Man, sorting out this Portsmouth versus Hull City history was a proper headache. If you’d asked me three months ago to list the top five moments in this rivalry, I’d have just stared blankly. Why the hell would I care about those two specifically? They’re barely ever in the same damn league, and when they are, nobody outside of the two cities is watching.
But here’s the thing. I got myself dragged into a ridiculous argument down at The King’s Head last month. My mate Gary—you know Gary, the one who thinks he’s an encyclopaedia because he watched a documentary once—he swore blind that the only game that ever counted between these two was that random 2005 Championship fixture where Pompey scraped a 2-1 win right before their big decline started. He said all the early 2000s stuff, when both were floating around League One, was just noise. Utter rubbish, he said.
I immediately smelled a rat. I remembered a specific chaotic game from 2003, a 4-3 thriller that felt like it changed the trajectory for at least one of the clubs, even if it was just League One. I needed to prove him wrong. I slammed down a twenty quid note, enough to cover a decent round. “Right, Gary,” I barked. “I’m digging up the timeline. We’re not talking highlights; we’re talking actual moments that mattered. Promotion deciders, relegation escapes, stuff that broke managers, games that led to actual financial shifts. I bet you five pints I can find five better moments than your random 2005 memory.”
The Digging Process: Sifting Through the Junk
So the hunt began. I didn’t just jump onto Wikipedia; that’s cheating and often wrong anyway, especially for these older, lower-league games. My first step was dragging out the dusty old external hard drive where I keep all my archived football forum data from the late nineties. Seriously, that thing sounds like a washing machine when it spins up. I spent three solid evenings just scrolling through ancient message boards—the kind where people still used awful GIF avatars and barely coherent usernames.
I started cross-referencing dates. I pulled up the official club history timelines first, then looked for when their paths actually crossed. Hull often spent time sinking while Pompey shot up, and vice versa. The key was finding the intersections. Most of the games were forgettable mid-season draws. I was looking for spikes—the games where the local press absolutely lost their minds afterward, or where a result directly triggered a change.
I had to trawl through microfiche archives online for old regional papers. You wouldn’t believe how bad the scans were for 1990s papers. It was like reading through soup. But I persisted. I managed to isolate about twenty potential candidates. The real challenge was narrowing down “mattered most.” Did the result lead to a major player sale? A sacking? A final league standing difference of one point that sent one team down and saved the other? That was the brutal filter I used.
The 2003 game I remembered was easy to verify—it definitely set up a winning run for one of the teams. But the earlier stuff was tough. I had to triangulate information from three different sources just to confirm the date and the stakes of a critical early-90s relegation battle. Some results looked crucial until I discovered the key action happened in the following week’s fixture, not this one. I felt like a damn private detective, only the reward was winning five lagers and the satisfaction of proving Gary wrong.
The Five Moments That Actually Shifted Something
After all that messy sifting, arguing with the internet, and having my laptop overheat three times, I finally cemented my list. It had to be five events where the outcome didn’t just add three points, but fundamentally changed the narrative for at least one of the sides going forward. Here’s the list I compiled and presented to Gary, ready to collect my prize:
- 1. The 1991 Survival Scramble (Hull 1-0 Portsmouth): This one was deep in the mud, Division Two at the time. Hull needed the win to have any hope of staying up, and they got it. It didn’t save Hull in the end, but it absolutely destroyed Pompey’s momentum and finished their promotion hopes dead in the water that year. It proved how volatile their matchups could be even at the lower levels. It was a massive psychological blow to Pompey.
- 2. The 2003 League One Thriller (Portsmouth 4-3 Hull): This was the one I remembered. Pure chaos. It cemented Pompey’s blistering run toward promotion out of the division under Harry Redknapp. It wasn’t the final game, but the confidence boost from surviving that back-and-forth battle was palpable, you could read it in the local reports, calling it the moment they truly believed they were going up.
- 3. The 2007 Championship Face-off (Hull 0-0 Portsmouth): A boring scoreline, absolutely zero goals. But this was a pivotal moment in the Premier League era. Pompey were established up top, using reserves and fringe players. Hull were scrapping and needed a point against the “big boys.” The draw was a massive moral victory for Hull, showing they could hang, and it really fueled their push for promotion the following season, proving they were ready for the top tier.
- 4. The 2017 Checkatrade Trophy Debacle (Portsmouth 3-1 Hull U21s): Okay, hear me out. Gary laughed, but this showed how far the mighty had fallen for both clubs simultaneously, even if it was just a reserve match in a cup nobody cares about. It was a symbolic low point for both clubs who had been in financial ruin, before both clubs started a serious, parallel rebuild effort out of the depths of League Two and League One, respectively. It mattered for morale and future planning by forcing them to use the youth.
- 5. The 2019 FA Cup Fourth Round Clash (Portsmouth 2-1 Hull): This was pure drama. Both clubs were having rough seasons and were desperate. The Cup provided a much-needed injection of life and cash. Pompey’s victory here propelled them to a decent Cup run that generated significant revenue they desperately needed to keep the lights on and stabilize operations. That matters way more than three league points sometimes, because it literally kept the club ticking over.
I printed out the whole timeline, grabbed the old press clippings I’d found, and shoved them under Gary’s nose. He read through the details, frowned, and then finally conceded. “Alright, alright,” he muttered. “The 2003 game was more important than I gave it credit for, and the Cup run revenue certainly counts.”
So, yeah. That’s how I spent three weekends, digging through twenty years of dusty football history, just to win five pints. But honestly, uncovering those little forgotten moments that actually shape a club’s destiny? That was way more satisfying than the beer. Next time, I’m picking two teams that have actually played each other more than ten times, though.