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MIDDLESBROUGH v BOLTON BLAST FROM THE PAST
Bolton. A small, traditional Northern club coming good - competing in the Premier League and solidly, if unspectacularly, in Europe. Indeed they are a club that punches above its weight through shrewd buying and even shrewder tactics.
Surely that's a reason to love them rather than loathe them, to celebrate their success rather than to deride their achievements? But for some reason all that is overlooked. And judging by the tone of your memories, my opinion of the Trotters is not too dissimilar to that of the Boro majority. Maybe they are just too like us or something...
A Cam Goes Wandering
Middlesbrough 0-1 Bolton, 21/11/1993
It was a cold and wintry Sunday in November at a time when Rioch was the manager of Bolton. Me and a mate from Uni - both of us working in Merseyside post-graduation - decided for some reason to go and watch a Boro match and chose this match to go to. Goodness knows why, it was November, it was bloody freezing and it was threatening to snow.
The trip over the Pennines was no problem - no snow - and this was in the days before the M62 had turned into a giant cross-country car-park. More incredibly however was that my Nissan Micra Mk I managed to get over the M62 eastbound with two people in it. Not an easy drive at the best of times, it was made worse by a car with four gears, a one litre engine, no FM on the radio let alone a cassette player, and no such thing as an intermittent wipe. Rear wiper? You gotta be kidding.
We spent the Saturday getting pissed in various dubious pubs in the Boro - I think the Masham and Shakespeare were still open at this time and for some reason we decided to go to those. Much beer later, after a walk along Linny Road for a kebab and an up-chuck in the bushes outside Kirby College, we went home for a fitful sleep before the "BIG GAME" on the Sunday.
Why the hell this match had been chosen for ITV's league coverage Christ only knows. I don't think Bolton were doing much at the time, and the Boro sure as shit weren't. After a great start to the season where we were disappointed if we didn't put at least three past the opposition (who can forget Hendrie's goal against Barnsley in a 5-1 tonking of the Tykes at Oakwell?), we had gone decidedly downhill. Performances were crap, we were getting beaten for fun and even the hilarity of elastic man Richard Liburd was beginning to wear a little thin.
All-in-all we were dead depressed. A bit like now really but we didn't have the UEFA or FA Cup to look forward to. Instead the best we could hope for was a good away draw in the FA Cup and a decent run in the League Cup, or whatever it was called in those days.
Sunday welcomed us to a "winter wonderland". In other words it had bastard-well snowed. Now, as a kid you welcomed snow with open arms. It meant the potential of a day off school, sledging (that is riding down the hill at Stewart's Park with only a Nitram bag between your arse and the ground, and not the deliberate shouting at the opposition batsman so favoured by Australian slip fielders), snowball fights and general running around screaming blue murder. Funny how as soon as you own a car you hate the bloody stuff. So I was no longer thinking - great, we can go to the game, I was now thinking this is going to be a right bastard of a drive home now.
I can't remember what we did before the match but I'm sure it involved a trip to the Yella'. I wasn't drinking due to being a goody-two-shoes non-drink driver - it's not quite the same. Also not the same when the place is frigging empty because it's snowed so much everyone is thinking "bugger this for a game of soldiers, it's on the telly I can stay warm and not destroy the car getting to and from the match". A very sensible approach as I later found out - I wish I'd had the same foresight. But then I was twenty-two and mad.
The match started as most recent matches had - i.e. we didn't have a clue. I think Hendrie was injured at the time and it was obvious that he was our key man - ah John Hendrie - a Boro great and no mistake. The rest of the team meanwhile went through the motions of playing a match but didn't seem to care. The fans - the 7,000 that showed up anyway showed similar apathy, which was understandable really, what with it being bloody freezing, the Boro playing like crap and seemingly doomed to playing in a shit league for all eternity. The chants and shouts were very reminiscent of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail piss-take of "and there was much rejoicing". God knows who scored, but he wasn't wearing a Boro shirt...
And then the snow started to fall - bloody great! If it wasn't snowy enough, it was getting worse. Bloody bloody bloody hell! And The Boro lost 1-0 against a Bolton side who also couldn't give a shit but seemed keener on keeping warm.
The trip back to Liverpool was at best entertaining, and at worst bloody awful. What was normally a three hour journey turned into a seven hour behemoth of slides and skids, going thirty mph because the outside lane hadn't been cleared etc etc. And all of this in a Micra without a fifth gear, FM radio, an intermittent wipe, or power!
All in all a bloody awful match in nearly every sense. Part of the reason why I've always hated Bolton sodding Wanderers (that and they always seem to get results against us).
And I won't go into the 4-1 home drubbing two seasons later...
Godzilla and the Smogmonster
It was in the days of the old Burnden Park. I had travelled alone - I was living locally in Manchester - and once I had got to Bolton I endeavoured to find a local pub with some Boro fans in. All the ones I went in were decidedly unfriendly to visiting fans, so I was cold and wet before I even got in to their poor excuse of a ground.
The away fans section was stuck next to a supermarket, and it meant that you couldn't see the action in one corner of the pitch. Meanwhile I was sure that the home fans were trying to wind up the away support, as as soon as the ball went into the "blind spot" they all seemed to get excited, yet nothing resulted from the "action".
It was a freezing cold wet day and I ended up soaked having watched what felt like half a match (with the missing view) and it was a very drab 0-0 result.
Fiddler on the Smog
Middlesbrough 2-1 Bolton, Carling Cup Final, 29/02/2004
I woke up on the morning wetting myself with excitement. I did the necessaries and tried to arrange for a taxi to take me into the Boro. I didn't even bother trying to get tickets for the final as I thought I had no chance of getting them. After our taxi failed to appear - the Ghostbusters must have zapped it or something - we decided that as one of our group was at work later on in the day that they would stay sober and drive.
We got into Lloyds Bar in the Boro about twenty minutes before kick off and I was determined to get stinking drunk. So I started the day as I meant to go on - with vodka.
By the time of kick off I was already on my third and decided I needed to open the flood gates and go for my FFP (fatal first piss), after all I thought, nothing was going to happen in the first five minutes - the teams will just settle and find their feet... Ha. Luckily I was walking back through the pub when Job scored. The place erupted, the wife was looking round for me and started to laugh, trying to wind me up that I had missed the goal.
I gradually got more and more pissed as the game went on - it's Weatherspoons fault, they shouldn't sell delicious high quality vodka at the prices they do. I remember the slightly dubious penalty and the two footed strike by Zenden, all those years where we had no luck, it turned out that we had just banked it until a game like this came around.
All the rest is a bit of a haze apart for the shocker by Schwarzer that let in Bolton's only goal of the game and the TV cameras showing the world the streams of Bolton fans leaving early.
By the time the Cup was lifted and the firework display started I was like a small child on Guy Fawkes Night oooooing and aahing.
Needless to say I had to be carried back to the car and put to straight to bed when the wife and me got home, much to his disgust.
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