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COLD TURKEY 5-10-06
Calum Law
She's like a drug. The first time she caught your eye you sensed that she would mean dependence and despair - but you were weak.
She got under your skin and stayed there and now here you are, years later, still shuffling round in a curmudgoenly pas de deux; and though not a week goes by you don't entertain fantasies of escape, you know in your heart of hearts your dreams are futile. And the worst thing is: there's always someone happy to remind you what a mug you are.
Like Jason, the Gooner who runs the shop two doors down from mine. Barely had I got the key in the door on Sunday morning when he bounded across like a puppy dog: 'you're going down mate!' How pleasant it would have been at that moment to have been able to declare: 'I'm sorry dear boy, but I don't have the faintest interest in sports.'
For I've often (at least half-seriously) wondered if it were possible to be hypnotised into such a condition of indifference - so often is my weekend fatally infected by the kind of black trance that can envelop a man after (e.g.) Vanquishment by Warnock. (My ex-flatmate recently admitted to religiously checking the Boro score before returning home in order to anticipate this very phenomenon, which he would thence try and sweeten with a gift of lager/hashish.)
And it's not just the effect on one's emotional equilibrium- it's also the time necessarily spent procuring one's fix. Whenever I board a bus or train I scan the deck for fellow addicts. International news? Book reviews? I think not: not with the F.A. Cup Second Qualifying Round as yet un-perused. How many thousands of newspapers, I wonder, have I bought and yet remained in eternal ignorance as to what was on the front page? I could be so 'well read', get invited to dinner parties and stuff, were it not for a burning need to plot in detail the likely ramifications of the next four weekends of Premiership fixtures.
Then there's the ever present danger of the Sportsnight Cuckoo - carnal interlopers like my friend Neil who had a regular Wedensday night tryst with a paticularly ravishing French girl - whilst her husband practiced a different form of exertion on the five-a-side pitch.
There are, in short, so many other things I could be doing on a Saturday evening other than sinking into hopeless despondancy as Boro get filleted by the Blades (it has to be said they have the league's best nickname), yet I'm unable not to care - and hence not watching is even greater purgatory.
The more I ponder it, the more apt the 'addict' metaphor seems, for it's certainly the case that the less glory one has access to, the more greedily one inhales the few highs that do come along; which is why it makes me speechless with rage whenever Chelsea or Manchester United fans in the midst of some brief trough have the temerity to claim some sort of empathy with the success-starved sub-strata. They're like rockstars who loll around mainlining China White pretending to understand the indignities we have to undergo to get our capful of methodone.
To all those High Court Judges getting Miss Whiplash to tighten the thumbscrews, I say: 'Your Honour, if you want pain - Get the Boro Habit.'
Coq Sportif
And on to ever more unlikely kindred spirits - Thierry Henry and his new role model...Kevin Davies. A loud collective guffaw from the nation's breakfast tables as we digested the news of an unguessed-at crush harboured by the French artiste for the Lancastrian hod-carrier and his muscular style of play. Such earthy (acquired) taste is surely evidence of the total and irrevocable anglicisation of the boy Terry.
He hoped England would win the last World Cup (seemingly forgetting his own outfit), he's married to an English girl (a model natch), and now Henry shows he's mastered our exquisitely nuanced sense of irony which traditionally renders the stonewashed Euro hordes nonplussed.
For as insincere flattery goes, 'Thierry loves Kev' has seldom been bettered. We await: '"I wish I could craft plots like Archer" bemoans Updike', or 'Federer: "If only I volleyed as well as Tim."'
Ostrich Pies
Interestingly-coloured leaves gather in the by-ways, small boys scrump for fruit, and from the mist-shrouded vales comes that unmistakable seasonal sound... of unattributable declarations of discontent from Camp Viduka.
I'm a big fan of the V-Bomber who, when fit and interested, is capable of world-class displays. And on this occasion I've a modicum of sympathy; Viduka was a major part of our cup heroics last year and with Hasselbaink leaving, arguably had a right to expect an automatic start. When a Deadline Day signing walks straight into the team ahead of him, he has further reason to be piqued, particularly when it's an ex-Charlton fringe player (and believe me, there's been much hilarity in south-east London over that bit of business).
Nevertheless, it would have been nice if, for once, Viduka - who's been less than scintillating when he has been given a game - could simply knuckle down and prove his manager wrong. He might do well to study the attitude of a player who, despite being perhaps the finest natural-born finisher the Premiership has seen, has never once been considered an automatic pick and who when not on the bench has frequently been shunted over to right-midfield.
Ole Gunnar Solksjaer may be baby-faced, but he knows how to conduct himself like a man.
Stuffed Fowl
One hopes that Steve Goldby isn't eating his cornflakes when he reads this because if he is, he'll pebbledash his laptop.
It concerns the severance package of his favourite stack-heeled Swede (no not the blonde one out of Abba). Apparently for the next eight months the F.A is to continue to pay the nordic Priapus £13,000 a day.
In the words of my host in Room 101 (the rancid Littlejohn): you couldn't make it up.
NOW HAVE YOUR SAY IN THE NEW HOLGATE FORUM
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