An Ode to Middlesbrough's 2014/15 Season

Let us measure a football season neither in terms of trophies won, nor promotions gained. Rather, let’s count the number of hairs made to stand on end, and the times the breath was taken away.

How many times Middlesbrough Football Club have made our hearts soar over the past ten months! Who could begrudge them the defeat to Norwich, denying the team access to the Premier League?

Time will ultimately be kind to the 2014/15 season waged by Middlesbrough. It will be viewed as the season legions of fans took to the motorways, filling away ends from Ewood Park to the Emirates Stadium. The adage that the club had used an entire history’s worth of good fortune with Massimo Maccarone’s immortal final-minute interventions against Basel and Steaua Bucharest was finally repudiated. Last-minute heroics were de rigeur once more, as victories were wrested from the jaws of stalemate at Huddersfield, Blackpool and Brentford. Magnificent goals gilded our games, and leads built upon them were protected by an resolute defensive unit. It was the year the town got their team back.

It would be churlish, therefore, to review such a season with rancour. I could bemoan the ‘lack of ideas’ and ‘basic mistakes’ characteristic in defeats to Bournemouth, Watford and – ultimately, heart-breakingly – Norwich. But who am I – an aspiring seven-a-side ‘playmaker’ who finds himself pining for the nearest bar after five minutes – to make such criticisms?

Perfection simply cannot be demanded of flawed, fallible human beings. I prefer to celebrate the moments the idiosyncrasies were overcome. These are the moments in which the perfection of being a fan of Middlesbrough Football Club are realised. In that spirit, and in no particular order, here are five moments which made being born a Boro fan such a glorious fate during 2014/15.

Grant Leadbitter’s winning penalty versus Huddersfield

There’s an interesting passage in Bill Buford’s otherwise infuriating ‘Among The Thugs’ in which the American author describes the felt, physical experience of waiting for, and eventually experiencing, a goal. Football’s paradox, he argues, is that, in spite of a goal’s scarcity, their instantaneous nature means they cannot be fully enjoyed. ‘It is one of the great fallacies of the game that there is no thrill greater than watching the scoring of a goal’, he wrote. ‘It is one of the facts that most people miss it.’

Bill Buford was not in attendance at the John Smiths Stadium that September afternoon. There is a moment – just before Leadbitter shapes to stroke the shot; just after Alex Smithies has committed to dive – when the goal became inevitable. A delicious anticipation arose within me, and for that moment, I swear I felt infinite. I lost it all – voice, dignity, plot – only emerging from the higher state of consciousness into which the goal had sent me deep into the following working week.

A reasonable retrospective of the season may anoint the goal as the symbolic moment momentum shifted in the Boro’s favour. It may note that it was the natural and righteous conclusion to a game in which Boro had outfought and out-thought their opponents. As for me? No other goal this season left me quite as ecstatic.

Fernando Amorebieta’s winner against Brentford

Football’s great beauty is found in its ability to make heroes of schmoes. Fernando Amorebieta was signed as a head on a stick; a great big lumbering galoot to wheel onto the pitch for the final moments of matches, with the express intention of adding a further body to the defensive penalty area. With reckless disregard for welfare – his own or his opponents – he crashed into headers and clearances as slender leads against Wolves and Norwich were protected.

His introduction against Brentford in the playoff semi-final first-leg came with similar instruction. With the scores level at 1-1, the match was on the precipice. Alex Pritchard’s brilliance on the right flank threatened to tip the scales in the Bees’ favour. Amorebieta was sent on as an insurance policy, nothing more.

Why he therefore found himself in the opposition penalty area for our late corner is a conundrum that logic simply cannot answer. All that matters is that he did. The ball fell to him and he swung his left leg at it. He has not kicked a ball for the club since.

Nor, indeed, does the romantic in me ever want him to. How poetic it would be for one’s final kick of the ball in a Boro shirt to be the winner in what was the season’s biggest game to date. Irrespective of the team’s eventual fate, instant legendary status should be bestowed upon him.

Kike’s clincher versus Manchester City

Lamentably, we have entered into the age of heat maps and pass completion ratios; an age where the articles of Zonal Marking are pored over and the nation pricks its ears to hear Gary Neville ruminate over tactical minutiae on Monday Night Football. Football is discussed in terms of shape and structure. We purr over counter-counter-attacks and gegenpressing, and pretend we’d rather spend our Saturdays watching one Spanish team we don’t care about subject another to death by a thousand passes on Iraq Goals.

Praise the Heavens, therefore, for Kike. His first touch is sometimes leaden. He is often ponderous and indecisive when the opportunity to shoot arises. When the conditions are particularly treacherous, he wades through the penalty area as if through quicksand. But by the beard of Zeus can he celebrate a goal!

A match-clinching goal of such verve and incision, putting to bed a match of such heightened emotion, simply must be met with a dash to the celebrating hoardes; preferably accompanied by a roar of unadulterated joy. There is simply no other means of celebration commensurate. The expression; the joy; the communal embrace: that is what football is all about. Nobody realises this quite as innately as Kike.

Patrick Bamford’s equaliser versus Birmingham

Middlesbrough Football Club were no strangers to Vine during 2014/15. Grant Leadbitter earned online comparisons to Roberto Carlos with his missile at Huddersfield (flattering on the Brazilian, if you ask me), whilst Patrick Bamford’s swept finish to some Samba-style football against Millwall set the standard against which all future descriptions of ‘exhibition football’ should be measured.

In terms of its heft and hue, however, the Chelsea loanee’s equaliser against Birmingham is the superior. Down to ten men on a cold, miserable February’s evening at a ground as historically welcoming as Death’s implacable maw, I spent half-time cursing my brazen stupidity for attending. Our attack without incision, our defence afflicted by calamity, we had regressed to our listless, shambolic state preceding Aitor Karanka’s arrival. Defeat was inevitable.

Roy Keane spoke of a football match being composite of a thousand minute details. ‘Pass by pass, tackle by tackle’, he wrote, you worked incrementally to ‘break opposition hearts’. It is precisely what we did to Birmingham. Bamford covered more yards, won more headers and harassed with greater vigour than at any other point during the season. Leadbitter was a constant forceful presence in midfield; his tenacity driving the team forward. Lee Tomlin, blowing out of his backside after ten minutes, found new reserves of energy, scampering past defenders with impish glee.

The three combined to create the equaliser; a staccato rat-a-tat of high-octane passes carving open a hitherto unwavering defence. Birmingham prised apart, Bamford froze Darren Randolph with his eyes, sliding a gorgeous shot across goal into the bottom corner. We may have scored more beautiful goals, but none which married strength of character with class quite like this one. Simply put, it was not a goal we would have scored in any of the previous seasons since relegation; a goal befitting of promotion contenders.

Leaving Craven Cottage following our 4-3 defeat

Forget the mind-numbing, spirit-crushing first forty-five minutes. Forget the fact that we lost 4-3. Forget that the defeat signalled the end of our hopes of automatic promotion. Never have I walked out of a football stadium quite so sure of football’s beauty. I staggered out of the Putney End a turmoil of emotion; infuriated, proud, heartbroken and astonished in equal measure.

I had not – and still have not – been a part of a crowd as electric and passionate as the 6,000 Teessiders summoning the ball towards goal through force of will, emitting a roar which rose with each passing moment, amplified only for the second and third goals. I left feeling genuine pity for people who do not ‘get’ football.

Writing weeks later, the season complete, the emotions remain.