POINT ONE: Cast your mind back to that burning sense of righteous anger that engulfed Teesside in the early part of 1997 after three points won fairly on the pitch were docked by the Premier League. It cost Boro relegation led to the disintegration of Robbo's Foreign Legion and caused the souring of a dream.
Remember the sense of outrage and injustice at a punitive process that reeked of back stage machinations, cover-ups and vested interests. Remember the power of the pure emotion as the Boro half of the FA Cup final crowd pointed accusingly at the sanctimonious suits and started to chant "three points... three points."
POINT TWO: Remember the similar sense of sickening wounded rage as Liverpool first "discovered" then exploited a clause inserted in good faith in Christian Ziege's contract that was so confidential that sheepish supremo Bryan Robson did not know it even existed to lure away a key player at a cut-price on the eve of the season. And remember too the anger at the insult added to injury as although the Premier League found Liverpool bang to rights of illegally inducing a player to break his contract they levied a pathetic, laughable fine of £15,000 - barely a week's wages for the spotty German turncoat.
POINT THREE: Remember the two year legal battle in which single-minded Steve Gibson ruthlessly pursued Liverpool and dragged them into the High Court, revealing exactly the extent of their duplicitous dealings and scoring a belated victory over the contract busting big boys with an unequivocal ruling in Boro's favour and an undisclosed settlement of a hefty compensation package and costs in full, estimated at around £2m.
Now remember that one individual links all three points: Rick Parry.
The permed pen pusher was the man who drew up the rule book of the Premier League and who was in charge of implementing it as chairman at the time of the 'three points' saga. He was also a material witness as Boro's defence rested on their attempts to clear with Parry and his senior staff their assessment that an unprecedented injury crisis gave them 'just cause' to call off the fixture at Blackburn. Boro insisted that the fact that his staff and their processes were being called into question made him an inappropriate figure to oversee the inquiry and the subsequent appeal, that he had a possible vested interest in upholding his own corporate structure. There was a feeling that the appeal was being viewed as a personal criticism and was being dealt with in a subjective and summary manner. His arrogant dismissals of perfectly understandable concerns left Gibson with a deep sense of frustration and grievance at the lack of transparency and left a festering wound that has been picked at regularly in the years since.
It was Parry too that two years later as chief executive of Liverpool oversaw the illegal approach for Ziege, who helped orchestrate a media campaign to unsettle the player and who rode rough-shod over the rules he himself had written to induce a player to break his contract. As a stickler for the rules he more than anyone must have known he had been caught red handed but instead of accepting it gracefully he used a media in thrall to the big clubs and set out on a mud-slinging campaign that included claims that opportunist Boro were just trying it on to get more money and a devious counter accusation - thrown out - that Boro had tried to tap up Emile Heskey.
It was Parry too that decided that Liverpool should fight Boro's High Court action, who assembled Liverpool's case, who tried every legal trick to delay, derail and divert the process, to have it struck out. It was Parry that tried to pass off Liverpool's tapping up as normal business practice, who in effect belittled the very rules he had so passionately defended and prosecuted over the three points.
Most Boro fans have Rick Parry right up there at the top of their list of hate figures because he has been central in many of the machinations that have damaged the club over the past decade or so and appears to have played his role with glee. Steve Gibson is no different - he is a Boro fan and he has his list too.
It is no secret that Gibson knows how to nurse a grudge like a Florence Nightingale of Vengeance, nor that he and Parry have history. In the heightened emotions of the angry aftermath of the rejected appeal over the three points he was scathing about the Premier League and key individuals in it and made it quite clear that he would not forget. In a no holds barred four page tirade in the Gazette the normally measured chairman lapsed into proper Teesside vernacular and warned darkly that one day Parry would walk down a dark alley and someone would follow him with a baseball bat. He was spitting blood. And that undercurrent of animosity was renewed after the Ziege row and deepened in the resulting legal action.
And now that same Parry is supposed to ring up Gibson and say that he wants to make a cut-price offer for Stewart Downing, a current England international, that is younger that £18m rated Gareth Barry, has far longer left on his contract and who can only get better? What do you think Gibson would say to that?
I think we can safely say that Boro won't do business with Liverpool. I believe Gibson would rather give Stewart Downing to Newcastle or Sunderland before he flogs him to Liverpool. Downing may well leave Boro at some point - if his current rate of improvement continues it will be hard to keep him off the biggest stage - but I can't see him going to Anfield anytime soon... except on the Boro coach on Saturday.
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