Latest / Minnows Football / Matchweek 2 of the Championship, plus Hull's sensational debut against Man United
Transcript
- Sam: Welcome to the Minnows Football Podcast, August 27, 2026. My name's Sam Martin. Lots of exciting stuff to get to this week. I want to start with a little bit of well, it's it's housekeeping, but it's more than housekeeping. We have been through three weeks now. We're into week three, through two weeks of our belief index on MinnowsFootball.com. And It was a really interesting week because when the results came back this week for that index, we took a look at them and we thought, hmm, something is going on here, which might not be quite right. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that at the top before we jump into this week's games. the belief index is made up of three elements. And I talk about this a lot on the website. I've talked about it in other shows. But those three elements at a high level, you've got history. What's happened to this club or team in the past, the trust that the fans have in the institution itself, that's a combination of ownership and management, how fans are feeling, and just objectively as well, how much trust can we have in these people who are holding the institution at this time? And then the third part is the performance. So that's the on-the-field performance, expectation, things like that. The first two elements, history and trust, I really calibrated over the the summer, and I think we've got those points into a really good spot. The third part, performance, what came of became obvious this week after looking at some of the results, we have not got that in a good enough place yet. And what was happening was we were getting really outsized reactions and just in some cases wrong reactions to some of the things that were going on. That component at its best is going to be working to test. Couple of different things. One, what are we seeing on the pitch? So what's happening? And in terms of points, it's a really pr kind of the more simple part in terms of points and results and and goals scored, things like that. What are we seeing on the pitch in terms of the team's performance? The second part is a little more complex and this is where it's starting to not fall apart, but just hasn't been properly calibrated at this point. How does the performance on the pitch match with the expectations of the club at the start of the season. And in particular the expectations of the fan base. The this is a really critical part of the belief index and one of the reasons it was created in the first place was to say that for some clubs, it's not about winning the pennant. If you look at a regular table of any sport, it really simplifies it and has this linear form where if you're coming first, then you're feeling best. If you're coming last then you're feeling worst. For some clubs, so you take Lincoln City this year, for example, if Lincoln City finishes in twenty-first place and avoids relegation in the championship, fans will feel ecstatic. Management of Lincoln City and ownership will feel ecstatic. They will feel like they have survived. They get another year under their belt, more revenue, an ability to grow. This process, this long process they're going through, becomes massively successful. Finishing in twenty-first as opposed to finishing first. For other clubs, look at a Burnley or West Ham, finishing outside of those top two spots, even, might feel like a failure. Definitely failing to be promoted this year for a club like West Ham is a massive failure, will be seen as a massive failure by their fans and by their management. And so the performance aspect is not just telling us what's happening on the pitch. It's also telling us why it matters and how that impacts the the belief in the different clubs. So we are tinkering with that calibration a little bit, should have something up and finalize by the time we go to run this on Monday of of next week around match three. But that's something to note about the the index itself before we jump into this week's results. That said. Just because we're working on that doesn't change anything that's going on on the pitch, and lots of interesting things happening out there over this weekend that we saw. I want to start outside of the championship, which feels weird, but it's with a club near and dear to our heart, which is Hull City. Hull City 2, Manchester United zero. What an incredible start to Hull's. It's their first return to the Premier League in nine years. and they had an incredible. Amazing game against Man United on the weekend. If you go and ask experts what's the secret to staying up when you get promoted to the Premier League, they're gonna tell you a few things. They'll tell you things like, Well, you gotta have a good spine, you gotta have a good goalkeeper, don't try to press too high and be something you're not, you know, really stick to kind of a compact defense, organized offense, maybe a low block, don't concede too many goals. You know, similar to what we're just talking about with Lincoln City, you're trying to stay out of that relegation zone, don't concede too much, lots of draws, snag a win here and there, and and work on your set pieces, things like