As chair of the Southern Supporters, the club contacted me the day after the Millwall second leg to help with a few things over what would become Fer Ark. That was mainly on the logistical side of things (essentially ensuring that the pub chosen would allow an easy route to Wembley, plus one or two other things. The OCS - led by the brilliant John Drinkall, who it has been an absolute pleasure to work with on this and the letter from the fans to the EFL - was also involved.
Once the pub was chosen, I'd had several ideas about what could be done to make it feel proper 'City' that I had intended to discuss with the club staff. Not one of them was needed. The club - Andy Clark, Joe Clutterbrook, Brendon Smurthwaite, Natasha Chapman, Dan Briggs and others I may have forgot - had already put together something that was way beyond my capabilities, way beyond my thinking. They just get the fans, they get the club, they get our culture, they get our heritage. They are fantastic, utterly fantastic.
On Acun, whatever shortcomings he may have, whatever mistakes he may have made, he was just what I needed at the helm of Hull City after the Allams. I don't want such a great occasion to be bogged down by discussion about that era, and I know that not all fans feel the same about that time, but I felt so detached from the club under their reign. I needed some mad, passionate owner who put the fans at the centre of everything to come in and do pretty much exactly what Acun has done. Saturday was incredible. Partly because I had my boys with me - who were too young to see us at previous Wembley matches - but mostly because I felt like we - the club and the fan base - were all as one. The scenes when McBurnie scored, the way I lost it and looked around to see that my boys, my brother and my dad had just lost it too, will live with me for the rest of my life. Every ounce of love, or passion, of toil, of emotion I'd poured into City over the past 45 years was repaid with interest in the blink of an eye. And had Acun - and those around him - not worked so hard to reengage and reconnect the fans that feeling just wouldn't have been the same.
