Cheating, time wasting, diving, feigning injury, intimidating a weak referee.  City survive the full breadth of QPR's horrible cynicism to strike two late goals and claim three vital points against a relegation rival amid tumultuous scenes.

Did Saddam Hussein receive justice as he swung limp on the bloody gallows of Baghdad after a showtrial carefully stagemanaged to conceal the extent of American complicity in the creation and maintenance of his evil reign? I suspect opinions in our cherished tiger-chat community might legitimately differ. But let no one doubt that justice was served up at the Circle yesterday. A big creamy chocolaty topped with hundred and thousands knickerbocker glory of a feast of sweet justice. QPR – boooooo!!!!!! baddies!!! – got beaten as they so venomously deserved, while Hull City – hurrah!! The good guys!! Weeee!!! – won the game and took the points.

For sure this victory lends a glowingly healthy sheen to the League table, but as the City team took the enraptured accolades of a jubilant support at the end of yesterday’s game the thoughts were more short-term. We’d won, we’d showed immense resilience by scoring twice in the game’s closing minutes and, most of all, we’d given this conniving, sneering, cynical, venal, glove-wearing, namby-pamby, wibbly-wobbly, glibbly-fibbly, plobbly-dobbly QPR side the pointless booting back home down the motorway that their scandalous ‘performance’ merited.

Indeed.

Off we went on a blustery afternoon, carding the fluid 4-3-3 that Mr Brown seems to have successfully chosen as the best vehicle for playing to our strengths:

Myhill
Ricketts Turner Delaney Dawson
Marney Ashbee Livermore
Barmby Parkin McPhee

QPR started brightly. Pairing two lanky pacy youngsters up front (Dexter Blackstock and Ray Jones) and supporting them with highly-rated loan signing Jimmy Smith on the right and nippy Lee Cook on the left suggested that manager John Gregory was going to serve up some refreshingly attack-minded ballplaying. So it proved. For about two minutes.

Whereupon it became obvious, first, that QPR can’t defend and that, second, the game plan was to fall over and scream as if hit by a roadside bomb whenever an opponent comes near. I know that Londoners are understandably touchy about terrorist incidents: I share their grief and I was shocked and appalled to see QPR mocking such dark memories as they served up their orchestrated simulated-casualty routines. Tasteless and worse, and I hope the country’s media will condemn such affronts.

We’re playing some nice stuff as the first half develops. Livermore slides the ball around deftly, McPhee dribbles with purpose, the Beast is a calm presence up front, looking a deal sharper game by game. Mr Brown has been in charge for just seven games now (from which we’ve harvested 13 points) and already the whole attitude of our players is completely unrecognisable from the woeful shambles with which Mr Parkinson signed off at Colchester and at home to So’ton (and at Burnley, and at QPR, and at home to Coventry, and home to Stoke, etc etc).

On 20 McPhee scores – offside. It was a very tight call, but the linesman seemed intent on awarding all 50/50 decisions in favour of the defence. Which is not what the rule says, as the official was generously reminded by most of the East Stand. On 22 Delaney sets up Parkin amid a penalty box melee, but the Beast, in space gifted by slack defending, slides his shot across the face of Royce’s goal and out beyond the far post.

They’ve decided not even to try to tangle aerially with Parkin, and they can’t cope with the pace and directness of our attacking play on the ground either. City dominate this flabby opposition. Marney crosses to the back post but it’s a shade too high for McPhee who can only loop a weak header into Royce’s grateful gloves. The energetic McPhee then collects a calamity backpass and chips the ball up and over Royce, but up and over the bar too. Then, on the half-hour, a long ball is superbly controlled by McPhee but he is crowded out by scurrying defenders before he can shoot.

The referee. O dearie me.

The referee was Mr N Miller, whom I do not recall having encountered before. I could litter this report with tales of his incompetence, but it wouldn’t help and it wouldn’t illuminate. Refereeing standards are dipping horribly and I don’t doubt that part of the reason is that many pack it in because they’re fed up getting it in the neck from ignorant football crowds. But, honestly …..

