Coincidence is a Godsend

On May 11, 2009, many of those same supporters were travelling back from Tyneside having watched their side lose to Newcastle in a match that seems certain to result in the club’s relegation from the Premier League.

The coincidence is a Godsend for any North-East sports writer with a column to write, but there is more to connect the two matches than merely the date. Had it not been for the events that led up to the former, the situation that accompanies the latter might not have occurred.

In years to come, it is possible that we will reflect on Middlesbrough’s UEFA Cup final appearance with incredulity. Did a selfstyled small town in Europe really play in one of the pinnacles of European competition?

They did – there’s a framed front page in The Northern Echo’s corridors to prove it – but like with so many things in modern-day football, success came at a cost.

An £80m cost to be exact, the rough estimate of the debt that currently hangs around Middlesbrough’s neck like an albatross.

The Teessiders didn’t quite live the dream with as much destructive abandon as Leeds United, but given the financial realities that should have accompanied an average attendance of less than 30,000, it’s safe to assume that what was going out in one direction wasn’t exactly a true reflection of what was coming into the club from the other.

The likes of Jimmy-Floyd Hasselbaink, Mark Viduka and Gaizka Mendieta were celebrated marquee signings, and without players of that quality, it is unlikely that Boro would even have qualified for the UEFA Cup, let alone gone on to record those unforgettable wins against Basle and Steaua Bucharest.

In football, as in life, you pay your money and you take your chance, and both chairman Steve Gibson and chief executive Keith Lamb can point to a golden night in Eindhoven, as well as a similarly unforgettable afternoon in Cardiff, as justification for salaries that, with bonuses and signing on fees taken into account, ran to around £60,000-a-week.

Eventually, though, the bubble has to burst, and as we have seen with the financial sector – something else that overperformed by living beyond its means – the effects of the fall-out can be harrowing.

When he instructed his manager, Gareth Southgate, to cut costs by reducing the wage bill last summer, Gibson was tacitly acknowledging that the boom days were at an end.

Lamb talked of the club “cutting its cloth”, Southgate described a “new reality”, and everyone associated with Middlesbrough promoted austerity as the formula to follow.

It has not taken long for the effects of the change to become apparent, and if Boro are relegated in the next fortnight, there will be plenty of criticism hurled at Gibson, Lamb and Southgate.

Some of it will be justified, as mistakes have undoubtedly been made.

But much of it will ignore both the circumstances in which Boro are being asked to operate and the scale of the club’s achievements in the last ten years.

If they are to travel to Plymouth or Peterborough on the opening weekend of next season, Middlesbrough supporters can at least console themselves with the memory of those Eindhoven and Cardiff glory days.

Their forefathers could never have dreamed of such celebrations, and if the cost of success is a spell in the second tier, it is surely not too high a price to pay.

To paraphrase a triedand- tested tale, it is better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all.

But it is equally important to accept that the past will eventually catch up with you.

AS LAST week’s column acknowledged, it has not been the greatest of seasons to be a North- East football fan.

But just as you’re despairing at the relentless misery, something comes along to restore your faith in the game.

Monday night’s derby was that something, a seething passion play that encompassed all that is good about the game in this region.

The quality of football might have been questionable, but the sense of occasion and atmosphere was enough to leave a lump in the throat.

Nobody does frenzied better than the North- East, and as a sold-out St James’ Park throbbed to the rhythms of a helterskelter derby, it was hard to imagine any other part of the country summoning such majesty from a relegation battle.

No matter what happens in the next two weeks, don’t let anyone tell you that the region is a faded force.

WHILE the sold-out signs were posted at St James’, they will be nowhere to be seen when Riverside hosts the second Test between England and West Indies this morning.

Durham chief executive David Harker is right to question the ECB’s pricing policy in the midst of a recession, just as he is justified in citing a clash with the football season as mitigation for the anticipated poor support.

But the harsh reality is that, in the days of the Twenty20 World Cup and Test series that blur into each other from one season to the next, a fiveday match with the West Indies does not hold the allure it once did.

For anyone who prizes the primacy of Test cricket – and I count myself among that number – that has to be a concern.

Less can sometimes be more, and if the ECB are serious about retaining Test cricket’s status as the jewel in the crown, perhaps they should abandon their current policy of arranging dual summer tours.

One properly-marketed five-Test series is sufficient. Shoehorning in a two-Test aperitif to satisfy the demands of sponsors and television is doing far more damage than good.