that, you know, control the controllables, all that kind of coach speak. I think you need a few different things. I think you need an absolutely rocking home stadium. You need a kit, a home kit that is a top five in Europe home kit. That's what I think about those Hull City Home kits, just phenomenal. They've got such a great blend of modern and old in that one uniform, just fantastic. And then you also need someone who is going to drag you along. And that's what I think they have. That's what everyone I think thinks they have in Ollie McBurney, who obviously got them up at the ninety-third minute against Middlesbrough in the playoff game to finish the season last year in the championship. But he is just magnetic. He has this energy unlike anything else, anyone else on the pitch. And he gives the team and the fans this reason to believe. And what you saw in Hull on the weekend was just an entire stadium full of people on the pitch and off the pitch who just were believing and having fun and loving what they were doing. That was just it was incredible to watch. An insane game. It felt the win felt inevitable, which is crazy to say when you look at some of the stats. Hull had twenty eight percent of the possession, seventy percent passing accuracy, fourteen crosses to almost forty, from Man United, only one corner for the game, and they never looked like losing. And McBurney was just so central to all of that. i he saw it in the f opening few minutes where he was just, you know, flipping the ball, grabbing the ball, ti getting so much attention from defenders then Pushing it out to the flanks, controlling the play, setting up the first goal, going on these phenomenal runs. He just has this aura to him, which is doing more than just, you know, having an aura. It's attracting a lot of attention and it's infusing the team with a ton of belief. So that was great to see. awesome start to the Premier League for Hull. See how they go this week. The switch up now to a similar club, but down in the championship. Let's start with West Ham. West Ham won. Charlton two. A pretty unexpected result there. Charlton's second win in two games. I wanted to start here by talking a little bit about West Ham. And let's go way back on West Ham. Actually, let's go outside of West Ham. Let's go to Africa, for example. Or Africa, in fact. Sao Tome and Principe. Don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's a tiny island off the coast of Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. And it's home to the Pico Cao Grande, which is this incredible, go and go and look it up if you get a second. Go and look it up. It's it's this incredibly dramatic, volcanic peak that just juts out around 2,000 feet into the air out of the jungle. It rises up like a kind of craggy finger shape. Just poking out of the jungle out of nowhere. It's this amazing kind of image to see. and Sao Tome is this completely largely unknown country in Africa, the second smallest country in Africa. And it's right basically right on the equator. It has this history of of a lot of Africa. It was uninhabited until the kind of the 1400s, discovered by Portuguese settlers. settled, starts up that kind of classic colonial path that you see from trade, slave trade, cacao beans, sugar trade, cash crops, plantations, all the way through to the nineteen hundreds. And it became an independent country. And then in the kind of latish nineteen hundreds, it is the home to a boy called Nuno Espirito Santo, who lives there. For the first seven years of his life on the kind of side on the coast of this tiny island around his whole family, and he develops a passion for cliff jumping and high diving and swimming. He has this scar on his leg from this high diving, cliff diving accident that he has as a young kid. And then when he's almost eight years old, his family's family parents leave the island and move to to Europe and Portugal. Eventually settling in Lisbon as they look for new work. But he's someone who is, if you read pieces about him, hear from him talking about it little bits here and there, he doesn't harp on about this, but he's someone who is shaped by this background and this experience, this tiny little African island. And he's someone who was has really Been in a really specific role for a number of clubs over the last five or six years. You know, if you look at the three clubs where he's most well known in England for managing over the last six, seven, eight years, Wolves, Nottingham Forest, now at West Ham, he has this presence to him, which is kind of a softly spoken but firm man. He he creates a lot of relationships. Was known to create relationships both within his dressing room and with others in a way that is really genuine and meaningful, but not one which is pandering to people. there's a great story in an athletic article I read about him, which was saying that when he started at at Wolves, he would go around actually, this was at Nottingham Forest, he went around and would introduce himself every single press conference, would say hello to journalists, shake them by the hand. but then that that wouldn't necessarily mean that he would pander to them in the the press conferences. He just wanted to have a kind of cordial and and