INCREDIBLY it was 25 years ago today that 34,000 emotional Teessiders made the long-awaited first ever pilgrimage to Wembley. And it was fantastic.
Boro were second Division relegation strugglers with the boss booted out just a fortnight before, and we were about to take the football world by storm.
March 25, 1990 was the delirious day a collective schoolboy dream came true.
I WAS going to write tonight but I’m knackered, I’ve got a cold and I’ve just spent six hours in a car, much of it listening to overgrown infant Matt Dawson screeching like a buffoon about egg-chasing in full Question of Sport “banter” mode. Then I got home and opened twitter to find a swathe of kneejerk comments from combustible fans who clearly believe that you are only as good as your last game and the world is ending.
It seems that the previous games in the Week of Destiny, the points tally and the position going into the last seven games count for nothing and that the spirited sweat soaked team who were heroes of Tuesday are now suddenly a feckless, spineless bunch of talentless wasters who chose deliberately to lose because they “didn’t fancy it.”
THE WIN over Derby felt like a pivotal point in the promotion battle. It felt like a seismic shift in the balance of forces. It felt like the landscape has been reshaped in the in the psychology and the maths and the momentum at the top. It felt fantastic.
This “Week of Destiny” has been looming large for months and lets be honest here, some people have been wetting themselves over it. If you are that way inclined and spend most of your time viewing events through a jaundiced flaw-magnifying telescope of scorn predicting that the next match is a looming disaster then you would have seen this Titanic trio of tussles as the point where the wheels would come off, where the inherent obvious weaknesses in the team were exposed and “typical Boro” collapsed.
BORO blasted clear of the four way share of the summit with an emphatic 4-1 win over Ipswich – briefly – then were reeled back in again during the afternoon games to squeeze onto the summit alongside Bournemouth and Watford as the crazy, cut-throat division continued to confound and constrict . It is going to be like that all the way in from here now. Just staying focussed and banking points by hook or by crook will be key.
It was a good day’s work. A win was vital to start the “Week of Destiny” with some serious momentum. Three points in the bank going to stuttering Derby is useful. And it was important too that Boro took the opportunity that the early kick-off presented them.
“BUNGLING ungling Boro threw away a golden opportunity to virtually secure a Premier League future at the City Ground.
“A pitiful performance in no way reflected the high importance of this promotion showdown at Forest which had Boro won they would have been clear at the top and sailing towards the top flight. Could any team have wanted a bigger incentive? Yet instead we got a disjointed debacle.”
JOINT top and still well placed? Or fourth and fading fast. It’s all in the eye of the beholder of course but Boro currently exist in both situations simultaneously after another crazy day in the Championship.
After losing to Leeds in a one-sided game Boro have squandered another golden chance to seize control of the promotion race after failing to make the possession and shots stats count in a disappointing defeat at Forest. Instead they have become enmeshed in a four-way summit split that makes the post-match debate all about perspective.
JELLE helped tasty Boro “wobble” back to the top of the Championship table as he delivered the knock-out blow in a 3-0 mauling of mediocre Millwall.
For a team that ‘can’t score’, ‘have forgotten how to defend’, ‘always struggle at home to basement battlers’ and were supposedly in wheel-nut loosening terminal free-fall a few days ago it wasn’t a bad night’s work: all three strikers got morale-boosting goals as Boro took their aggregate tally over Millwall this term to 8-1; Vossen has now banged in four against them in 88 minutes which is not a bad strike rate; Kike scored his first goal at home for four months; the team banked three precious points; they played well and leap-frogged Derby to reclaim the summit. That’s some wobble.
untypicalboro 