TESTIMONIALS are dead. The meagre crowd of 8,647 for Colin Cooper's beneifit game underlines the fact that what was once seen as a chance to pay tribute is now dismissed by the bulk of supporters as an unattractive half-paced friendly in a quarter-full stadium.
Despite the Boro's sticky pre-season, the change of opposition to Chievo and what seemed an afterthought of welding Coops' benefit onto the fixture, there still should have been a bumper crowd. After all, it was the first home game since Eindhoven and Southgate's first in charge at home. And on top of that it was a chance to say farewell and thank you to a club stalwart, one of the heroes of '86 and a player who first footed Wembley and Europe with Boro.
But supporters are not bothered with those attractions anymore. Testimonials have lost their logic and unless the opposition is something special the crowd will simply not show. It is time to kill the concept completely.
Why does football even need testimonials? In the professional game players are not cast into penury on retirement. Even down in the depths of League Two footballers earn well above the average wage and the PFA funds education and retraining and pays them a generous pension when they hang up their boots. Those that stay in the game long enough to earn a testimonial - a rarity in itself these day - will be rich beyond their wildest dreams of their armour-plated casey and dubbined forebears.
And at the top players take their cash home in wheelbarrows. After a decade of stratospheric salaries they should be embarrassed to even consider that the people who have paid their wages all along should dip into their pockets one more time to fund a millionaire's final farewell. If anything the players should stump up for their swansong as a thankyou to the fans.
Against that background, aside from the really big names departing the serial silverware collectors - Bergkamp, Roy Keane - when the opposition is from the global elite and anything involving Celtic, testimonial crowds have been dwindling for a decade across the entire game.
Fans are fed up of small screen saturation and already resent funding a Ferrari for every day of the week for players they can not relate to and who often show no pride, passion or even any discernable skill in the sacred shirt. Paying even more on top to finance a windfall for someone already richer than most smaller nation states does not sit well for many.
Plus, having paid through the nose for a season ticket they are making savings elsewhere and anything that is not a "real" game is at risk. The Charity Shield (I am resisting rebranding on this one) had a crowd of 'only' 56,000 yesterday. What was always a sell out had 20,000 unsold seats because, well, who is going to pay upwards of £40 for a glorified friendly?
Crowds in early cup rounds are in free-fall across the game because fans are keeping their cash for the big games. Last season Boro could only attract 14,000 for a League Cup quarter-final and 9,000 for a UEFA Cup game, both with discounted ticket prices so it should be no surprise that a friendly in whatever guise can fails to reach even that.
And you can't blame fans. Friendlies are almost always boring, low tempo affairs with zero atmosphere and teams are chopped and changed so much as to make them meaningless.
Players who were once recognisable, approachable members of the local community and who lived and shopped and went drinking in the town are now ever more estranged and distanced geographically and emotionally from the fans and you wonder what the dynamic is for selling a testimonial. Very few people will reach the old ten year mark that triggers it in the future. Mark Schwarzer will next year but beyond that you wonder who will be next.
So testimonials are an anachronism and one increasingly unpopular with the fans. Football should abolish them and find new, more appropriate ways to thank a player. Maybe a public subscription to buy a plaque to put along our avenue of heroes.
Of course, there will always be exceptions and Coops should maybe have been one of them. But the public have spoken: only 8,600 were willing to mark the contribution of a legend, one of Brucie's bottle blond Boro babes and a player whose times at the club spanned 20 years of incredible drama and progress. It seems that many in the crowd have little feeling for their own history or respect for the people who made it. Sadly, it was still twice as many as Bernie got.
Equally sadly, the only way there was ever going to be a crowd was if Juninho played.
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