polite relationship with with everyone around him. And he's known for attention to to detail. He's a former goalkeeper. He was a second string goalkeeper for a lot of his career. And he's this Very interesting and really meaningful character in English football and the levels that we're talking about here over the last almost decade. And it's gonna be really interesting, I think, to see what he does at at West Ham and to understand how he can put his imprint on a club like that in a way that feels successful. You know, successes at Nottingham Forest were pretty easy to see in that he pushed them towards that almost getting a spot in Europe, Pushing towards a European spot in the season two seasons ago, before he was then sacked a few weeks into the season last year. He's got a very different challenge in front of him here at West Ham, where he's really trying to battle to hold the soul of this club together. And it's something that has been fraying for many years since the move to London Stadium, ownership challenges, the ownership challenges obviously that have really flared up in the past six months or so with David Sullivan. But then this very proud club, this club that's kind of comes from this hard-working background. It's a fascinating picture of lots of contradictions and challenges, which is not unique just to West Ham. There's all sorts of clubs that go through these same kind of crises of of identity. But it's going to be really interesting to see what Nuno can do to hold all of us together. And If you're looking for someone with the background of these kind of clubs and dealing with challenging ownership and different expectations, he's pretty uniquely placed to to really battle for that and and and go and perform great things for the club. We didn't see that in the result on the weekend. we saw basically a Charlton side that took its chances, a West Ham side that didn't, a West Ham side that looked kind of incoherent and sloppy a lot of times. If you look at the first goal that Charlton scores, the Lloyd Jones goal, you might be really, you might think, wow, I'm really going to focus on the kind of slow bicycle kick, half semi bicycle kick, overhead kick that that scores this goal in the end from the long throw. But go back one play and look at the effort at which Charlton ran to that ball and got the the throw in for them. In a way that they could have otherwise not done and not gotten their throw in. They've just pushed and pushed and pushed, and they are so organized right now. Nathan Jones has them organized and passionate and energetic and playing for each other at the moment. And that was kind of the biggest difference between these two sides for me as I looked at them over the weekend was that Charlton just looked like they really wanted to be there and they were locked in and they were doing it. West Ham looked like they were creating more chances. in better parts of the pitch. Teddy Castellanos should have had five or six goals probably by the end of the game. He ends up ironically kind of missing that penalty to even even it up in extra time. But they they're not there yet, West Ham. And we expected them to win the whole thing. They still definitely can win the whole thing. And it's gonna be interesting to see when they start to to put it together. they've got all these pieces there. Interesting pieces like Piro who joined from Leeds on loan this week. I thought that was kind of interesting. Perot's kind of tried to find his his footing at Leeds for a little while now. And I thought it was interesting that they let him go out on loan. and you could you might have seen why a little bit on the weekend. I I don't want to, you know, jump too many conclusions after one game, but He really looked like someone who he's he's someone who is in the right spot, but just is unable to really put his foot on the gas and and finish things off sometimes. And so it'll be interesting to see how Nuno goes to pull all these different pieces together. I think to to kind of think about it, West Ham should be fine. Charlton certainly have taken their chances to start the season and it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. Blackburn Rovers two, Middlesbrough one. What happened here? I turned this game off. I was watching this game on one of my monitors Saturday morning my time here in West Coast of the United States. And I had this game on, watched the first half. Middlesbrough was winning 1 0. And I thought, well, I'll switch that one over because that just looks like Middlesbrough is going to easily win that. We should probably win that. two or three nothing or two one three one, switch it over to Rex from Rexham Watford and came back after the game and saw they'd lost one two to one at Ewood Park. It was a a it's kind of a game of two halves, but really what happened in the second half is Blackburn Rovers got going, but I think there's an impact that Tony Mowbray's having on this club, which should not be understated and it's not an impact that necessarily is going to sustain Blackburn through the entire season. But you have someone like Mowbray come in who at his age and his experience, it's not, we're not saying that he knows better than others of how to do things, but