oneBoro False promises leave Gareth a loan Ranger - News : Middlesbrough FC : Boro : MFC

Latest News from Middlesbrough Football Club

False promises leave Gareth a loan Ranger - Date: 3 Sep 2009

Well that’s that then!

The transfer window slammed shut at 5pm on Tuesday with Middlesbrough successfully managing to alienate virtually all of their supporters by making precisely no signings at all, selling the players who could realistically have helped secure their championship football betting odds for an instant return to the Premier League and also managing not to offload the dead wood £13m flop Afonso Alves!

The early summer promises from chairman Steve Gibson turned out to be timely red herrings aimed at keeping fans on side as the season card deadline loomed in early June. And it is fair to say many people parted with their hard-earned cash on the strength of what they were told was going to happen at the Riverside ahead of the Championship assault.

So they will no doubt be asking today, where is the experience playing staff promised, the badly-needed target man and the midfielder that the current side is sadly lacking?

True a bid for Rob Hulse was ‘made’ but if there was any real desire to sign him then why was not it made on Friday or earlier? Then again the player admitted only a week ago that he had no intentions of leaving Pride Park, so why didn’t Gareth Southgate try and lure an alternative target from that extensive list he kept telling us he had devised?

The likes of Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and Nigel Reo-Coker were mooted as possible targets in June. Instead we got Danny Coyne, Leroy Lita and Mark Yeates. No disrespect to these boys as all three look promising, but they were not the players in the fans’ minds after Gibbo’s BBC Tees phone-in.

The fans could have handled the loss of Stewart Downing, Robert Huth and Tuncay for £23m if even a fraction of that money was used to bring in the players that were promised to us.

In reality we spent around £450,000 on one player, got two freebies and made a half-arsed last ditch, was never gonna come off in a million years, £3m bid for Hulse. No doubt the ‘couldn’t get any further away from a target man’ signing of Danny Webber will make it a hat-trick of freebies in the next week or so, while we still have ‘the Goal Machine’ Alves sulking away after the Arabs conveniently put the brakes on his move.

We are now being told that Gareth is looking at the loan market!

Well Gareth you obviously need specs because two of your Championship football transfer targets from the past 12 months have already gone on loan to rival Championship clubs while you have sat with your finger up your backside!

Reading’s James Harper and Wigan’s Ben Watson – both decent midfielders who would do a good job for Boro in the Championship – have gone to Sheffield United and QPR respectively!

We have until November to utilise the loan system, but no doubt we will just sit and wait to see how far down the table we can drop before the fans kick off big style and they are forced to act on that front!

To be honest when it comes to the Boro and transfers I think I will switch off in the future because if anything is said by the club, it is usually lies! In fact the fans have been kept so much in the dark and fed that much shit by the club I would not be surprised to see 20,000 mushrooms at the Ipswich game!

In the meantime all we can do is give the players that are still at Boro our backing – it’s not their fault the club’s transfer policy this summer has resembled a joke – and hope they have what it takes to get us up! After all they will not be getting help from anyone else to do it!

Written by Craig Smithson, a Middlesbrough season-ticket holder and a sports writer who blogs about football betting.

Discuss on the oneBoro Forum

Share: