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If
football really was the "business" that some commentators
would have us believe, if money and balance sheets and bottom lines
were the only currency with which you could measure the beautiful
game, then you wouldn't have had the chance to watch Middlesbrough
taking on Manchester City last Monday.
We all know that City have sailed a little too close to the financial
wind at times, but that's nothing compared with Middlesbrough. Indeed,
this Middlesbrough isn't, strictly speaking, even the same club
that used to boast Jack Charlton as its promotion winning boss back
in the mid 1970s.
Things reached such a catastrophic peak in the 1980s that when the
club was relegated to Division Three after a last defeat by Shrewsbury
in 1986, the place was all but closed down. The football club went
into liquidation as the result of monumental debt and it looked
as if they might be the first league club to disappear into oblivion
since the days of Accrington Stanley.
But football clubs are strange beats, behemoths that belong in books
of myth and legend. Try and lop off its head, and it'll grow another.
Try to kill it, and thousands will come to its aid, from near and
far, passionate devotees and barely interested bystanders. When
push came to shove, too many people wanted the football club to
survive in a town that had already had the industrial heart ripped
out of it by 1980s recession.
Steve Gibson was the catalyst for the rebirth, carefully, patiently
piecing together a consortium of local interests, all of whom tapped
into the local fervour, the demand that Middlesbrough should survive,
must endure. ICI, Gibson's company Bulkhaul, Harry Moszkowicz and,
ironically, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries were all involved and
though Boro played their early games of the following season over
in Hartlepool because Ayresome Park was still padlocked, the worst
had passed.
The Middlesbrough Football & Athletic Company (1986) Limited
was formed and the legacy of Mannion and Hardwick, Camsell and Clough
was preserved to be passed down the generations. And the intervening
20 years have been arguably the greatest in the club's history.
They've moved from Ayresome Park, a ground full of character but
also full of holes, to the impressive Riverside Stadium, and they've
established themselves in the Premier League.
A series of cup finals have been endured and, on occasion, enjoyed
as they collected the first silverware in their history, the Carling
Cup, when they beat Bolton Wanderers in Cardiff in 2004.
They've played in Europe, in a European final no less. They've been
managed by the former England captain, Bryan Robson, and by the
current England manager, Steve McClaren. Some of European, even
world, football's biggest name have worn the Boro shirt - Juninho,
Fabrizio Ravanelli, Paul Gascoigne, Paul Merson, Robson, Ince. Not
bad for a club that should have been long out of business.
So when you next hear the argument that all that really matters
in football is the profit and loss account, when you hear that the
game has lost its soul, sold its soul, when you hear that money
is the be all and end all of the game, allow yourself a contemptuous
laugh in the face of people who don't know what day it is.
People are the be all an end all of this game. Football people.
People who understand just what it is that's special about kicking
a bag of wind across the grass. People who understand that a town
without a football club is a town without a heartbeat. Remind them
of what happened at Middlesbrough and if they don't understand what
you're talking about, just accept that some people aren't worth
talking to.
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