I am wearing brown trousers. Partly this is due to eating too much red-hot tarka dal yesterday (I find sitting in a bowl of yoghurt provides much relief.)
But I also need some kind of reinforcement to get through this week's football as a Boro supporter. Not just the games, but that other most incontinence-inducing subject to which I must return again: the England manager.
There was a collective horror this weekend in The Football Community at what for 48 hours was the very, very real prospect of Steve McClaren being given the England manager's job later this week.
Alan Green on Saturday said he has learned that it's 'almost certainly going to be McClaren'. Argh! However, like a menstruating teenage girl, the FA seems to have had a massive mood swing overnight - how many times has that happened? And today's flavour of the hour is apparently Scolari, though it may have changed again by the time I finish typing this sentence.
You know me, I've been a Boro fan of 36 years. I love the Boro. But in no circumstances did I want McClaren to be given the England job.
It's not just me saying this, it's the captain of my club! Gareth Southgate, one of the country's most respected and articulate players, an ex-international who has worked with McClaren for years, was distinctly lukewarm about the prospect of him taking the England job.
In a revealing interview this weekend he said it was the dressing room rather than the management which turned Boro's season around after the Villa thrashing, by which time McClaren's motivational skills had collapsed and the side was in disarray. It was Southgate and Hasselbaink who stood up and said it wasn't good enough.
Add to this the fact that it was Chairman Steve Gibson who told McClaren he couldn't sell the club's best players and replace them with journeymen, dissuading him from buying Jason bloody Euell and Nigel Quashie in January. McClaren has to take responsibility for that situation. It was a frighteningly poor period of management.
Make no mistake, there was a lot of panic in the air at the likelihood of a McClaren appointment this weekend. Teddy Sheringham, another wise and astute student of the game, came out against him on Saturday as well, albeit politely with the usual "he's not ready" type comment.
The threat of a McClaren regime seemed to bring out all this doubt; doubt that has always been there and which the FA should have known about from the start.
But we should all guard against complacency. The FA are more fickle than a man with an erection on a Friday night and may change their minds again this week. So just in case they need reminding, this is why McClaren is not the man for the job.
Firstly, one bad result and the press will crush him. He doesn't handle criticism well, tending to go a bit huffy and moody when his talents are questioned.
Secondly, his tactical instincts are negative and boring.
Thirdly, he's not inspirational. In fact he seems to annoy a lot of players.
Fourthly, if we're getting rid of Sven then why appoint the man who is implicated in the regime that we've decided to get rid of? If Sven is no longer deemed appropriate, why is McClaren?
Fifthly, he's dull and we deserve someone interesting who will excite the nation or at least not just stare blankly with a very red face.
He asks to be judged on his results. Well, if we do that then Alan Pardew has a better shout at the job, having put West Ham higher in the league after being promoted and beating us in the cup. A fantastic achievement. He's bought better players, has organised the squad better and he's developed a better spirit. He's developed Marlon Harewood from being a bit of a lunk into a superb striker, something that McClaren has never been able to do.
He has just tried buying in expensive strikers that have been a very mixed bunch. Even the good ones have not played well enough often enough. That has to be something to do with McClaren. He's either not getting the best out of them or he's bought lazy skivers who have only come for the money. He should have known.
Football fans can be fickle buggers. But I think the general distaste for the idea of a McClaren regime is genuine and deepfelt, born out of real knowledge. No one hates the Boro. Most people are indifferent to us or rather like the idea of the Toxic Teessiders. It's not a club bias that fans have against McClaren. It's there because everyone, over the last five years, has seen Middlesbrough play and everyone has been bored by them. Forget these past two months, everything else has been almost unremittingly boring. And that's why everyone was horrified by the very notion of him being England manager. And rightly so. Of the other candidates, only Alan Curbishley is a worse choice.
Big Sam is a stronger character, more firm-minded, more sophisticated in his training methods and better motivationally. The accounts of his second interview with the FA are amazing, presenting them with a three-laptop PowerPoint lecture, a dossier of his analysis and in case they couldn't be arsed to read the dossier, he also had made a DVD of all his ideas. That's taking the job seriously.
Martin O'Neill has a touch of lunatic genius about him and is a proven motivator of often-average talent. He's passionate and has massive self-belief. He's inspired loyalty at both Leicester and Celtic and players respect him. In all these aspects he is in a different league to McClaren.
Scolari just needs to put his World Cup winner's medal on the table, you can't do that without understanding what is required from your team at the highest level. His lack of English is the only department that McClaren beats him on.
Curbishley is a steady plodder. He looks tired and boring in comparison to Allardyce and O'Neill and an under-achiever compared to Scolari, and he's not even achieved anywhere near what McClaren has.
If McClaren was somehow in a fit of lunacy given the job, I seriously doubt that the majority of fans will be behind him 100%.
It may sound stupid but I also think him being ginger doesn't help his cause. It's very shallow I know, but a psychologist once did a study of why Neil Kinnock didn't win the 1992 election despite the country being on its knees after a second appalling Tory-caused recession, despite the Tories being led by a ludicrously over-promoted, intellectually inadequate gimp in John Major and the Tory party being full of landed gentry and toffs who looked down on people who bought their own furniture rather than inherited it.
After careful study, hundreds of interviews and academic analysis of data he concluded that the main reason Kinnock didn't get enough votes in enough constituencies to win a majority was because he was 1) ginger and 2) Welsh and this affected enough people's judgement of his character to stop them voting for him. They thought it made him untrustworthy and probably a bit stupid apparently.
Personally, I would rather have Kinnock as manager of England than McClaren but maybe we shouldn't underestimate the ginger factor when it comes to binding the nation's fans together behind him, even though obviously it's his football record that should really count (against him.)
The majority of us know how we feel about McClaren. The FA still can't decide and there'll be more twists and turns before the decision is made. He was everyone's second choice apparently and in a fit of proportional representation-style voting, he still has a chance of success as the candidate that no one really wants but no one really doesn't want. That's a recipe for discontent and mediocrity right from the start.
I think the FA are taking notice of our views on this one because they don't want us on their back about this appointment. I think that's why its already swung away from McClaren, but let's not take it for granted.
But my God, what an unholy mess this whole process is. And wouldn't it have been better if it had never happened? I thought even squinty-eyed Jamie Redknapp, previously a big critic of Sven-Goran Eriksson, was looking a bit shame-faced about it all at the weekend. And how ironic after all his and his ilk's 'it should be an Englishman' ranting if it turns out to be Big Phil.
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i love that guy, "waaaave after waaaaave!!!!!" i'd have him instead of capelol 
