A Striking Problem

In two of the last three transfer windows, Gareth Southgate has made late and expensive moves for strikers. Unless Boro's difficulties up front start to clear up, we may well be stopping up late on January 31st again. Despite the odd bit of tabloid tittle tattle, its highly unlikely Tuncay will be going anywhere. But the Turk will be much more effective given license to drop off a main striker and bring the midfield into play. He may run around like a demented rooster, but the Turk should still be more artist than warrior.

The problems with Mido and Afonso Alves are very different. Mido seems a more complex character than many give him credit for. Its not hard to see why he's been labelled a mercenary. In a professional career that is not yet ten years old, he'd already played for El-Zamalek, K.A.A. Gent, Ajax, Celta Vigo, Marseille, Roma and Tottenham before signing for Boro last year. His time at Ajax was fruitful on the pitch but fraught off it, the most noticeable indiscretion being an alleged scissor-chucking incident involving team-mate Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The recent Boksic-esque run of suspiciously late injuries before games, particularly away from home, does not help in this regard.

It would be a little harsh to brand Mido in the same way. The Croatian was the classic hired hand, unmoved in defeat or victory, with scant motivation beyond self-interest. In admittedly rare moments of fitness during his Boro career, Mido has shown a surprising capacity to inspire team-mates and fans alike. Its the story of his career – at his best, he's a hard-working, technically sound and physically imposing target man. Getting 'his best' out of Mido remains an enigma.

Articulate and intelligent (for a footballer anyway), Mido still seems to be his own worst enemy. “I have made mistakes in my career with some of my moves. I didn't stay and fight for my position," he said in September. "Now I have to learn from the past and think that it is not always an option to go somewhere else when I am not in the team.” You have to wonder how many more European clubs will be prepared to give him a chance if his time at Boro ends in all too familiar frustration with a wasted talent.


If many feared such issues with Mido, its fair to say the record signing of Afonso Alves in January met with something a lot closer to universal approval. Gareth Southgate's faith in the Brazilian remains strong but the doubters are growing in number and volume. A patchy start could be explained away with talk of time needed to adapt and achieve full fitness. A superb brace against Manchester United and a last-day hat trick in the 8-1 humping of City assuaged many concerns.

Instead of flowing, the goals have dried up this term – three in total and just the one from open play. Alves cuts an increasingly fraught figure, struggling to come to terms with the physical side of Premier League defenders and bereft of confidence in the penalty area. The harder he tries, the worse things seem to get. His insistence on retaining free kick duty against Newcastle was brave but the results were embarrassing. Fans in the upper rows behind the goal cowered in a fashion not seen since Stewart Downing last limbered up to take a penalty.

The £20m spent on these two dwarfs the investment made in other areas but its hardly new for expensive strikers to turn into injury-riddled, jelly-legged flops as soon as they arrive on Teesside. We can only hope that if the chequebook has to come out, the curse of Davenport doesn't strike again.

From Fly Me To The Moon 432 (Boro v Arsenal)

Just Typcial

There are many words, most unsuitable for a family fanzine, to describe last weekend's grim capitulation to Bolton. Surprising is certainly not one of them. The “typical Boro” tag is an infuriatingly negative attitude on the one hand yet sometimes it is hard to find suitable words to explain our consistent travails against the inept and the mediocre. I’m not suggesting it would be bad idea to start playing before the last half hour of home games or to start marking opponents on set pieces. Yet maybe we need to examine our expectations first.

Middlesbrough Football Club has changed enormously in the twenty years since this fanzine began. Having made my own Ayresome debut on New Year’s Day 1991, I’ve never been entirely sure whether I should consider myself fortunate or not to have missed the tumult of the 1980s. The number of fans who went to games and never returned, victims of violence and/or dilapidated stadia, is shocking. The responses from authorities were rarely anything other than depressingly reactionary. Squeezed by hooliganism on one side and a Thatcherite government on the other, the ‘80s cannot have been an easy time to be a football fan.

On top of that, its hard to imagine the club, the area or indeed the domestic game being at a lower ebb than was reached that summer. To achieve what Bruce Rioch then did would be remarkable anywhere, but to do so under such perilous circumstances is an achievement of scarcely credible magnitude. It was perhaps inevitable that, having achieved such rapid success, a small and youthful squad would feel the pressure. A cruel last-day relegation was almost followed by another.


Rioch achieved near miracles with a club with no money, no ground and barely a squad with a belief that things had to get better. Gibson dragged the club forward in the 1990s because he recognised that investment in new players and a new ground were essential if Boro were not to be left behind by the growing commercialisation of English football. In 1986 or in 1994, the goals were clear if ambitious - promotion in the short term, stability in the top flight in the long term.

In 2008, those goals have been comfortably achieved. Premier League status has been maintained since 1998 without any major scares. Most of you reading this have seen Boro win a trophy and play in a European final. The club operates on a different level - where painful defeats in the latter stages of the FA Cup used to occur once a decade, they now seem to happen once a season. That is progress of sorts. Having come so far, what counts as success now?

Safely positioned in mid-table Premier League, you could reasonably argue Boro are now just battering their head against a glass ceiling. Looked at soberly, this is a golden era, even if it may not have felt that way last week. There may not be much more distance this club can travel upwards. Having grown accustomed to rapid progress, you don’t need to look far at the Riverside on a match day to find fans harbouring unrealistic expectations. There is a danger when a club’s image of itself becomes divorced from reality. We need only look at today’s visitors for an example of how self-defeating this approach can be.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition in itself but if it becomes unconstrained, that can be counter-productive. We shouldn’t abandon hope but we must accept the next chapter could be Boro’s hardest yet.

This article is from Fly Me To The Moon 431 - the 20th birthday spectacular