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NEVER A BAD SEASON 8-5-08
Toby Higgins
Petrol to Leicester: £40
Taxi to Nottingham: £120
Entrance to club: £9
Being able to reassure yourself that, after a season of being knocked, football in this country has still got it: Priceless.
I’ll keep the foreword to this short. A mate of mine since we were "young’n’s" is going to live and study in America for a full twelve months without returning.
He studies at Leicester University so six of us piled down there to send him off in the drunken fashion that has become more a way of life than a social passtime.
The plan was to spend Friday night in Leicester and Saturday in Nottingham. Anyone who keeps even a slight eye on the Football League tables might have an idea where this is going.
We were in Nottingham the night Forest had been promoted. The mighty Forest, former champions of England and Europe, have recently floundered in the bowels of the country’s football hierarchy.
On Saturday, they confirmed a triumphant return to English football's second tier and to every Forest fan in Nottingham, the good times were back.
By contrast, we spent Sunday afternoon in a pub in the centre of Leicester. Flocks of fans arrived before their big game at soon-to-be Premiership side, Stoke City.
The Foxes simply had to equal the result of Southampton to survive the drop to the third tier of English football for the first time in their history. The 0-0 result was enough to see Stoke promoted but Nigel Pearson’s Southampton beat Sheffield United 3-2 to keep the Saints afloat. In the process, they sunk Leicester.
Oh, how different the mood was. The previous night in Nottingham had seen fans, and indeed tens of players, bouncing around the city in hysterical jubilation.
In Leicester on Sunday, a sombre mood of disappointment and frustration swept through the streets. The fans wondered how a team who beat Boro at Hillsborough to win the League Cup in 1997 had, eleven years later, endured a season which saw them use forty-four players in their first team under the command of four different managers, and sunk to their lowest ever league position.
I feel great compassion for the Leicester fans and congratulated many a Forest fan on Saturday. However, as a neutral to what was happening, I felt great.
Every football club has highs and lows. This is true no matter what level they are at, how much money they’ve got or how glistening a history lies behind them.
It’s the passion and emotion of the game which inspires us all to sacrifice time and money in the hope that one day, the good times will be back.
Then there’s the great anomaly of the Boro. There’s a philosophy which suggests you don’t know you’re at the top until you’re coming down and that you don’t know you’re at the bottom until you start coming back up. I think where Boro are on this journey needs some clarification.
I’m bored of hearing that this has been a bad season because it’s simply not true.
A quiet season? Yes.
After the Cardiff horror, a disappointing season? Certainly.
Having not scored more than two goals in a game, an unexciting season? Pretty much.
But a bad season? Never.
At the start of every season, around sixty percent of the teams in the Premier League have the overriding aim of staying in the division.
For the newly promoted teams, this is their only aim. How often do we here managers declaring before a ball has even been kicked that they’d bite your hand off for seventeenth place?
The others - such as Fulham, Reading, Bolton and ourselves - might just hope for a little more. A good cup run, beating one of the "Big Four", hammering a few teams four and five nil, a good couple of away days and maybe even sneaking a run at the top eight.
But all of that comes second to keeping the team in the Premiership.
Next Sunday night, ask fans of Derby, Fulham, Birmingham, Reading, Sunderland, Wigan and Bolton if they think they’ve had a bad season. Three of them will say they have. The rest will not.
This is why I’m a tad bemused to hear fans reckoning that we’ve had a bad season. We haven’t been in the bottom three since before Christmas and have only ever really flirted with the bottom three sporadically.
It has not been a good season by far but it would be wrong to call it a bad one when looking at the grand scheme of things.
Sometimes a little look at our club, the resources we have and who we are really competing with in this League wouldn’t go amiss.
Southgate is improving – even if sometimes it feels like he takes one step forward and two back. It can’t be easy being a rookie manager in the top flight (this is something that Southgate has professed himself), particularly when your predecessor is the club's most successful manager ever.
But the points Southgate made in the press conference after the win over Portsmouth show his football intelligence.
He has waited until Premiership safety has been confirmed before telling his squad in no uncertain terms that they are not as good as they think they are and are certainly not good enough for him.
His acknowledgements that his ‘open-door’ policy hasn’t worked and that he will change things for next season show that he has ideas of how to improve things.
Already in his managerial career, Southgate has had the knack of impressing me just when I began to doubt him.
His most recent post-match comments mean that while this season will be quickly forgotten, planning for next season is already well underway and has been for months.
The summer shopping will, as always, provide excitement and the European Championships mean we can all do our own little bit of scouting.
It would also be wrong to forget that Southgate started the last major international tournament as a pundit and finished it as our manager. This is testimony to how quickly and how much he has learned in such a short space of time. And in that time, we have still remained a Premier League side.
Let’s make no mistake about it, the aim for next season is the same as this – Premiership survival. Anything else on top of that is a bonus.
Maybe we’ve been spoiled of late with our fantastic European Cup nights and other such glory. We are more than capable of staying up and if we entertain fans next season whilst doing so, it will be another solid season.
And if it isn’t and we end up having a ‘bad season’, just remember that the Boro will still be there and we will support them no matter which league we end up in.
Finally, let me thank everyone who has read the Rockcliffe Files this season and for your continued support and comment. I look forward to writing for you again in August.
Same time next season…
Up the Boro
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