Hull City Defeats Millwall in Playoff Clash as Belloumi Shines

Millwall’s curious, painful relationship with the Championship playoffs lives on. Another home leg, another defeat. The Lions’ 100% losing record in front of their own fans at this stage remains intact, and this one will sting for a while.

They came into the night as the form side. Six unbeaten. Four home wins in that run. The Den expectant, snarling, ready. Hull, though, walked into the noise with the calm of a club that knows this terrain and quietly set about reminding everyone of their playoff pedigree from 2008 and 2016.

The visitors started on the front foot. A cluster of early corners pinned Millwall back, the pressure building without quite breaking through. Then came the first real scare. Charlie Hughes rose at the far post and sent a header trickling agonisingly wide of the far-left corner. Anthony Patterson was beaten. The home crowd fell silent for a heartbeat.

Millwall had every reason to feel fortunate. Across the regular season, only champions Coventry scored more away goals in the opening 15 minutes than Hull’s seven. The Londoners had survived that familiar early Tigers surge.

That escape finally jolted Millwall into life. The press went up a gear, the tackles bit harder, and suddenly it was Hull who looked uneasy. Femi Azeez almost flipped the script within two minutes of Hughes’ miss, bursting into the box from a tight angle and testing the visitors’ resolve with Millwall’s first genuinely dangerous attack.

The Lions grew from there. They began to dominate the rest of the first half, pinning Hull deeper and forcing mistakes. Thierno Ballo, increasingly influential, set the tone with a crunching tackle that ended Kyle Joseph’s night with an ankle injury. Soon after, he almost added a brutal finishing touch of his own, stretching desperately for a cross from the right that skimmed past his outstretched boot by inches. The Den roared; the net refused to cooperate.

That failure to land a punch before the interval felt ominous, and with Millwall’s season-long habit of conceding late at home – 20 of their 25 home league goals shipped after half-time – the tension was obvious as the teams re-emerged.

Hull sensed it. Within three minutes of the restart they carved out the kind of chance that decides playoff ties. A slick passing move sliced through midfield, Regan Slater threading a clever ball into Oli McBurnie’s path. The striker drove to the near post and let fly, only to see Tristan Crama throw himself in the way and block. A huge moment, and a reminder that Millwall’s back line still had some fight left.

For a while, neither side could land a clean blow. The game sagged towards the hour mark, tight, anxious, and cagey. On the touchline, Alex Neil knew this script too well. Just one win in six previous meetings with Hull, he rolled the dice, calling for changes and sending on Alfie Doughty among others to tilt the balance.

Instead, the move backfired almost instantly.

Barely a minute after Doughty’s introduction, Hull struck with ruthless clarity. Matt Crooks picked his head up and drove a searing ball out to Mohamed Belloumi on the right. The Algerian took over, cutting infield with purpose, gliding past the hesitant challenge and shaping a left-footed curler towards the far corner. The ball bent past Doughty, beyond Patterson, and into the net. A moment of quality, delivered with cold precision.

The goal rattled Millwall. The home crowd’s defiance gave way to a low rumble of anxiety. Hull smelled blood.

It might have been even worse for the Lions moments later. Barry Bannan, so often the calm heartbeat of a side, coughed up possession in a horrible pocket of space. Belloumi pounced, driving forward before slipping in Liam Millar, who suddenly found himself with the angle and the stage. His shot looked destined to kill the tie, but Jake Cooper flung himself across and deflected the effort over the bar. A huge block. A brief reprieve.

It didn’t last.

With 12 minutes to play, Belloumi again tore into Millwall’s right side and this time produced something even more audacious. Collecting the ball wide, he shaped as if to drive towards goal, then instead whipped an outrageous outside-of-the-boot pass square into the box. Joe Gelhardt, on from the bench and alive to the opportunity, took one touch to set himself and then drilled low into the bottom-right corner. Patterson got a hand to it. Not enough. Hull had daylight.

Gelhardt’s impact from the bench was everything Doughty’s was not: sharp, decisive, devastating. Millwall, by contrast, looked drained. There was no late surge, no heroic scramble to salvage something from the wreckage. The belief that had built over their unbeaten run simply evaporated in the final minutes.

When the whistle went, the reality was brutal. Millwall, the “best of the rest” not long ago, must wait at least another year for a shot at ending their exile from the top flight, which stretches back to relegation in 1990. Another playoff campaign, another home leg that slipped away.

Hull walked off with something very different: momentum and a growing sense of destiny. This is a club that has never tasted Championship playoff elimination. A year on from scrambling to survive on the final day, they now stride towards Wembley on 23 May with a ruthless edge and a forward line humming with confidence.

With Belloumi crowned Flashscore Man of the Match and the Tigers one win from the Premier League, the question is no longer whether they belong on this stage. It’s whether anyone can stop them delivering one more killer performance when it matters most.