A lot of people are excited about the prospect of Newcastle getting relegated. I’m one of them. I can’t wait. Seeing the legions of overweight, moronic ‘toon’ fans despairing, with looks of sheep like bewilderment as another icon that they were convinced would lead them into the promised land instead guides them down into Championship purgatory will be an image to savour. Brilliant.
There’ll be far less talk about how they’re such a huge club, a veritable sleeping giant. It’ll be interesting to see how much their attendance figures suffer. We probably won’t be informed constantly about how they’re “the best fans in the world”. Newcastle have been run like a joke for so long and such a parody of a club deserves all the contempt that relegation will bring.
There is another club that I have an equal desire to see consigned to the plunge. Bloody Middlesbrough. I’ve disliked Boro for a long time. I remember the big hoopla back in 1996 when they emerged as an ‘ambitious’ club and signed the Brazilian duo of Juninho & Emerson as well as securing the transfer coup of Champions League winner Fabrizio Ravanelli. At the time, the White Feather was the highest paid Premiership star earning (a comparatively modest) £42,000 a week – “How absurd!” everyone remarked, “That’s 50p a second, even when he’s asleep!” they cried.
They ended up being a major attraction that season, unfortunately more sideshow freak than marquee headliner. In the following years, they had an antagonising habit of luring Villa players and staff to the Riverside, with the real clincher being double your money wage packets rather than the guff they all spewed about Boro’s supposed ‘ambition’.
Ehiogu, Boateng, Barron, Harrison and the current managerial incumbent Schnozgate himself all sang from that hymn sheet. Good for a laugh, the old ambition chestnut, but Southgate is a man who thought those Pizza Hut adverts were hilarious and who currently sports an unruly ducks ass for a barnet, so he clearly suffers from a skewed sense of humour. The reality is that since 2001, Gareth has won precisely what he did with Villa, a measly League Cup, whilst also racking up just one solitary top 10 finish.
There is nothing to like about Boro, from playing in a shitheap of a town, to constantly having a half full stadium, to having some faux northern chump writing awful, excruciatingly clichéd columns on the BBC website.
What a glorious thing a fixture list can be! Next Monday, the calamitous north-eastern duo lock horns, with both clubs teetering on the precipice. A nice juicy stalemate could leave the pair right on the verge of disaster. Ooo and looky who Aston Villa have in their last two games of the season! Why, Middlesbrough and Newcastle! As a Villa fan, I don’t get to see much in the way of silverware, so I have to take my pleasures where I can find them and I am certainly salivating over the prospect of us potentially delivering the knock-out blow to two punch-drunk, shambling excuses for football clubs.