Boro Mania

I have supported Boro since 1986, in the wake of the ‘Hand of God’ World Cup in Mexico and our club avoiding destruction by the skin of a parmo-bound chicken giblet. This means that in my time, I have suffered four relegations - a lot by some people’s standards, not bad going by others. This time will be the one that hurts most.

Let’s assume that we will be in the Championship next season. What will you miss most from our years in England’s promised land? The glamour? The money? The players on massive wages? Surely not the coverage, which to me looks more and more tipped in favour of the Premiership elite, the rest of us being left to peck at the few remaining crumbs.

I’ve known for some time that we are going down. Let’s be honest, so have you. The bad results anger me, just like they do to you, and prior to writing this I spent some time going through the recent spleen ventage on the FMTTM messageboard for a fresh fix.

Wow! What a day Monday was for Premiership Sackwatch fans, huh? First, Tony Adams is dumped from Portsmouth, largely as expected, and later that day Roman Abramovich claims the head of Phil Scolari, the fourth Chelsea P45 dished out since 2004 and made worse by the fact Mourinho was in post for more than three complete seasons. Who felt sorry for Adams, his sacking utterly overshadowed by the bigger fish at Stamford Bridge? The newspaper I bought on Tuesday had four pages on Scolari; the former Arsenal defender was relegated to a sidelined column.

In the build-up to the Blackburn match, I got the impression that we were heading into possibly the most crucial days of our season. Beat Rovers, make one or two judicious signings in the transfer market and our chances of survival would be improved. Anything less and the outlook was bleaker than your average weather forecast for the next twelve hours (at the time of writing).

Middlesbrough have a kiss, cuddle and fiddle with relegation on a near annual basis, but the last time we really faced the drop was during the 2000/01 season. On this occasion, Steve Gibson saved our bacon by recruiting Terry Venables to ‘assist’ a beleagured and increasingly bleary-eyed Bryan Robson.

So what’s it to be then? A third straight season of barracking Steve Gibson to sack Gareth Southgate before he manages to turn around our fortunes and save Boro’s Premiership status? Or do we finally get rid of ‘the nice boy with a big nose’ and look for a more experienced leader to steer us into safer waters?

If one thing has kept me going where the endless Stewart-Downing-to-Spurs debacle is concerned, it is that no matter how bad we’ve been in recent weeks, the player’s target club remains below us in the table. As we coughed out a draw at the weekend, Tottenham were preparing to lose to Wigan, thus keeping them in a relegation place and crucially on one less point than ourselves.