I’ve been going to football matches at Middlesbrough’s old ground at Ayresome Park and more recently the Riverside Stadium regularly since 1966, the season in which Middlesbrough were promoted out of the old Third Division into the Second, where they lingered until 1974. On the night that Boro gained promotion, a night match against Oxford United as far as I remember, a wall collapsed causing injury to several fans who needed hospitalisation. Nothing much was made of it at the time but it seems an appropriate event at which to start my theme.

Basically old duffers and sections of the media often harp back to the good old days (TGOD), which seems to be some imprecise time following the Second World War until about the late 1960s. We have all heard the mantra-players maybe earned a little bit more than you but still lived in the same street, carried their boots to the match in a brown paper parcel on the Number 11 bus, the crowds were all massive and well behaved despite being mainly standing, you paid a cheap admission fee at the turnstile, kids got a squeeze in, no need for season tickets, every other game ended up 5-4 or similar, good natured banter, no hooligans, no swearing, jumpers for goal posts etc etc. I certainly believe much of this is myth and needs a little closer look with reference to my experiences and some events in the wider world.

Ayresome Park, along with many other late Victorian and Edwardian grounds was slowly crumbling, as the 1967 incident illustrates. In 1980 another wall collapsed, this time with more disastrous results as a young woman was killed. Apart from the truly awful football at Ayresome Park during the 1980s I remember the appalling toilets and the wall behind the Holgate end for those who shunned the aforementioned bogs for a more al fresco approach, the diabolical catering consisting mainly of Oxo out of a battered and huge stained urn and indescribable pies, both of which were served at 400 degrees Fahrenheit rendering them inedible on health and safety grounds for a good 15 minutes after you bought them. I remember not being able to see on a packed terrace and being squashed against cruel crash barriers and beery blokes with the odd river of recycled Camerons Strongarm washing your ankles. Yes you could pay on the door to get in but this was a chaotic process as Harry Pearson recalls a Boro fan telling him about a 1970s match he attended:

"There's people stamping on your feet, and elbows digging in your ribs," he says. "And I find myself shoved up hard against the wall below the directors' lounge. I'm pinned there, can't budge. Suddenly I feel water falling on my head. I look up." He tilted his face and gazed up at a frosted glass light fitting shaped like a salad bowl. "And there it is, this ... liquid, dripping out of an overflow pipe from the gents' toilets. I said: 'That's right, you bastards - put me through hell and then piss on me as well'."

The biggest argument you hear reeled out was the apparent lack of hooliganism in TGOD. This is plainly wrong, hooliganism has been going on since football was invented, read any contemporary newspaper reports from the 19th and 20th centuries and crowd incidents of drunkenness, fighting, pitch invasions, fans attacking players and so on are rife. My first experience of it was in the late 1960s in the Holgate end when we were playing, surprise surprise, Millwall. I was just welding an errant crash barrier in place with the heat from my pre-match pie when suddenly a large gang of shaven headed young men wearing sheepskin jackets, tight jeans and boots charged into the Holgate end, battering all and sundry in the way and then set on the wheezy Police and Stewards who came to try and stop it. Whilst I had seen many individual fights, drunkenness and general unpleasantness before, some of it even off the pitch, it was the first time I had witnessed organised terraced violence. Whilst hooliganism has always accompanied the game I believe it was increasing living standards and ease of travel to away matches that saw it take off and flourish. It is not as visible today but is still simmering just below the surface.

Throughout the remainder of TGOD and beyond things progressively worsened, unchallenged racism flourished, grounds crumbled further leading to the criminal tragedies of Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough. Racism at Middlesbrough was no better or worse than in other grounds but, in the late 80s when we signed our first black player since the 1950s, we showed our progressive nature by calling him “Sooty” rather than the names opposition black players were called. Cringeworthy now but I’m sure the Duke of Edinburgh approves.

Football clubs were run by dodgy businessmen accountable to nobody, true crowd figures were suppressed and financial shenanigans were rife. One ex chairman of Middlesbrough got into trouble for press ganging the first team into his election campaign for local political office and several were admonished for illegal payments whilst we also had the obligatory betting scandal. It was this tradition of incompetent and self serving amateur blundering that nearly put the Boro out of business for good in 1985/86 but thats another story.

The Riverside Stadium today can be criticised for being soulless but that’s more a reflection of the fare served up on the pitch-on the odd occasions when we play well to a full house theres no better place. My main gripe is I can’t take my son to see league matches with me-I have a season ticket and am surrounded by other season ticket holders so we can not sit next to each other. Even if that was not a problem I can not justify the cost of 2 season tickets to the Finance and General Purposes Committee.

My only other hankering for TGOD is a Saturday 3.00pm kick off, increasingly a rarity in the Premiership but that is the price paid for selling football’s soul to Mr Murdoch-but transferring the old first division into the best league in the world, apparently. Other minor things like players wearing hairbands, team huddles, baby Bentleys and bloody matchday mascots are passing fads and as such mere annoyances. I do not begrudge players earning fortunes-it is sweet revenge for a century of players getting bugger all and being treated as feudal serfs by their bloated chairmen. Good old Days? Not for me.