he certainly has confidence in how he does things. He does things a certain way. And he's done it so many times before. And when you are such a so inside your craft in that way, you might be quicker to turn things around in the early stages because you you have a simple playbook and a simple method for how you want to play the game and and how you want to motivate your players. And whatever he's done there seems to be working to start the season. Now, can it sustain over a longer period of time? Who knows? But the what we're seeing right now is is a club that's fr a team that on the pitch it's pretty well organized. It has these they have these, I think, really players of potential and they're showing a lot of potential to start the season. This isn't just like a simple club. You've got guys like Alaboso who who played really nicely and and set up their second goal. You got Good Johnson who obviously played well and scored a number of goals to start the season. And then you've got Cantwell in the beautiful long sleeved Kit with the armband and scoring that second goal and and kind of flowing over to the corner in front of the stadium. It's this it's just great to see. It's great to see Blackburn doing well and and starting strong. And a lot of that probably comes down to Mowbray and how he's done. so hats off to them. Amazing comeback in the second half. I thought it was really interesting. I talked a lot about Will Langshear last week, and of course he had a very quiet game after I showered him with praise. That's kind of classic. But Middlesbrough, not a lot changing there. They look organized and I feel like they'll be competing again this season. West Brom three, Burnley one, kind of chaotic game, honestly. West Brom, I kind of panned last week that they didn't play very well. And they started slowly here, they conceded a known goal within ten minutes. But after that, they looked really confident, and confident on the ball and really kind of coherent and knowing what they're doing. It I was struck with how young they looked out there. And I went and looked it up. This is a very young squad. They're the fourth youngest squad, or the fourth youngest eleven that's been put out there so far this season. I think they're the third youngest squad in general. and that could explain some of the sloppiness that we saw last year last week and some of the sloppiness that kind of continued into this week. But when they got going, they looked really fluent and coherent at at They're worse, they kinda look like a what I would call in Australia a private school, what you'd call in England a public school, first eleven, these like young white boys. but they they are more than that and they really played beautifully in the second half. And a couple of goals to Isaac Price, and yeah, just l really looking like they know what they're doing and and that they've got a a a good solid plan. Burnley just just look like a a club that recently hired a manager. There's no other kind of way to put it. You know, Nikki Hay they they went around and he was kind of their third or fourth choice to take that role. Took a long time to hire him and bring him in. They haven't really remade the squad to any significant degree. We'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks with them. they definitely need time. He needs time to settle. But how much time, you know, and They've got a tough little run here. they're away to Norwich, then they're home to Middlesbrough and Bristol City, then away to Brook Brexham. So it doesn't get a lot easier for them in terms of the schedule. but certainly nothing to start the season that is gonna tell us that they're gonna have immediate runaway success. Millwall three, Norwich City Zero. I wanna talk about a theme in August that I think points to success. And it's a theme that an analytics person would tell you is bullshit. But I think it's true. Something that you see from successful sides early in the season is energy. And there is a fine line between energy and chaos. But for the clubs where they're doing really well, they've just got this frenetic energy to the ball that is being manifesting in a really positive way. And in the f in the in the case of Millwall, it's it's coming across in this incredibly disciplined and relentless way in how they're playing. I mean, they are playing as if they just did not stop playing over the summer at all. The back of the den for the first time, the den was in full flight. Alex Neal just patrolling the sidelines like kind of like a I don't want to say like a lion. It's kind of a cliche with the lions there. But he's he's really looks in control and looks the part. everyone knows what their role is. They're so quick to the ball. And there are players in this Mill War squad who just they just breed confidence and and you can see the confidence just flowing through the rest of the team. You know, you've got Coburn up front, who's who's an absolute handful for defenders. He's this big, strong, aggressive presence. You got Cooper down the back, also big, strong, aggressive. this towering kind of presence who can drift forward, he set up the first goal for them. And it really opens second goal, sorry. And it really opens it up for guys