Bubbling Boro Mackem Weep

BATTLING Boro Mackem Weep! An industrious show of Teesside steel. Top flight strugglers left derby dazed. The tabloid phrases and praises were spinning in a superlative charged night at the Stadium of Light as the Mogganaut ruined Marty’s party.
Boro bossed the game. Seriously. Boro dominated pretty much throughout with a superb team display: they were well balanced, determined, organised, hard-working and dangerous on the break. Shaky Sunderland by contrast were sterile, one-dimensional, nervous, toothless and for long spells clueless.
A neutral looking in would be hard pushed to say which of those teams was in the Premier League. Or indeed, which of them was at home.

Smoggies 2 Cloggies 1

BORO showed great character and resiience to claw back from a goal down to beat Bolton and clock up a fourth successive league win.
Would they have done that last year? Would they have kept their confidence and swagger? Would they have stepped up the tempo and kept the initiative? There was a time when the ‘typical Boro’ reaction to bossing a game and then leaking an unlucky goal would be to lose heart and lose shape. Not this time.

Tickets: The Club Is Listening

BORO have announced a ticket offer for the televised Sheffield Wednesday game. Walk up prices on the night will be £12 for adults and £7 for concessions. Half-price. That’s fantastic. And neccessary: with a midweek night automatically lopping a couple of thousand (Friday night brings its own problems) and live screening tradiitionally scything away another slice of the walk-up gate, it nothing had been done Boro were looking at a new record low.
Let’s hope the people of Teesside respond and support their team. Let’s hope those who been priced out seize the opportunity. Let’s hope some who have drifted away can be lured back and re-energised. Let’s hope some new fans can be attracted in by the price and are caught up in the buzz. And let’s hope the team deliver.

“You Have 20 Seconds To Let Fly”

GEORGE Friend, said Mogga, was “marauding up and down the left flank like Robocop”.
I think Robocop clunks and trundles aggressively burdened by all that hunter-killer hardware and weaponry rather than sprints gracefully but you take his point. It is a colourful turn of phrase that nicely captures the single-minded dedication to duty of a tireless man-machine on a hearts-and-minds mission to win the demoralised citizens of the Ironopolis to the forces of progress and waste the bad guys with his awesome firepower.
Well, maybe not that last bit.

Brighton Breezy: Battling Boro Resist Seagulls Storm

SOMETIMES you just have to dig in and defend. Sometimes you have to surrender the ball and initiative and soak up the pressure.Sometimes you have to block and tackle and hustle and harry, chase and close down quickly and head away a barrage of crosses and corners; sometimes you have to drop back in numbers, charge down the shots and scramble away dangerous balls into the box.
And if you can nick a goal and plunder the points, preferably with a spawny slice of sarcastic fortune, all the better. It was a perfect away day mugging by a battling Boro side that showed they have the silk and steel to flourish in this league.

Tickets: Time To Bite The Bullet?

IT’S time to break the tyranny of the season ticket and radically reshuffle the Riverside.
Boro need to bite the bullet on tickets, stop punative pricing of casual fans and look at a sweeping range of creative offers to put bums on seats – and to do that they may need to risk upsetting the stalwarts.
The Riverside hit a new low of 13,377 against Derby last week – and anyone who was there knew that in reality it was lower than that. It was a chilling view of the future.

Oh McDonald, What A Yarn, EI-EIO

PUNCH-drunk Boro climbed off the canvas to claim a crazy win at Watford thanks to a spirited fightback, a fortuitous red card and a soap scripted winner.
Frozen out frontman Scott McDonald came back in from the cold with a bridge building winner at Vicarage Road that was a big step forward in his Riverside rehabilitation. And most season Boro fans had it marked down as inevitable.
But whether he netted or not, from the moment he was named on the team-sheet, Scott McDonald was always going to be the story. “Oh McDonald, What A Yarn, EI-EIO!

An Existential Howl of Anguish

BOOOOOOO! The Pavlovian post-match despair was all too obvious at the Riverside.
Yet another late lapse led to a ‘red zone’ sucker punch – the sixth goal Boro have conceded in the last five minutes so far this campaign – and victory was snatched away. Boooo.
A familiar fatal lack on solidity at the back, some chaotic scrambling and a failure to find Row Z and Derby wriggled off the hook with a cruel late leveller that – again, for a second game running – looked to have more than a hint of offside about it. Boooo.
But on the whistle the booing wasn’t aimed the officials. And I’m not sure it was even entirely aimed at the team. It was an existential howl at the Championship experience.