Falling out of Love

“Then you find your heart no longer flutters
And you no longer look through a lover's eyes
What's to see when the world falls down around you?
You simply can't believe it, but it comes as no surprise”

Falling out of Love by John Denver

I’ve seen us lose home and away to Grimsby.

The pinnacle of my maternal grandfathers Boro supporting career was reached by Charlton’s Champions. The other lived to see us get to Wembley for the first time but no further. I lived in house called Ayresome Lodge and once drove 1200 miles - (3 home games in 3 weeks) to see three 0-0 draws.

So why, albeit listening to the Boro at Man City as I write, am I not compelled to do so? Not 18 months ago, I’d be in the stand with the other die hards but why not now?

Because like a lot of other Boro and football fans I know and have spoken to, the love affair is over. The kids have left home and graduated in Cardiff; now we look at each other and realise that we’re two different people from when we met on that sunny afternoon in Hartlepool 20 years ago.

Saturday was and still is the most important day of the week for me. The traditional matchday has a rhythm all of its own – familiar meals and faces followed by familiar walks and pubs. The conversations have changed though. The bare excitement of anticipation has been replaced by something else. Like a visit to a relative you can’t stand but can’t get out of; thousands of people (less than before) walk to the Riverside with the resigned humour of the trenches and the broken ambitions of men passed over for promotion too many times. Football provides so many emotions I don’t need to tell you but whereas victory should provide the purest of these – now I feel the basest. Relief. Of course I’m happy when we win and disappointed when we lost but the sensations have been dulled to the point where the most basic – relief at avoiding defeat, humiliation, relegation – are the strongest.

The majority of the performances at home this season haven’t helped. I was at work for the watershed Villa match but managed to watch it and could feel the pure anger flow from the monitor speakers as I began to question the evidence of my eyes. That a highly paid professional football team were capable of acts of physical ineptitude that a trained circus troupe would be hard pressed to emulate.

Like a partner who feels their contribution to the relationship is being taken forgranted, I’m looking at my own unmatched efforts more and more. The money, the travel, the leave taken, the inconveniences, the potential for trouble. 20 years of mainly unrequited love, like following the support band on a tour.

I’m not the only one. The Championship and Division One resemble an Aircraft graveyard of burnt out husks of once mighty war engines – Leeds, Wolves, Derby, Forest and every single team in Yorkshire.

At the very least, we are at the zenith of the English game, the Premiership, and all the attention and profile that brings and maybe that’s the problem. World-wide exposure, Match of the Day, Sky, 23 non-Saturday Kick-offs, Asian TV, webcasts.

In the same way that teams have to get used to winning and success, maybe so do the supporters. 80’s nostalgia is all the rage and I look back at 1986 to 19889 as my rock n roll years. We were the best kept secret in football and I liked it like that. 10 bleach blond Teessiders and an Elvis look-alike who had almost as many hits as the other King. Every week, we turned up to back them and every week, or so it seemed, we were rewarded. We played well and more often or not, won.

As well all know, like a lot of relationships, success turned their heads. More glamorous suitors came knocking as we hit rocky times and took advantage as they left for, footballing, better times. I stayed, and despite a lot of other successful relationships, more successful than I could have hoped, I still haven’t forgotten, or got over, my first loves.

Maybe my ambitions are so narrow that I am a typical small-town small-timer. Don’t get ahead of yourself, settle for what you’ve got, don’t try so you won’t cry. Settle for survival and miss knocking around with our old mates Barnsley and Notts County who also didn’t risk it.

But in my own life I did break out. I moved away, reluctantly, but things worked out for me, and the Boro. I except in some ways we’ve both moved on and we’re both better for it but like the growing minority of Chelsea fans bemoaning the methods if not the achievements – we all know something is missing and it isn’t coming back.

I’ll be on my settee on Thursday night, physically in Oxfordshire but spiritually back home, cheering on the escape and while I want nothing more than Ayegbeni Yakubu to score a first half hat-trick; I have now come to reluctantly accept that I’ll never love him like I loved Archie Stephens.