like Akante who who come and and clean up around these these bigger magnetic guys. and it was just it was fantastic. And and if you went and looked at at some of the fan videos and some of the fan forums afterwards, mil Millwall fans are just ecstatic right now. and so they should be. Their team is playing the best football you could say of of anyone so far this season. Norwich, on the other hand, there are there are questions there. They they bottled it last week, which we talked about. they were never really in it this week. They had the red card late. Kind of fell apart. they've got a huge match this weekend home to Burnley. That's two squads that are really looking to prove something that are gonna have tough training weeks this week. managers trying to hammer home what their message and and get their squads playing the way they want them to play. Which we're not seeing from either of those squads yet. So it's gonna be really interesting, whoever loses out of that game. and you know, to see how they finish up up the month here. They were the big games for me. A couple of other results that I thought were interesting. Lincoln City won, Portsmouth three. Wanted to read to you from a fan report. Sorry, not a fan report, a real Journalist report Aaron Boer from The Guardian, who was at Pro Ampack Stadium for the first game of Lincoln City back in the championship in since 1961. Let me just read a little bit of this. There is optimism to be found in almost every corner of the footballing landscape at this time of year, but you would do well to find anyone without a smile on their face on this sunny Saturday lunchtime in one of Britain's most picturesque cities. Football may not necessarily be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Lincoln. After all, Sinsel Banks sits in the shadow of the imposing cathedral high on the hill, and a building that symbolically represents the importance of this area stretching back hundreds of years. And then it goes on, talks about Yuri Gagarin, how he just returned from space when they just they came nineteen sixty one. Whether it will need adapting over the course of this season remains to be seen. That's him talking about the 442 structure, but for now Lincoln are backing what has got them this far. The most important constant is the deep rooted connection between supporters and the team, which has helped fuel their progression. Togetherness is at the heart of everything. Barely a soul left before the final whistle, even when Ibu Adams' strike secured a first win of the season for Portsmouth in the sixty ninth minute. Many supporters stay behind and the new fan village debrief the loss, and they remain generally upbeat. Given how far they have come, it will take more than two defeats to steer this club off course. Really makes you think if, you know, i as I was talking about at the start of the show, that staying up is is is like winning the whole thing for Lincoln this year. And, you know, how devastating could relegation be for a club like this? They are living in with on borrowed House house dollars. You know, this is a c a club playing with house money. And so super exciting for them. they lost to Portsmouth. We thought that was going to be an interesting game to see if Portsmouth could come back from a really tough start last week. They did. And we'll look ahead to them them both this week. Speaking of this week, what are we watching this weekend? We've got a couple of big matchups. Friday, Wrexham takes on Birmingham. Both clubs. Not terrible starts, not amazing starts. and they face each other in this kind of battle of the big ownership, big ambitious ownership. and we'll see what happens there. Middlesbrough takes on West Brom. That's two clubs well organized and should just be a a really great game. We just talked about West Brom and their really good start and f two wins from two to start the season. Middlesbrough, can they rebound from that? unexpected loss to Blackburn this week. Southampton's home to Millwall. We didn't talk about Southampton. They came back and had a win against Stoke, but still not looking amazingly convincing yet. And that's going to be a great tester for them against Millwall and a good test for Millwall after having a couple of good strong, strong wins to start the season. Can a couple of clubs keep it rolling? You've got Charlton Taking on Preston and they would be expected to do make it three from three there given the last couple of games. Blackburn home to QPR, there'll be a lot of expectation. He would park. QPR had a draw on the weekend, nil-nil. and so that'll be a big, big game for Blackburn. If they if both those clubs are coming out of August with multiple wins, that's kind of unexpected for both of them and and setting them up for a a good start to the season. And then the biggest game, Norwich versus Burnley, we've kind of already alluded to wha it could something big happen if or or could it be the catalyst event for something big happening for either of those clubs if they which whoever doesn't doesn't win there. so that's gonna be a big game for this weekend. So with that, thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a fixed belief index and some more thoughts from Minnows Football.