RIGHT. I'm back, bronzed and with batteries fully recharged and ready to resume spraying defence splitting hyperbole through midfield. Game on.

SO, BRUISING and brooding Sheffield United at home for the opener. They don't get much more archetypal rude awakening than that do they? The battling Blades and back line bouncer Chris Morgan are the blueprint for exactly the type of club soft-centred Boro have struggled against in recent years.

"It is a tough league and we have to learn the lessons from this." You can hear it now.

DARLINGTON Station on the last day of the season and the icy hand of fears grips the heart of even battle-hardened awayday travellers. We were going to West Ham, which is a doddle. The train to Kings Cross whizzes there in less than three hours: plenty of time to write up the match report and interviews - or time to shift a six pack in the old money.

But ten minutes before the Darlo-KX, the ghost of Christmas Future had chugged away ominously from the same platform. The cross country "express" to Plymouth eased away from platform four leaving white faces behind. The announcer had just read out a schedule from hell ... "the train now leaving the Premiership glory years behind is the new reality shuttle service to Plymouth calling at York, Leeds, Sheffield, Chesterfield, Derby, Burton-on-Trent, Birmingham New Street, Cheltenham Spa, Bristol Parkway, Bristol Temple Meads, Taunton, Tiverton, Exeter St Davids, Newton Abbot and Totnes."

Six long hours and 38 bloody minutes. Great. And there's Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea to look out for when the fixtures come out tomorrow too. Welcome to the two thousand plus extra miles, numb-bummed cabin fever grind of the 46 game Championship.

BORO have been linked with a big money £350,000 swoop for a Colchester winger. Yesterday we got dumped onto the Sky Sports Championship round up. I've handed my Premier League biometric press ID card in. And when the fixtures come out next week we will be looking at being the category A games at Blackpool, Barnsley and Plymouth. Deal with it.

WARNING: the following infomercial contains shameless plugs.... think of it being like the clips between programmes on the telly that urge you to press the red button or switch over to a dedicated digital channel for more, more, more.

KEITH Lamb has broken his silence and admitted that Boro were "found out" last season. Over the thudding sound of a giant penny dropping he added that the club had paid the heavy price for filleting the team of experience and relying too much on untried youth.

SORRY. Dull bean-counting stuff again. David Conn's annual preview of the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance accounts of the Premier League in the Guardian (and picked up and padded out on the BBC) has revealed the clubs have a collective debt of £3.1 billion. Not even the most brass-necked of MPs could get that through on expenses.

In the club-by-club breakdown Conn, who has recently run the rule over Boro in some detail, says that things at the Riverside had looked bleak until a recent rejiggle of the finances but now look relatively healthy. Phew.

AFTER being inundated with requests from readers outside the five mile golden radius of the beating heart of Gazetteshire who don't get to see my column in the paper (well, two anyway) here by popular demand is Tuesday's Big Picture post-mortem...

CHAIRMAN in "town full of Mackems" Stockton own goal future misquote shocker!

SO BORO'S slow-motion car crash of a season skidded and spluttered to a half-hearted halt at Upton Park; the Riverside Revolution twocked by bean-counters, downsized from a gas-guzzling flash bright red sports number to a humdrum family hatch-back with little power but better value for money before being left rusting on the drive with a felt-tipped notice in the rear window "for spares or repair". Sad. But inevitable.