just saw this on TWTD, its long and whill take a while to read, but its worth it, its written by a Middlesborough fan
Fresh from FA Cup humiliation at the hands of Nuneaton, I feel compelled to dwell this week on my own club's private grief, because I think it illustrates a broader, more universal problem with many of our clubs in the modern era.
Essentially it boils down to this: Our clubs are too full of tw*ts who rob us of our money, our identity and ultimately diminish our passion for the club which in turn means we stop going to the match.
Middlesbrough F.C. is a great old club with a few lower-league titles to our name. We've been in the Premiership since 1998, been in Europe for the last two seasons, had a League Cup win and regularly get crowds of between 25 and 30,000. Historically this is a period of unparallelled success the like of which we have never known.
So why doesn't it feel like it?
Why do I and other fans feel a bit hollow inside?
Why in only our second season in Europe can we not fill 75% of the stadium?
Why are this season's attendances the lowest since we opened the Riverside?
Something is wrong and it's not just being fifth-bottom and unable to beat Nuneaton. It's a deeper, wider malaise in football that Middlesbrough serves to illustrate perfectly.
I first went to Ayresome Park in 1973 to see them play Hull City. It was 1-0 to the Boro. A Mills goal. Just over 9,000 were there. Most of us stood in the Holgate End on flaking concrete terraces. The players were balding, chubby, long-haired and some had thick bushy sideburns that you could hide an owl in. We didn't go for the glory, we went because it's always been a laugh. It's always been fun. But it's really not anymore.
We should be joyful at our current relatively high status - seventh last year and all the European success. But many of us are not. And be warned, all of you who support teams striving for that European place, this can happen to you. For we at the Boro are, like California, a few years ahead of the game.
This is the problem; We're so bored and discontented by the football we play, how it's played and a lot of the players who play for us that all the passion, attraction and excitement is getting sucked out of the whole concept of going to the match.
We have been one of the most consistently boring clubs to watch for at least ten years now. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction to a few dodgy games, this is a whole extended culture of football tedium. If we're coming to your club to play you, I bet you groan. Middlesbrough is a by-word for boring, and this season is just as rotten.
This is bad enough, but on top of that we have possibly the worst reputation for buying over-priced, over-paid, under-committed players. This really needs saying. We shouldn't try and pretend it's acceptable.
Most of them have been little better than average, some of them have been appalling, others have just taken the pish out of the club financially. But they all shared one thing. They didn't give a s*** about the club and just drained us of huge amounts of money and left as soon as they were offered a job anywhere else. Now I know we don't suffer uniquely from this. But it has become a way of life at the Boro.
This endless catalogue of footballing mercenaries has slowly rotted the guts of the club and is slowly separating the fans from their team so that the club doesn't feel like it's ours - instead of the love of our life it feels like it's some kind of hooker who is taking it up the arse from legions of sex tourists.
And yet we have one of the best youth teams in the country and are bringing some of them through to be regular first-teamers and in James Morrison, Stuart Parnaby, Stewart Downing when he's fit and a couple of others, we have the only members of the team who seem to actually care - which is because they're local lads and surprise, surprise care a bit about their team. But they're dragged down by the mercenaries and the lazy good-for-nothings and will continue to be so unless we change the rent-a-mercenary culture.
The plain fact is we don't really care about the UEFA Cup adventure much. With a crowd of just over 9,000 I think we proved this conclusively. We didn't care much about drawing with Nuneaton. A lot expected to lose. We won't fill the Riverside for the cup replay. It may only be half-full.
People who feel like me don't care much because we suspect most of the first team don't actually care much. So if we win we don't care, because it's the same load of s***-eating f***wits have won and we secretly hate most of them. I'm just saying what a lot are thinking. Who at the Boro has affection for Viduka, Rochemback, Doriva, Pogatetz, JFH, Yakubu? No one. Occasionally, like with Frank Queudrue, we buy a player who does put his shoulder to the wheel. Sometimes we get it right. Not often.
Our relative success feels hollow because it's being achieved by players we by and large don't respect.
And you may point to the 4-1 Man United victory and the 3-3 draw with Spurs and say 'look how great those games were'. Well, you'd be right, but that ultimately doesn't make any difference because, after all these years in the top flight with Gibbo's money buying so many desperate money-grabbers for a season or two, we find it hard to really feel good about any performance anymore.
Rather, it compounds the problem because, to me, it looks like some players are only interested in playing against the top clubs and that makes us feel even more disenfranchised and furious. Remember we lost to Sunderland - the only club to do so so far. That tells us something important.
Our policy of buying old has-been or never-were strikers is unparallelled. Every season brings a new joker who takes our money and then laughs at us as they leg it back down the A19. It started with the evil white-feathered goblin Fabrizio Ravenelli of course but there are many, many others. Hamilton Ricard, Alen Boksic, JFH, Viduka, Maccarone, Nemeth and this is just a few of those who ride the Boro gravy train before getting off with their pockets full of our money and a smug look on their face.
Most of the time they play rubbish and only get picked because McClaren has wazzed so much money on them he has to justify it. But occasionally we resurrect players like Ziege or Zenden's career and what do they do? They repay us by f***ing off as soon as possible.
