Cup Glory Is Leagues Ahead
RELEGATION jitters are abroad on Teesside again after the stiffs lost a second successive match. The gap is still ten points but there are some hard games to come and the glint of silverware is blinding us.
Yet there is also a growing hysterical belief that Boro can somehow stumble all the way in at least one of the knockouts. I buy into that and have done since about October when I became convinced that it was 1997 all over again and we were going down in a blaze of glory.
But if I was asked right now to sign a Faustian Pact offering an open topped bus parade down Linthorpe Road come May in exchange for my soul and going down with the Mackems I would willingly sign in blood.
Not because I want to see Boro relegated. I don't. I realise the possible consequences if a club doesn't bounce back back before the parachute payments are ripped away. I realise the Championship is a shadow world ghost fleet of rusting once proud vessels like Leeds, Sheffield Wednesday, Ipswich and Sunderland.
But I also believe passionately that Steve Gibson is right when he insists that Boro is about "sport and glory".
And I believe that the current debilitating malaise around the club - the bickering, the alienation of fans from pampered millionaires, the frustration at a stasi-stewarded sterile matchday experience, the slow drift away to bars that show games on al-Jazerra - can best be blasted away by a cup final ticket frenzy and another fix of the affirmative ecstacy we experienced on the whistle at Cardiff.
I believe an FA or UEFA Cup win will fire the imagination, revitalise flagging spirits and revive the Riverside Revolution in a way that gamely edging up to ninth place never could and that the feelgood factor would flow no matter what division we were in.
I could live with the drop. After all, it is not something we have never experienced before. But winning the UEFA Cup is. Winning the FA Cup is. That is what I always dreamed of. That is sport and glory.
It may be heresy in an age whne the Premiership is all but next year I'd rather be lording it at Burnley wearing a UEFA Cup winners scarf than trudging to Everton festering with empty-handed bitterness and a fear that the club will be treading water for years.
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Anthony Vickers
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Vic
Well, you know I don't agree. And the reason I don't is simple. We all believe in sport and glory but with our resources we should also believe in - and demand - that we can have it all; safety in the Prem with an expectation of Euro qualification most years and taking silverware every now and again.
Life - even Boro life - can now and should be both/and and not either/or.
There are 3 things holding us back. The Current Manager and his entourage; the current commercial management of the club; and, (sad though I am to say it) the small town mentality that surrounds Boro and pervades many of it's fans, the local media and local government which translates 'small town' into 'small team' and stunts ambition so that people are prepared to live with 'not for the likes of us'.
It's not just the pampered millionaires who will cut and run either. The next generation we are rightly so proud of parading and who can be the backbone of Boro success for the next 10 years will be off too, taking the option many have done, not just in football, over many years to pursue their careers somewhere with real ambition for sport and glory and you couldn't blame them.
Stirling stuff Vic
The outcome of this season hinges of a knife edge. It can either end up been one to forget, our best ever or somewhere in between. And as we are well into the final third of the season its not a bad position to be in at all.
Hypothetically speaking would have you taken this if offered it at the begining of the season? I think I would have snatched your hands off.
I wonder how many premiership teams would swap their position for ours right now. I bet I could count the number teams who wouldnt on one hand. We are out performing the two big clubs up the road. And with the emergence of the youth players added with transfer buys in the summer we will continue do to so. Its certainly a good time to be a Boro fan.
We're all disappointed with our poor league form this season. But the redemption has more than came via cup progress and its not over yet.
Yesterday all but for a wonder goal a understrength team would have got a draw from an in-form champions league chasing team on their own patch. The FA Cup and UEFA cups are realities that we should throw ourselves at. In all honesty were not going down and in a few years time, looking back on this season who's going to remember whether we finished 10th or 16th? The cup runs will stick out in peoples memories. McClaren has his priorities right IMO.
I dont think we will go down but I do think yhe best way to do well in the cup was to keep our run going.
A couple of changes are understandable, Downning has just come back from injury, Mendi's legs are getting on. Wholesale changes break the flow and put extra pressure in the games that 'count'. Points at Charlton and Blackburn would have lifted the club and players. We now have lost three in a row, it is easy for that to become four and then five.
There is, however no guarantee that we would have got points at either place, playing weakened teams was a gamble and it has failed as far as the premiership. If we lose at Charlton that makes the exercise pointless and with Bolton Sunday that may be the result against them.
Mac is paid to make the decisions, he will take the glory and/or the flak. Lets hope we are praising him come Friday.