With the semi-finals of the League Cup beckoning, Boro’s trip to Port Vale has assumed mammoth proportions.

It’s a huge game for Michael Carrick’s men, especially as a win would help confidence and hopefully have spin-off effects in the Championship. However, while it is a truly massive game, it pales into insignificance compared to the time when Boro needed to fulfil a fixture against Port Vale to ensure their survival as a football club.

It was 1986, and Boro were embroiled in a battle with the Football League to free themselves from voluntary liquidation. The League said that Boro would not be accepted back if they failed to play their opening Division Three game against Port Vale, while at the same time they placed several stumbling blocks in the way of the club’s battle to resurrect themselves.

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In the event, an agreement was reached between the League and Boro’s legal team seconds before an early evening deadline which had been set. So certain were most organisations that Boro were finished, that the club did not even feature on football pools coupons.

It had even been a nightmare trying to find somewhere to play the game because the gates to Ayresome Park had been padlocked by the provisional liquidator. There was no chance of negotiations being completed to re-open the ground in time. Boro had been well aware of this probability.

They had searched far and wide for an acceptable venue to meet Port Vale, should the club be saved. The consortium working hard to maintain football on Teesside had approached Darlington and even Sunderland for permission to play Vale on one of their grounds.

But both clubs turned Boro down. Darlington’s problem was that the police had requested that no game should be played at Feethams because Teesside Air Show was taking place on the same afternoon. Billingham Synthonia’s Central Avenue was another possibility though there were both segregation and access problems. In any case the police were opposed to the idea.

Hartlepool ’s Victoria Ground also appeared to be out of the running because Pools were due to play a Fourth Division match at home to Cardiff City on the afternoon. However, Boro’s situation was desperate. Due to the generosity of the Pools directors, a compromise was reached.

Boro would play Port Vale at the Victoria Ground after Pools’ own game, which kicked off at 3pm. The Boro-Vale game was set for 6.30 pm. Port Vale actually complained to the Football League that the venue was unacceptable, but their complaints were fortunately overruled.

I decided to take in both games and watched Pools for starters. It was Pools’ first game against Cardiff City in any competition and ended as a 1-1 draw. A crowd of 2,804 fans watched the Pools game. Once all the fans had exited the ground after the final whistle, the gates were temporarily locked.

It appeared that there might be problems accommodating all the Boro fans, because the police had set a crowd limit of 5,600 for the evening fixture. It was not all-ticket, though naturally it would not have been possible to print and sell the tickets in the 24 hours following Boro’s rescue from extinction.

Admission prices were set at £3.50 for seats with £2 concessions and £2.70 standing with £1.50 concessions. It was a warm, sunny evening and the Pools stewards opened the gates at 5.45 pm. The anticipated rush did not materialise and the eventual attendance was 3,690, including around 300 fans from the Potteries.

I was born in Hartlepool and there’s a comment which I have often heard: “Virtually everybody in Hartlepool has been to Middlesbrough but hardly anybody in Middlesbrough has been to Hartlepool”. In some respects Hartlepool is the back of beyond for many Teessiders, but in reality the attendance reflected the fact that fans were simply disillusioned with the way in which the club had slipped away in recent years.

The standard of football had been dismally poor. People had fallen out of love with the Boro and even the club’s resurrection from the ashes had not motivated them to get behind the team again. In any case, there had been some alarmingly low crowds at Ayresome Park over the previous two or three seasons.

In 1984-85, a mere 3,364 fans watched a 1-0 home defeat at the hands of Notts County, with the season’s average crowd being slightly over 5,000. In the season which ended with liquidation, this had increased to just over 6,000, though this was partly due to a massive Christmas crowd of 19,701 which turned up to watch the derby battle against Sunderland.

Boro fans clearly needed convincing that the club’s new board of directors was committed to bringing back the good times before they got fully behind the team again. To make matters worse there was a signing embargo place upon the club leaving manager Bruce Rioch with only 13 players to choose from, including several raw youngsters.

So there were no summer signings to raise the fans’ adrenaline, just the nucleus of the squad which had been unable to prevent Boro from being relegated to the Third Division the previous season. Rioch’s selection problems were acerbated by the fact he was without central defender Gary Pallister, who was serving a one-match ban after being sent off in the final match of the previous season at Shrewsbury.

It meant that the manager selected the 12 players which was all he had at his disposal. The team which lined up against the Valiants was: Pears, Parkinson, Mowbray, Kernaghan, Cooper, Ripley, Laws, Gill, Hamilton, Slaven, Stephens. Sub: Turnbull.

Colin Cooper, Stuart Ripley, Gary Parkinson and Lee Turnbull were all teenagers with only 17 previous starts between them, while Parkinson was making his debut. Vale were on a high, having won promotion from Division Four the previous season. So it was the visitors who were pre-match favourites.

Yet the fact that liquidation had been avoided seemed to take a massive weight off the Boro players’ shoulders. Spurred on by Rioch’s dressing room team talk, the Boro lads forced the early pace. In fact, they forged a two-goal lead thanks to a brace from Archie Stephens who, at the the grand old age of 32, was considerably older than any of his team-mates.

Stephens was a non-nonsense centre-forward who put himself about and was particularly good in the air. He had been signed by previous boss Willie Maddren the previous season and was to go on and form a formidable striking partnership with Bernie Slaven.

Maddren had also brought in Slaven, in 1985, for a fee of £25,000. It proved to be one of the best deals ever completed by the Boro. However, Boro’s braves began to find the going tough as the Port Vale match progressed. As their legs became weary Boro tired and Vale bounced back with two goals to force a draw.

Ironically Boro were back at the Victoria Ground just three days later, this time as the away team. They were paired with Pools in the League Cup, with Slaven scoring the goal in a 1-1 draw in this first leg encounter. The attendance was even lower for this derby battle, just 2,356 fans watching the tussle.

It was fitting that Pools should be the first ever visitors to Ayresome Park when Boro finally returned home. The teams met at Ayresome in the second leg of the League Cup tie with goals from Ripley and Gary Hamilton, earning Boro a 3-1 aggregate victory.

A crowd of 7,735 welcomed Boro back to their spiritual home and set the scene for what turned out to be a memorable promotion season. It all started with Port Vale. Hopefully there are more big things to come this season.