Imagine a reality TV show, ‘Jobswap’, in which Mr Norman Mellows, traffic warden from Frome, is whisked off to police the crack-infested firearm-riddled barrios of Miami where life is as cheap as a pint of farm cider. He’d have resembled referee Miller yesterday – pootling about in utter bemusement as ferocious mayhem spilled out its gory entrails on to the sidewalks, dimly aware that something wasn’t quite right and yet completely unable even to begin to come to terms with the grotesque ferocity of it all. A lamentably pathetic scene. (However, back in Somerset there haven’t been any instances of locals parking on a double yellow line when nipping into the newsagents for a paper and a pint of milk, not since six-foot-eight no-nonsense Florida lawman Ramon ‘The Gorilla’ Dominguez brought his oversize sunglasses, doom-laden wisecracking and collection of large guns to town). Referee Miller was painfully, woefully out of his depth in Hull yesterday. It never even occurred to him that when a QPR player hurled himself to the turf, writhing in agony, there might just be an explanation for this other than that the gentleman in question was on the verge of painful death. Timewasting, Mr Miller? Disturbing the rhythm of the game? Mr Miller must be as innocent as a new baby for these foul tactics had clearly never blipped on to his screen. And so of course QPR kept on cheating.

A foul or even simply a tackle, a feigned injury, a compassionate intervention by Vicar Miller, a QPR player making sure he lay on the field of play rather than off it so the game could not continue, a random drop-ball, an afternoon that was quickly becoming more circus than football match. Midway through the first half the game descended perilously close to pure farce, as both teams, utterly bemused by what Mr Miller expected of them, competed with each other to boot the ball out of play, sometimes because someone was down injured, other times because no doubt someone would soon pretend to be. QPR, of course, were a good deal more sly and calculating than our fine upstanding bunch of men, though perhaps the most crass moment of all arrived when Delaney fell hurt on the edge of their box as a City corner was cleared, whereupon right-back Kanyuka surged forward with the ball as QPR initiated an extremely promising break against our under-strength defence, only to boot the ball into the East Stand like a simpleton when invited to do so by an incredulous home support. Pure laughable nonsense.

Towards half-time. We’ve played well, but the scrappy pattern of play desired by QPR, and eagerly promoted by the abysmal referee, has won out and, as the board shows an added 5 minutes it seems that we’ve been robbed of a deserved lead by deeply offensive tactics.

But in the added time Cook finds space down the left where Ricketts has been pulled out of position and his low cross is catastrophically fubled by Boaz. The ball squirms loose and is jabbed into our net from close range by Blackstock.

That hurts. That really hurts. That’s not justice.

Though the capering knot of QPR fans might have been usefully warned that justice ain’t just a 45 minute thing, as Henry Fonda pointed out in Twelve Angry Men (probably).

At half-time Barmby, who’d been hurt in a messy challenge in the penalty area, was replaced by Forster and we set about repairing the indignity of deficit. The very first challenge of the half, just ten seconds in, saw the QPR player collapse to the turf, clutching his back, waving his leg, howling about his hurt ribs, asking if anyone had seen his hair gel …. Referee Miller was of course horrified by this - The poor chap! That must be a bad one! - and immediately stopped play for a couple of minutes while the player received treatment. But, do you know, once the game re-started the QPR player decided he was fit enough to join in too! Thank Goodness!

How has it come to this for Queens’ Park Rangers, an inoffensive club who threw up a superbly fluent side in the mid-1970s (poorer teams have taken the title than the team of Gerry Francis, Dave Thomas and Don ‘The Master’ Masson that was bested only by Liverpool in 1976) and which offers visitors to the capital an infinitely less grimy and gritty experience than most London grounds. They have become vile pigs.

On 53 Marney sets up Forster, but he shoots into the sidenetting. On 58 one of theirs hauls down one of ours (Forster, I think) on the corner of the penalty box. Inexplicably there’s no booking, but there is an inviting shooting opportunity from the free-kick. A low shot from Marney deflects wickedly amid the melee of players and Royce, hopelessly wrong-footed, watches with relief as the ball bounces back into play off the inside of his left-hand post.