So, it seems the England squad have been sworn to secrecy...

There's a legal embargo on anyone who's been in contact...

It'll be kept a secret until the great unveiling...

Is it a new signing? A football rescue package? The latest FergieCorp excuse package?

Nope, it's another new fecking England kit, being kept secret with the same tenacity as MI6 employee lists, by which I mean tons of guards and millions of pounds of high tech security equipment... and it'll still end up splashed over the newspapers when some duffer leaves it on a train.

It's being kept a highly guarded secret until a specified England match next month where the players will warm up hiding it under tracksuits and finally reveal it at kickoff.

One small question.

Who gives a capuchin monkey's right nut about it to THAT extent?

Yes, it'll be interesting in a vague "oh, look what they want us to spend money on now" kind of way but a top secret project?

Is it going to be able to administer sub-cutaneous doses of sedative to Rooney every time a decision doesn't go his way?

Perhaps it'll be a new design featuring a combination of leather, latex and steel rings with a horse hair lining to reflect the self-flagellating martyr nature of England footy fans and the team?

Perhaps it'll come with a pop up white flag ready for the World Cup knockout stages?

Or perhaps, like the preceding God knows how many, it'll be a white shirt with a red cross somewhere and a three lions badge on it, almost indistinguishable from all the others before it except by the minutest of changes needed to call it new and charge everyone another 40 quid.

It's a sodding football kit, not a car design or the latest jet fighter blueprints, just release the damn thing on a certain day without all this ridiculously childish secrecy.

So, Alex Ferguson has come out today to say (in essence) the Premier League are deliberately making Man Utd's fixture list tougher than everyone else's and he's going to send someone to FA Headquarters next year to make sure it's done 'right'.

To be fair he might as well go himself, sort out a few conduct hearings and get the fixture draw in at the same time, a nice day out for all the family.

Seriously though, there are only four reasons I can think of him saying this, and I'm wondering which one people think it is.

1) He's right. Just thought I'd get this one in before the Manc fans complain. No, I have no idea about the fixture creation for the Prem teams, I wasn't there.

I will then concede that Fergum may actually be correct. I doubt this, especially as the Man U heirachy have already issued a statement apparently distancing themselves from what Fergs said... but, it is a possibility.

2) Getting his excuses in early. Let's be honest, does he really need to? They've won something already, even if it was a meaningless cup nobody watched (but that doesn't stop Carling Cup winners celebrating, does it?), and are going strong in the Prem right now, especially with games in hand.

I see Man Utd as more credible challengers to Liverpool now than Chelsea and would think Fergie can look at the table and be content.

However, on the flip side we know Fergus does love his excuses whether it's refs, pitches, fixtures or injuries, so this can be counted as a possible reason.

3) Mind games. He may be a distant second to the likes of Mourinho (be him ever so humble...) but we know he likes to play the mental tactician as much as the sporting one.

Is this trying to put extra pressure on Liverpool and Chelsea by suggesting they have it easier, so trying to bring in more doubt if things don't go to plan in a game or two?

Is this trying to affect his own players, make some of the current underachievers (not naming names... Berbatov) realise if they want to win something this year they have to push harder?

This one is probably a low-odds stake, but maybe not quite favourite because there's one aspect of Fergal mind games that deserves it's own section.

4) Paranoia. I really don't know if Fergarina really does have the paranoia he seems to or whether this too is a carefully constructed mind game.

A player from his Aberdeen days said he was always trying to permeate a feeling of paranoia through the dressing room, against the Old Firm clubs, against the Scottish FA, against the refs... basically against anyone who wasn't Aberdeen.

We all know this has carried on into the Prem, as Ferging spent years being the top conspiracy theorist in the country before Arsene Wenger came along. We're talking about a man who could solidly suggest the FA horsenapped Shergar, shot Kennedy, faked the moon landings and are really run by a shadowy organisation of Illuminati headed by Lord Lucan.

I sort of hope he doesn't believe what he's saying, but all geniuses have a flaw in their mental make-up, perhaps this is it?

What it does succeed in doing, however, is giving the players the feeling of being underdogs... and the British love an underdog (and Tim Henman). Man U were possibly the only team I know to win a treble and still be suggesting the world were against them, admittedly most of the footballing world IS, partly because of the aforementioned paranoia but that's beside the point.

Believed or not Fergasaurus Rex is the joint-master of paranoia in the Prem (with Wenger) and is this yet another indicator he might be losing it completely and wearing a tinfoil hat to games... or he's still as sharp as ever and trying to get that extra little edge from his players?

Personally of all four options, I'd suggest the last is the most likely, but as to whether he believes what he comes out with... I have no clue.

Anybody else got any ideas? (and let's not get into any slanging matches, no "I hate Man U" comments, if I can try and be vaguely impartial, so can you.)