DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE 2-11-05

By Peter Holmes
November 2 2005

All week, here in this glorious Antipodean outpost of paradise Perth,we’ve been lambasted with the spin of the ill informed. Enduring the biased and sycophantic local media plagiarising and joining the brown nosed world media spouting lyrical bullshit about Glazer’s Bitches.......

approaching yet another record. Specifically, how Manchester United only need one more ‘glorious goal’ to become the first team since the money-spinning inception of the great white hope, the English Premier League, to score one thousand goals. Blah! Fucking blah! Wankity bloody wank!

Don’t get me wrong marras, it’s no mean feat and to be applauded then recorded in historical posterity as befits such a numerical and official milestone of glory.

The content of the drivel was annoying the shit out of me though. How, in the showcase game on Satdee night, against the lowly flat cap scum of Middlesbrough, they will annihilate the record and more, will flog the hell out of the inept under performing Smoggies in the process at their home by the Riverside.

Bookies scrambling over each other to give odds on who would achieve the mark and who would be THE player, the super doopa star, to bulge the back of the net for the thousandth time for Glazer enterprises PLC. Oops! I mean Man Spew!

Why wait? Let’s get the FA trophy designer to knock up a nice goalden goblet to present to Sir Alex and in the process, blow off a few explosive streamers, a nice tiered stage and banner on the pitch, maybe a few cucumber sarnies with the associated pop of a few dozen bubbly corks, stop the fucking game when the great milestone is achieved and well….. Yeh! Why the fuck would Boro turn up anyway?

It was another midnight watch in the ErimusRed household, after a grand night out with the Bride and the Bairns being entertained by my best mate Froggy and his family, up at the Joondalup Country Club. Very nice, very plush and what’s more Froggy paid.

To be honest, I thought this was going to be the highlight of the night with good tucker, a few snorts and a snooze on the way home in the car. Game wise, I was expecting a continuation of chop and change, a muddling middling aimless performance and hopefully a score draw.

Injuries, especially to the man who normally glues the back four together, the consistent and marvellously professional Sir Gareth, along with his sidekick Ugo Ekyhoggyhoggy in the heart of defence left me a bit wary. Allied to a certain makeshift nature to the team with it’s packed midfield and truthfully, some very under performing stars, left a very dark smog cloud hanging over our whole season and my optimism.

In truth, this game was always going to be a catalyst of change in my mind, one way or the other, make or break, now or never.

When watching the Boro, you just never really know who’s going to turn up and which head we’ll have on our team, especially at the previously impregnable fortress of the Estadio de Riverside. Lately we’ve waved the white flag anonymously as the mild mannered, boring, studious, timid and fairly non-descript incarnation of Dr. Jekyll.

Though, we all just know that the collective personnel in that well paid squad are well capable of being a supercharged, over caffeineated, exhilaratingly, compulsive, explosive Mr. Hyde on steroids.

Settling down after getting home at around ten, putting the bairns and the Bride to slumber and watching an entertaining game first up, Chelski eventually putting down the workmanlike threat of ‘The Three-Pointstealers’. Then thinking to myself, that would be a game to live up to and very hard to top as it was competitive end to end and action all the way and packed full of entertaining incident. Game of the weekend then. How wrong I would be and then some!

Later, after midnight, I’d no sooner grabbed a few coldies from the fridge, adjusted my arse on the couch then watched in awe as from first kick we went into warp-speed-mega-hyperdrive, resolutely staying there for fifty exhilarating gob-smacking minutes of the first half.

When the goals thundered in I nearly put my head through the ceiling which is no mean feat as we have a two storey lounge. I loudly woke the Bride up with my yelping orgasmic ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ routine, which made her think I was downstairs shagging the totally delectable Catherine Zeta Jones.

That diminutive fair-haired studious little man Mendieta, who always reminds me of a bookish scholarly type, was world-class, string pulling superb. Playing just like the bloke who used to run around in the tangerine of Valencia with concentrated orange juice coursing through his veins, ripping apart every team who came his way in the Champions League.

The same bloke who really should have been European Footballer of the year two, maybe three years on the bounce. Compulsive, sublime, instinctive, aggressive and magnificently and constantly probing at United’s heart. Playing imperiously, majestically in the red and white of my Beloved. Even David Pleat as co-commentator, gave the Siesta boy a score of ten for the game and the rest of the Boro team nine apiece.