In this game you don’t get booked for serious foul play, but when yet another QPR player pretends to be injured and referee Miller yet again dramatically stops the play as if he’s dealing with an outbreak of bubonic plague Ian Ashbee boots the ball into the crowd in utter frustration. He’s booked for that.

We’re dominating the play despite the chicanery practised by the opposition but we need a touch more quality in the final third. Only a touch – this QPR defence is not sturdy and there was never a moment yesterday that I didn’t think us capable of scoring at any (and every) moment.

Duffy on for McPhee. The onslaught continues. On 70 Turner thunders a header against the crossbar from a corner. On 75 a Livermore free-kick from the right is looped delicately into a crowded penalty area and is allowed to travel to the far post where it reaches Parkin just three yards out. He hoists the ball horribly high over the bar. This is madness – we can’t lose to this lot? Can we? Livermore off, Elliott on, and we go 4-2-4. Smart choice by Mr Brown. Another corner, a storming header from Ashbee – just too high.

Time’s ticking down. We’ve played well. A defeat is not going to undermine the truth of our recent good form. We can lose this game and still no one can say we’re playing like a side heading for relegation….

So do football fans seek to rationalise pain. But losing to this wretched QPR side was going to be hard to endure.

EQUALISER!! And it’s a sudden injection of quality that brings it. Ball into Parkin, good control, slick turn, superb ball in behind the defence to Marney who has made a brilliantly imaginative lung-bursting sprint down the right, he’s composed, he won’t waste it, and he delivers a deliciously inviting low cross which is met just inside the six-yard box by Elliott, racing in unmarked from the left, and the ball is whipped past the stranded Royce.

Just fantastic – massive exultation sweeps the ground. That’s one. We need two. Neither team nor crowd even consider settling for a point. But QPR are roused from their slumber and respond with brief aggression, as their first attack since the Fall of Constantinople brings a decent shout for a penalty after a suspicious trip by (I think) Delaney. Moments later, though, and their ambition is snuffed out. Irritating wide-man Cook had managed to get himself booked ten minutes earlier for a foul so crude that even Referee Miller couldn’t ignore it and now he stupidly pursues a mouthy vendetta and gets a second yellow. He’s off and though he seems to want to have a pop at the ref, he’s dragged away by QPR players wanting to protect him from doubling his foolishness and by City players eager to tell him close up and personal that he’s a nasty sly cheating little swine.

O, this is marvellous, mad refereeing, wild scenes, an equaliser and a sending-off. What more do we want? Well, we don’t want a very tasty position for a free-kick, right on the edge of the box, being wasted by Marney blasting the ball twenty yards too high, but that’s exactly what we get on 89. There are 4 added minutes. And what we want is a winner.

It’s what we get.

A corner, a soaring header, the ball sails inside the far post. Elliott’s won us the game. Justice may be blind, but I expect she has a sighted companion who helps her out with a running commentary on the game, and by this time she was surely wearing amber-and-black robes.

Mr Miller’s 4 added minutes are stretched out to 7 – it’s past 5 o clock and we’re still playing for heaven’s sake! - and ten-men QPR finally start to play properly, earning a couple of free-kicks in advanced positions which ensure the home support remains nervy. But is justice delayed justice denied? Not on this occasion. It took a while. But we got what we deserved and so did our dear visitors.

This was my favourite game for a while.

HULL CITY (4-3-3): Myhill; Ricketts, Turner, Delaney, Dawson; Marney, Ashbee, Livermore; Barmby, Parkin, McPhee.  Subs: Forster (for Barmby, 46), Duffy (for McPhee, 67), Elliott (for Livermore, 80), Coles, Duke.

Goals: Elliott 85, 90

Booked: Ashbee, Livermore, Parkin

Sent Off: None

QUEENS PARK RANGERS: Royce, Bignot, Stewart, Mancienne, Kanyuka, Cook, Lomas, Smith, Bircham, Jones, Blackstock.  Subs: Timoska (for Bignot, 31), Baidoo (for Bircham, 61), Furlong (for Blackstock, 76), Cole, Bailey.

Goals: Blackstock 45

Booked: Blackstock, Cook, Lomas, Timoska

Sent Off: Cook

REFEREE:  N Miller

ATTENDANCE: 19,791