Hello and welcome to the game football podcast from The Times and Sunday Times and for the last time in this 2025-26 season.

This is our EFL Extra Show with me, Tom Clark, and the former Football League legend Gregor Robertson.

Today we're going to be looking at the three football league playoff finals, but we're also going to be dishing out some end of season awards. So make sure you keep listening all the way through to see if your team get a shout out. Gregor, we've made it a long way. We basically finished the season with shows every week. My intro used to say that it was every fortnight, every two weeks. Such a packed season, so many talking points that we finish with basically

a show every week. It's been emotional, hasn't it? It has, yeah. It's been great to see some

surprises in the championship. We've spoken for a number of seasons about yo-yo clubs and teams

coming up and down and the starting effect of parachute payments and we've got Coventry and

whole city upending the odds and yes,

Ipswich came through in the end, but it's been, I think it's been a really positive year for

the championship in particular and Hull City. What a story. Yeah, absolutely. Nothing sums it or better,

does it? We've talked so much on the regular show. I keep calling it a remarkable season. We've

brought in updates from the crazy Scottish premiership, but the Football League does also fit into that category and probably one of the stories that sums it up is Hull City, winning the playoff final against Middlesbrough. This most talked about playoff final, of course, because of Spygate, because of Southampton's expulsion. Olling McBurney getting a 94th minute winner, a tap-in after a mistake by Middlesbrough goalkeeper. Gregor, in terms of the football, let's just talk football. Let's try and give it to football. I'm going to ask you about the bigger picture and step back in just a second. But in terms of the football, an amazing achievement by Hull City in this season in itself to finish six and get into the playoffs.

But then to go into the playoffs, not concede a goal and get past Millwall who finished third

and Middlesbrough, who at times played some of the best football in the league, is a fantastic,

fantastic achievement by everyone at the club.

It's extraordinary, yeah.

They're a club that's kind of been spoken about throughout the season

because when you consider everything that happened last season,

staying up on goal difference, then over the summer,

the transfer embargo, then the fact they hired a complete unknown

in Sergei Akirovich, who had worked in Turkey, Croatia,

Bosnia and Herzegovina.

And then there's the whole kind of narrative about the way they were confounding the underlying

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