Middlesbrough On This Day

Boro fans will love this deftly-plotted, densely-potted day-by-day history of their club. Formed in 1876, Middlesbrough A.F.C. are one of the oldest in the football league and one of the best supported.

One of the big three in the football-mad Northeast and without rival on Teeside, they are one of the sport’s great enigmas. Though rich in history and folklore, they seem for a big club inexplicably somewhat short on ‘silverware’, the hard currency of football measured in cups and championships.

You have to go back twenty years for their first and last tangible success - winning the League Cup in 2004. It doesn’t carry the kudos of the FA Cup but it’s a valued achievement. Two years later, thanks to a memorable last-minute winner at the Riverside Stadium from Big Mac, the one-and-only Massimo Maccarone, they made it to the final of the UEFA Cup only to sadly lose to Sevilla.

Yet as this book - a labour of love, by football scholars and Boro supporters, Gordon Rees, Dr. Tosh Warwick and Shaun Wilson - tells us, their history has been crammed with memorable moments, glorious wins and agonising near misses, not least losing three major English domestic finals in a single year, 1997.

Like all genuine supporters, Boro fans have had to suffer heartaches along the way in order to savour the sweet rare taste of success. Fighting back from the brink of extinction in 1986 to enjoy two promotions under the management of Bruce Rioch is as greatly prized by supporters as European trophies won by the elite.

It’s clearly ‘a proper football club’, as one of their most famous players, Graeme Souness, might say. It’s to be doubted that the sponsors munch prawn sandwiches in the directors’ box, to borrow another of football’s clichés. It’s not for the faint-hearted ‘glory supporters’, those who attach themselves to conspicuous success then switch allegiances when it fails to materialise.

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• Jack Charlton
• Peter McWilliam, interwar Boro manager.
• Brian Clough Photo: The Gazette

This is the latest in Pitch Publishing’s excellent On This Day series, a sort of developing franchise, which seizes on the most memorable moments in a club’s history, with at least one entry for each day of the year. It is a marvellous vade-mecum for all Boro supporters, ideal for dipping into, to learn about how the old Ayresome Park came into being in 1903, the first ground to be designed by the great football stadium architect, Archibald Leitch. Two years later, we learn, they signed the world’s first thousand-pound footballer, the legendary Alfie Commons.

In the inter-war years, George Camsell, who scored a club record of 325 league goals in 419 games, hammered home 59 during the 1926/27 season. He must have been some player and his 18 goals in only 9 appearances for England remains his country’s highest goals per games ratio.

Camsell was one of many of the club’s players who represented the Home Nations, including the England captain George Hardwick, honoured by a statue outside the ground and still regarded as the finest defender in Middlesbrough’s history. Another impressive statue remembers Wilf Mannion, who played for the club for close on two decades and was always dubbed ‘the Golden Boy’, not just because of his blond hair!

In more recent times, Brian Clough bagged 197 goals in 213 appearances for his hometown club. Later he would become one of the greatest managers of all time, with Nottingham Forest and Derby County.

One non-playing figure rightly features prominently in these pages. A lifelong fan, Steve Gibson joined the board as the club's youngest ever director at the age of 26. He helped save the club from liquidation by forming a consortium in 1986. In 1993, he became chairman owning roughly 90% of the club’s shares.

Two years later he took the club out of Ayresome Park for the Riverside Stadium, a brand new all-seater stadium worth £54 million at the time. He also made money available for the purchase of big-name players and raised the club’s profile by appointing Bryan Robson as manager. As a result of his investment , the club by then under Steve McClaren’s management, was able to win its first trophy in 128 years, the English League Cup.

It’s a bit too early to be talking about Christmas but it’s a fair bet what Boro fans will be looking for in their red and white Christmas stockings if, as seems unlikely, they haven’t bought it before then.

The book is available here.