blades blog Lost your Tonge

Posted: September 2nd 2008
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Idol or Idle – every club’s got one.

He’s an anomaly, an enigma, a Jekyll and Hide, saint and sinner, a love-hate player. He’s the match-winner this week who next week disappears off the face of the earth. Silky skills tainted with stray passes, weak tackles and tunnel vision.

He’s the club’s NFP (Never Fulfilled Potential).Nail your colours to his mast and you kiss the shirt. Criticise him and you’re a whinger, a moaner and a traitor and you know nowt about the club. Get off his back, let him play, give the lad a chance versus sack him, get rid now and we should have sold him years ago – you hear it in the crowd, on the way home, the radio phone-ins and any forum you choose to frequent.

The idol/idle plies his trade with every club. No other player in the squad divides fan opinions with such vitriol. No other player in the squad has so much written about him and no-one else is held responsible for so much success and failure. His profile raised, he attracts the attention of the Prem’s big boys and although they sniff around his backside they never close the deal and you always wonder why.

He made his name off the back of match-winning goals against local rivals. He got you to the semis, the play-offs and more and he’s the supporters’ player of the year. But he’s the cause of all your ills and he’s the first in the ducking stool when the Salem witch hunt picks up pace. There are calls for him to be sold every year but the idol/idle always manages to turn in a stunner just as his closest confidantes prepare to sell him down the river.

Like I said, every club’s got one.

At the start of every season, come rain or shine, goal feast or famine we Blades questioned the commitment of Michael Tonge and this season was no different. Midfield maestros are notoriously hard to come by and Bramall Lane still revels in the ghost of Tony Currie’s sublimeness. Anyone in the middle of the park has to cope with comparisons going back nearly 40 years.

Michael Tonge revelled and shone brightly in a partnership with the voracious, ankle-snapping, attacking midfielder Michael Brown and the tough-guy-nice-guy routine bossed the Blades midfield in the fantastically enjoyable triple assault season of semis and play-offs. But in truth it was Brown’s tenacity and sometimes mardy desperation to win that provided the engine fuel and the manic desire. Then Brown left and the middle of the park was a hole too big for Tongy to fill.

I liked him because I like any player who tries to play football, plays the ball along the ground, strokes the ball and fires home from a free kick outside the area. But he drove me to distraction and made me angrier on the terraces than I can ever remember. He suffered from a disease famously suffered by Ronaldo in his early English football career – that twiddly-toed-white-boot thing which, like a Paul Daniels magic trick, made it look like he’d done something really clever until you realised you’d been sadly distracted by Debbie McGee (it’s a mid-life thing) and taken your eye off a ball which Tonge no longer had in his possession. Ronaldo cured himself of this disease. He took a deep breath and calmed down, self-assured by the immense reserves of talent that he possesses. Tonge meanwhile, scurried and harried and rushed at the ball like an over-eager hamster on a never-ending wheel of eternity. He sometimes looked scared in possession and fans felt his fear. Less skilful players who on paper you wouldn’t rate good enough to clean his boots, end up playing more effectively for the team, putting in gutsy performances and playing with more passion and pride than the idol/idle.

Tonge was United’s NFP and many ran out of patience waiting for fulfilment. It’s a sad day when a homeboy goes but it’s like that old pair of favourite trainers. They feel secure and familiar but they let in water at the crucial moment and sometimes they just smell like something crawled in and died. Eventually, you have to be brave, put the trainers in the bin or recycle them, legendary though they were, or might have been.