Hull City match in the FA Cup. It seemed odd, on stats at least, that City should lose the tie, given that both League games against Portsmouth had been played by this time, with Chilton scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win on the south coast and then Houghton and Ken Wagstaff finding the target in a 2-0 win at Boothferry Park.

However, perhaps it was also indicative of City's need to graft in the FA Cup, with the run from the first round to the sixth in the previous season, resulting in the glorious exit to Chelsea after a replay. More third round heartache via a marathon tie would follow the Portsmouth disappointment, when Middlesbrough won a third game in 1968 at Bootham Crescent, home of York City, after stalemates at Ayresome Park and Boothferry Park.

That wretched 1991 season represents the last time these two teams played at the same level, and having done for Ternent's woeful tenure at the turn of the year, Portsmouth came to Boothferry Park in the April, by which time Terry Dolan had taken over the Tigers, and won 2-0.

League encounters between 1967 and 1991 came and went, and City did sometimes get it their own way. Somehow though, beating a Portsmouth side as worried about relegation as the Tigers - and one containing three of England's midweek starting XI - might just become the best representation of this fixture yet, especially as so far there isn't a lot go on.