Brown and Hart can draw little comfort
HULL 0
PORTSMOUTH 0
Sunday October 25 2009
Jimmy Bullard missed this match with a knock. By God I wish I had. There was a rumour going round before kick-off that Hull City's ebullient midfielder had apologised via Twitter for being late, which sounds a wonderfully Bullardesque thing to do.
Disappointingly it turned out to be the American teenager Jozy Altidore, who was to have been among the substitutes, who tweeted his excuses. Not such a good story, though he had the right idea.
"What's Twitter?" Phil Brown had to ask. "He'll be disappointed he did that. When you've been preparing for a match all week surely getting to the ground an hour and a half before kick-off is not too much to ask."
That diversion apart, a dismal pretence of a match was more about two managerial casualties waiting to happen. How long Brown can possibly last is the only topic of conversation on Humberside at the moment, while Paul Hart can only have been made to feel less secure -- if that is actually possible -- by Avram Grant's return to the Pompey payroll. Changes can be expected sooner rather than later, and not just because relegation appears certain for two teams incapable of playing each other with any conviction, let alone playing their way out of trouble.
Hull, especially, may have been the success story of the early part of last season, and are still punching above their weight in the overall scheme of things, but no manager can survive being a hate figure to his own fans. Chants of "You don't know what you're doing" rang around the ground when Brown took off Stephen Hunt, Hull's liveliest if not always most effective player, to replace him with Richard Garcia.
"It shows how far we've come when the crowd is disappointed with a point," Brown said diplomatically. "Defensively we were quite solid, but I appreciate there was not an awful lot of action in front of goal."
The hardest thing here was working out what happened to two teams who have both been splendid, against-the-odds success stories within the last couple of seasons. Now Hull are about as threatening and full of surprises as Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink -- and he is chiefly useful these days for helping match reporters fill their quota of words. Portsmouth have changed so much David James must feel like an adult guesting as a ringer in a junior game.
James made a well-timed interception in the 56th minute to whip the ball from Geovanni's feet, and Hull did not get a penalty either when the ball struck Marc Wilson on the arm in the area. Bo Myhill was comfortably Hull's man of the match for two second-half stops in quick succession from Aruna Dindane and Hassan Yebda that allowed the home side to keep a clean sheet and claim a point. Brown said beforehand that a point would not necessarily be a bad outcome, though there were boos from the home fans at the final whistle. Two dead men walking? Two dead teams more like.
"That's the worst we've played for a month and we still had chances to win," Hart said. "It wasn't our day but I'm pleased we got something from the game. I'm not sitting here with my head in my hands, the players are keeping me going. They are a good set of lads."
- Paul Wilson
Sunday Independent