The rock of Riggott held the back three together superbly, aided by all action Frankie and the very impressive young master Bates. The Boat was his usual compulsive self and the Yak and JFH counter-attacked quicker than the Roadrunner with a stick of dynamite up his clacker!

Overall, every player got stuck in and gave 110% during the 201st game of Steve Mclaren’s tenuous tenure. Technically as well as tactically, I think it was one of the most complete and rounded Boro performances of the modern era, with blood and sweat given for the cause allied to class and endeavour all over the Riverside turf.

Was it the catalyst for the beginning of a new more consistent era?

Headlines the next day?

As usual the collective hackneyed hacks of Fleet Street and the arselickers of cyberspace made every excuse about and for Man Spew supposedly not playing well and how Sir Alex found it all, “shocking and a total embarrassment.” As sour as the grapes that his next bottle of favoured red will come from. Give credit where credit is due, you sore loser.

The truth is they never had a chance, because we did not give them one. From first kick to last we did not give them one inch to perform. A cliché I know but you only play as well as the other team lets you and vice a versa and Boro never stopped playing.

Why do some brain dead fuckers insist on using the word humiliating? Humiliation is losing to Linthorpe Calathumpians reserves of the third division of the Osmotherly Docks league. That is fucking humiliating, not losing to my Beloved Middlesbrough Football Club, the small team in Europe with the big soul, ensconced in the group stages of the UEFA Cup and in the last sixteen of the Carling Cup. And, only three bloody points behind the great Glazer Toy Boys for fucksake.

Yet again, the best most accurate match report was here on this very web site as usual.

At least ‘Soccernet’ got it right for a change.

“BORO bludgeon United – Boro run riot!”

Now that’s an accurate heading.

Give credit were credit is due I say. Are you listening Ferguson? Remember, this was a team who were unbeaten on their travels away from Old Trafford all season, in all competitions and hadn’t suffered an away defeat since Everton in April. Boro inflicted their biggest defeat in over two years on them.

But this is about my Beloved, mighty Boro.

I remember a halcyon period of the late 60’s into the early 70’s, when we were forever crossing swords and playing another Manchester United side in the FA Cup, always a side punctuated by greatness and truly world-class stars. This particular clash was in 1972, Tuesday arvo on 29th February to be exact. I nicked off school so I could go along to the game.

This was the time of the power cuts in the industrial backbone, power cuts which accelerated the birth rate in the Teesside area some nine months later. It was a replay of a fifth round tie at the theatre of Smogs, the 1966 enhanced arena of Ayresome Park. The game was a ticketed sell out and the ground was bulging and full to the rafters with a sell out 44,000.

It did not stop me and numerous other Boro raggy arses congregating around the Stadium, all hopefully trying to get a ‘squeeze’ through the turnstiles into the ground with a beneficial avuncular Gadgee.

It was proving a very illusive goal and I was on the verge of giving up for the day when I spotted two familiar sheepskin clad characters, the twin superstars from Leeds United, Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner, strolling along Clive Road behind the South Stand.

I sprinted up and cheekily remember asking and receiving a double autograph and being a bit lost for words after that. I’d met and had my hair ruffled by two of football’s true Gods of that time and being only fourteen years old, the vertically challenged twosome, Billy Bremner in particular, had to stretch upwards to reach and pat my scone.

That coincidence gave me a last burst of inspiration and I saw a chink in one of the wooden gates as it was left slightly ajar and I managed to get that squeeze, through and onto the South Terrace and into the ‘Chicken Run’ stands, pushing my way forward till I was right at the front barrier.

Best, Law and Charlton were as awesome as the two other superstars I’d engaged outside the ground earlier that day, and United destroyed us imperiously, 3-0. It was just as comprehensively as we destroyed them the other night. Sweet revenge over 33 years later.

So fitting and ironic then that after this week long saga of hype and hoopla, of an expectant media ready to report the approaching record of one thousand Man Spew EPL goals, that we well and truly fucked up the script and cancelled the party.

It was lovely to think that as that record goal from Ronaldo hit the sack, the thousand goal milestone would now be remembered as a whopping drubbing for United by my red neon Boro in party pooper mode. Middlesbrough Football Club 1986. Lovely stuff.

Looks like that bugger Mr.Hyde ain’t such a bad bloke after all...

Enough Said! ErimusRed