And something tells me we'll find Yakubu doing the same soon enough if he has half a chance. I don't trust him. He'd be gone before the end of the month if it suits him. We seem addicted to players who disrespect us. Like a wife who returns to her abusive husband for another slap.
Okay, you say, no one who's any good wants to move to the unglamorous Ironopolis of Middlesbrough unless no-one else will have them - fair enough then - sod them all. Let's just use the youth team and a handful of good British players who understand the value and worth of the industrial heartlands of Britain. I really don't care.
I genuinely believe that the gradual effect of all this abuse over the years has been to freeze our hearts. But McClaren doesn't seem to realise and keeps on buying these muppets. I despair of him. He makes one good buy in every six. He might, might be okay as a football coach but as a manager of the club he's lightweight and quite rubbish really.
Okay, we've had some success and we're a stable Premiership club, but the price for that has been selling the soul of the club to a revolving door of mercenaries who use and abuse our club. That's too great a price. Are you really surprised so many stay away now? We're numbed by it after all these years but deep down it's a bit humiliating to us all.
We're dying inside. The best signings we've made in recent years are almost all British players. Southgate, Ehiogu, Riggott, even old Ray Parlour has been better than the likes of Doriva.
Have you seen Rochemback? He's surely one of those not-really-a-footballer-ringers that only Souey gets fooled by. It's not because they're foreigners per se, God knows we've rubbish British players as well - remember Robbo bought Brian Deane, Noel Whelan and Dean Windass - but its undeniable that we have attracted some of the worst imports. Not just poor players - some of them can kick a ball when they feel like it - but just woeful attitudes. We've had them all going back to Emerson and his unhappy wife drowning in our money.
Personally, and this is a radical point of view I know most disagree with, I would rather be relegated by playing our youth team then stay mid-table with the bunch of football hookers that we have season in, season out. I'd rather have a purge of all the lazy leeches. I'd rather have good honest pros and not feckless egomaniacs, wherever they come from.
I fear that younger fans now think this is the only way you can run a football club as one big name after another is touted as our saviour. Maybe it works at other clubs, I don't know, but to me, at Middlesbrough, it all seems dreadfully inappropriate.
I hope Steve Gibson realises why the stadium has big bare expanses all the time now. He's a man of great integrity and the fact so many of these tw*ts have taken his money and laughed in our collective faces as they run off back down south really angers me. It's time to stop this now.
During this transfer window I don't want to see any more of it. No more half-buying half -assed players who are mysteriously injured for four months a year or who are 34 and looking for one last big pay day. If we've got the money, why not gamble on promising British players? They cost less in wages than bloated tarts like Viduka and might actually bond with the club which has given them a break.
Players arrive and clearly loathe the place like Pogatetz. I wonder where he thought he was going. Misquoted my arse. He hates the place and will be gone as soon as he can. I wish he'd go now. Imagine if you turned up at work and said in front of your paymasters: "This is a right dump, now pay me."
We're not the big city, glory-hunting prawn sarnie mob at the Boro.
We'd take love over money. We're not flash, we don't want to be flash - we want true grit to make the pearl, not another donkey-choking wad of cash paid to strikers who can't get a gig anywhere else because they're lazy fat fools. It's time the manager realised this. He may be the last man on Teesside who doesn't. I even fear he may offer Maccarone a contract extension.
Southgate and other players have been asking fans for more support - hey Gareth, thanks for that, but remember you are getting paid to turn up, we're not. We're not discontented for no reason. it's not knee-jerk, fickle fans here. This has been a long, slow process of disillusion. Win or lose or draw, a lot of us feel too distant, cold and alienated from much of the team who in turn hate playing in front of us.
And it was you Gareth, who revealed the extent of Boksic's pampering. It sickened me. So don't lecture us please, son. We've been Boro for longer than you and will be so long after you hung up your boots. We're the experts. Not you.
Can we please have our club back from these slippery characters who seek only to cream us up one last time? These jokers are not fit to wear the shirts that once belonged to real men like Alan Foggon, John Hickton or even Bernie Slaven and Paul Wilkinson.
I'm not depressed because we're fifth bottom and can't beat Nuneaton. It's weird but the results don't matter to me now. It's bigger than that.
Is there anything wrong with wanting a team of mostly British players complimented with one or two top-class overseas players? Is that such a bad thing? Wasn't that actually how it was supposed to work? Are you really telling me we can't find a lad in the north east who can play just 1% better than Rochemback? A drunk monkey could play better.
The irony is because of a good youth policy we have the chance to do something shocking. We could have 75% of our first team as home-grown talent. Top it up with a few judicious buys and we'd all be much happier. Is it really so shocking to think that might be the answer? Surely, that is the future and all this buying in a striker from Machu Pichu will be seen for the foolish delusion it is.
Would it be so shocking to try? I'd rather be relegated with that team than stay up and have to look at Viduk'as big square head and JFH's ridiculous big sticky-out granite horse's arse every week.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. Maybe. Or maybe it's the most modern of thinking. But Middlesbrough should be a warning, an illustration of what can happen if your club is one of the many unfashionable, out-of-the-way clubs who are trying to pretend to be a big boy.
If you have some money and resources and moderate success, you too might find that you feel very disillusioned. That for which you have struggled for years is not the promised land after all, because your club has been flooded with desperados.
We're losing all our highs and lows, ain't it funny how the feeling goes away.
