Their season balances on a knife edge, forged from Teesside steel. The furnaces are cold in Redcar, the great coke ovens are dead and as Middlesbrough the town confronts a new reality, a sense that they must construct their destiny just as they once built the world, so Middlesbrough the football club enter a defining week knowing the same. They are a win away — a single win — but they must sweat for it and they will be alone.
Anger and loss still seethe through Middlesbrough where, last autumn, 170 years of industry came to a shuddering end and although it can be trite to talk about sport in the context of 2,200 job losses and countless more rippling into the supply chain, the connection here is palpable. It burns. “A club is an expression of a region, of pride and defiance,” Pete Robinson says. Perhaps it matters more than ever.
“I’ve never known a place so passionate about football and you really feel those core values that come from the steel industry
Robinson worked at the steel plant for 37 years, 25 of them at the blast furnace. “I was complacent,” he says. “We were told we had a job for life. Managers, shift managers, supervisors, even our union, all of us old hands were told ‘you’ll either retire here or die here’. Like the rest of them, I was dumped on my backside, £2,000-a-month down, just like that. My daughter has just come out of university and it’s like . . . what can I do? It was frightening.”
The 55-year-old was talking inside the Riverside Stadium where, on Saturday, Middlesbrough will play Brighton & Hove Albion. Aitor Karanka’s team are top of the Sky Bet Championship and Brighton are third, with Burnley in between, a trio separated by a meagre point. There are nuances — Middlesbrough have played a game more — but the equation is simple: win and they are promoted. “The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Rob Nichols of Fly Me To The Moon fanzine says.
Community and club have coalesced. The father and brother of Steve Gibson, Middlesbrough’s outstanding chairman and owner, were steelworkers; two friends of Stewart Downing, the former England winger, were left unemployed by the closure of the SSI plant. A game that, at the highest level, can feel estranged from the real world, has reflected the dismay of Redcar and answered it, stuck two fingers up and fought back.
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George Friend, the left back, is an outsider in the northeast but smitten by it. “I’ve been here for four years and extended my contract because of how much I love the area and what’s been happening on the pitch,” he says. “It’s the fans, but it’s also the people of Teesside in general. I’ve never known a place so passionate about football and you really feel those core values that come from the steel industry — they’re hard-working people. The whole community breathes that.”
Friend, 28, considered how he and his team-mates could respond to the closure, beyond the usual drill of supportive T-shirts and expressions of solidarity. They posed for and produced a charity calendar. “We didn’t want to distract from football or annoy the manager or the people upstairs, but it was an easy way for us to do something that could make a difference,” he says. “All the lads were up for it. They all understood the impact of the steel closure.”
It was severe. “I’ve been to the doctor for stress and anxiety, I’ve been on antidepressants,” Robinson said. “I’ve been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in both knees because of the years I’ve had in the steel industry. I’m only just starting to come out of it, with a lot of help from counselling, and things are starting to level out a bit. I’ve still got financial difficulties. At the moment, I’m just holding my head above water.”
Like Friend, Robinson wanted to do something, to help, to volunteer. The money raised by the calendar has funded Middlesbrough’s Team Talk project, which will establish “Boot Rooms” across the region, where those made redundant will be encouraged to meet, socialise, train and hold workshops.
“The community needs our football club,” Robinson says. “If you’re not working it’s difficult to afford tickets, but this project is brilliant and I hope to embrace it for as long as they run it. Because of the football, the whole town is buzzing, everybody I come across in the town centre, everyone I know. I’ve never seen so much excitement.”
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“It’s so important to get back into the Premier League, if only for the morale and the spirit,” Neil Carter, another former steelworker, says. “Just to lift the town, to lift everything.” Since leaving SSI after 27 years, Carter has established a company offering training in mental health issues, but there is still a “feeling of betrayal and I think you’ll get the same answer from everybody. Where was the government?”
These are testing moments, but there are also sparks of optimism. The Tour de Yorkshire began yesterday’s third stage in Middlesbrough, which is celebrating its local history month, and Nichols speaks of a town “kicking back”. “A lot of restaurants and independent shops have opened,” he says. “It feels like people are really going for it as far as entrepreneurship is concerned and they’re helping each other. If we did go up, there’s a lot to tap into that wasn’t here last time.”
With promotion worth in the region of £100 million, it is difficult to overplay its significance. “The northeast, Middlesbrough and Teesside gets very little help from the government,” Nichols says. “There’s this myth that our plant was old, but it was one of the most modern and sophisticated facilities in Europe.
“It would be really, really important to be part of the top flight and not just in monetary terms, but for the confidence boost it would give us. It’s a cliché but it’s that thing about putting a place on the map. The Premier League does that. Look at Leicester City. Their story is incredible. It gives everybody hope.”
They are separated from it by 90 minutes, but “this will feel like the longest week and I’m now incredibly nervous,” Nichols said, because they are a game away from the play-offs too. Middlesbrough lost in the final to Norwich City 12 months ago and although that proved a galvanising episode, they have never won at Wembley — their triumph in the League Cup in 2004, the club’s only trophy, came at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
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Seven years after their relegation, when “there was an assumption we’d just be passing through,” Anthony Vickers of Middlesbrough’s Evening Gazette, speaks of a “leaner” club who, whether by design or necessity, have re-engaged with supporters. Karanka’s players are “hard-working and functional, with the mechanics of an industrial town. There’s none of that swagger of Juninho. There are no dream-weavers. They reflect where we are as a place.”
The end of steel and the untimely death of Ali Brownlee, the beloved Middlesbrough commentator for BBC Tees, have reaffirmed “a sense of identity,” Vickers says. “It’s been an awful year, but you realise how close-knit this town is and how close people feel to the club, whether they go to games or not. It’s that parochial northeast thing, kith and kin, how the club is our face to the world, a rallying point, a beacon. We’re really alive to what going up would mean.”
In those circumstances, “the tension is tangible,” Vickers says. The team are unbeaten in nine games since Karanka’s lost weekend on gardening leave, but face Brighton on the back of three consecutive draws. Pressure, but an opportunity. “This club is very proud of its history and a promotion team goes down as heroes,” Friend says. “I want to be one of them. I’m not going to hide from the fact that I want to be talked about in a few years as being a big part of that.”
Whatever happens, this new slimmer, sadder, stronger, fiercer Middlesbrough will struggle and strive together. As it says on a wall inside the club shop, “We’re all one. Our fans, our players, our people.” Here, at least, you believe it.