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THE FEVER IS ROMANCE 12-4-06
Back on board this week after resting my favoured typing hand, my write hand, and what an amazing bloody week it was to be a Boro wallah.
I'm in the wars yet again, with a severe dose of carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist and hand. Yes, the hand I tried to saw the finger off last November, and I now have to wear a support brace because the bloody hand keeps going totally numb and keeping me awake at night. Allied to the fact that at the same time I finally gave in to my myopia and purchased my first pair of reading spectacles.
After a vain battle and a load of squinting and denial, I finally gave in to old-age, as I was trying to read the newspaper with ramrod straight arms and couldn't read anything but the headlines. Not a very good combination a right hand brace and glasses, to start simultaneously adding to one's attire, you can imagine the shite my Mates are giving me.
So after a few days of using medical vowels to repetitiously explain my plight to inquiring people, I've given up explaining about the brace and my wrist injury. It's just so much easier to explain it all away as the old wanker's cramp, Portnoy's complaint, and then the glasses are included in the scenario, no questions asked. "Young Erimus. Stop it or you'll go blind!"
Time to get ranting and over-opinionated.
Now, in every nation on this globe, during every single hour of every single day, there are billions of words written about fabulous footer. Churned out endlessly by earnest journos and bloggers, in a veritable conveyor belt of factual and fanciful guff. Romance would be one of the least used words on that conveyor and isn't a term readily associated with the daily life of our national sport. In fact, it's a fading term, a fading manner, in this sex obsessed world of in-ya-face overt full on sexuality.
That's of course unless you read the wafflings of the much parodied Barbara Cartland, the bouffant poodle preening darling who writes endless pink tinged drivel about romantic trysts between well behaved Nigels and Clarissas with constant nearlys, maybes, and generally flowery pink possibilities. So romance and all it's rose tinged soft and cuddly derivatives are not over-used in the general parlance of daily life, never mind in the context of the hairy-arsed, testosterone charged, machismo oozing world of association football.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, a newly accepted idiom in modern life that has melted into general language as a standard. The male and female understanding of the term romance with their different attitudes and opinions illustrate the great sexual divide perfectly. Women go all moist, dewy, bambified, mushy and starry eyed, while blokes have a simpler, harder definition of the term, literally.
But, haven't you buggers noticed that the scene has begun to change and that there is finally some romance creeping back into the great game?
I'll explain, or maybe just confuse the hell out of you all.
Just lately, and I mean over the past dozen or so seasons, the grip of the all powerful iconic Premier League has swamped romantic tales from the game even in that bastion of romantic giant-killing, the FA Cup. The simple David and Goliath notion of a smaller minnow swimming in the great swirling river of big salmon became just that, a notion, with reality being an unhealthy dose of lopsided monopolising of the silverware by the powerful and rich.
It all became an untouchable dream, as the same old same old, won the same old same old. In fact, the politically powerful lobbyists from the Greedy14 have effectively monopolised the top levels of the game, with their Champions League revenue driven bottom lines. Addicted to media and advertising moolah, with their lavish shopping habit of buying up big on the transfer market and cramming their huge squads full to the gunnels of overpaid Galacticos, many of whom seem to spend most of the season looking vacuous and yawningly disinterested, while polishing their superannuated arses on the colour coded Recaro leather clad reserve sports seats.
What ever happened to the cold wooden bench? It's all effectively denying the services of a very good player to another club, an example being Wright-Philips who was superb at Manchester City but has turned into a crap player with no confidence at Chelski, all thanks to Moaninhio.
It's a veritable self-perpetuating league of gentlemen, pissing in the same grandiose gold encrusted pot, with the urine instantly turning into more and more gold and greed pushing the divide wider and wider. Where will it all end?
Well, well, this season bucks the trend with some very romantic scenarios unfolding across the back pages of the world's tabloids. With first, lowly second division Gretna splendidly and heroically scrambling their way into the Scottish Cup final to play the might of Hearts, a club who have pressed the self-destruct button more than once this term.
Gretna, a small town in Dumfries, the Scottish second division champions are ironically from a border town more associated with romance and love fulfilled, than attempts at glory at Hampden Park.
Gretna is the world capital of elopers, those hormonally rampant runaway brides and grooms, a town who now profits on that line of business.
The simple presence of those wonderfully over-performing minor players will ensure a huge audience for that final, simply because the neutral will want them to win because we all love a bloody good heroic and romantic tale and nothing better than a hot blooded story of a rabid underdog.
Then we have the muscular minnows of CF Villarreal from a small town near Valencia, not a swallow's fart from the sultry waters of the Med on the Eastern coast of Spain. They've deservedly crashed the party of the big boys both in La Liga and Europe and they are the surprise factor in the last four, the semi-finals of the Champions League. They stand on the threshold of greatness if they overcome the Parisian multi-national team Arsenal.
Recent marauders in the field of European football, they have a remarkable record already, even after many epic journeys through the early season quagmire of the Inter-Toto cup, which they've actually won twice. El Submarino amarillo (the yellow submarine) inflicted Middlesbrough's first ever Uefa Cup defeat in last season's seminal interlude within the confines of their compact 23,000 capacity, canary yellow stadium, El Madrigal.
Now, you know where I'm going here, as of course the sweetest and most epic romantic episode came last Thursday night, when Middlesbrough, the small town in Yorkshire, played in the Quarter Final second leg of the Uefa Cup at our very own Riverside theatre of Smogs. What unfolded was a miracle of Lazarus proportions, took the breath away, winded William Tell and put Heidi out cold in amazement (thanks Alistair!).
We were dead, buried, and about to get embalmed prior to the coffin lid dropping when the pulse started ticking like a rampant Big Ben in time warp overdrive. The rest is comeback romantic history with more to come.
So, romantic notions are now beginning to propagate in the popular press about three of Europe's lesser lights nobly overcoming their more fancied and supposed betters and leaving an indelible and garishly romantic mark by scoring silverware and confounding the blinkered elite. In the process winning over the ubiquitous TC Mits (the celebrated man in the street) which may even push his normal allegiance from the usual culprits to hang with the unfancied, the unfashionable, for a while anyway, as everybody loves to get on the bandwagon of the unfancied underdog.
Truth be known, the neutral amongst us would enjoy nothing better than to see the established names overturned. We are all underdogs at heart who like nowt better than to sink our fangs into the nether regions of a blue blood and bite back every now and again. Nothing stirs the soul better than a bloody good giant killing to fuel the romantic notions of fans and press alike, as long as it's not our mob on the receiving end of a humiliating upset.
So you will find yourself wandering from your task, uncontrollably gazing into the ether, brain in neutral, with your heart and soul controlling your thoughts, causing you to day dream constantly about ifs, buts, and maybes. Of furtive red n' white splashed dreams of glory. Fantasies of hope. Of silverware gleaned in gladiatorial battles on foreign soil. Proudly scratching our mark in history.
So, embrace your inner self as the fever has got you my friend. And that fever is romance.
Enough Said.
ErimusRed.
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