There’s no doubt these are testing times for the faithful supporters of our beloved football club. God knows, we’d suffered enough already from the slackjawed banjo playing incompetence of Souness and Roeder, before Allardyce came along with his ‘direct football’, weird substitutions and a bigger obsession with clean sheets than a hospital matron. Once again our football club resembles a wounded animal with the gutter press snapping at its heels like hyenas. We badly need a run of results to lift the pressure on us, but that seems beyond us at the moment with a run of difficult fixtures to come.

More depressingly, to me there seems to be an air of apathy and resignation among the supporters, even in the face of several abject performances and gutless surrenders this season. Can anyone work up a decent rage anymore? This is the legacy of Souness and Roeder compounded this season by boring football, overpaid players who couldn’t give a toss as usual and terrible results - whatever the reason, it’s been a pretty effective passion killer. Perhaps the club could bottle it and sell it to the Army to use instead of bromide…..

At times like these, it only lightens the load to know somewhere in the world there is someone far worse off than you. Of course the Mackems have been a rich source of comfort for many years, with their own full compliment of incompetent managers (Mick McCarthy anyone?), dodgy signings (Torre Andre Flo sticks in the memory) and constant yo-yo’ing between divisions (with some outstanding records for shiteness along the way, lest we forget). And the Smoggies have afforded the odd moment of hilarity down the years, such as the UEFA cup final and the absolute shoe-ing they got from Sevilla.

However, if you were a fan of New Zealand’s only professional football team, you’d think our current woes were a walk in the park. New Zealand is rugby mad – the All Blacks have a God like status despite choking at every Rugby World Cup since 1987 – so football is a minority sport in a country of only 4 million people. After all, when your football club plays in an Australian league, has gone bust, been renamed twice, relocated to a different city an eight hour car ride away, and been mainly toss all the way through its history, you’re entitled to moan.

The Football Kingz of Auckland were formed in 1999 and played in the Australian National Soccer League. That would make attending away matches a little inconvenient and expensive then. Their league placings ranged from mediocre (no better than 8th out of 13) to total rubbish (13th out of 13). Luckily it was impossible to get relegated as there was no second division. In 2005 the ANSL was relaunched as the ‘A-League’ and the Kingz ditched their embarrassing monicker in favour of the ‘Auckland Knights’ (disappointingly, with no ‘z’ at the end this time).

Unfortunately the only thing that changed was the name. The team was still pretty rubbish, made up largely of journeymen and makeweights, (record winning streak 1 match, undefeated streak 2 matches, losing streak 11 matches) and very few people turned up to watch the matches in a city with a population of 1 million people (the average attendance was around 3,000). By 2006 the club was on a downward spiral and the A-League cancelled their A-League membership with a view to replacing them with a further Australian team. It seemed like the writing was on the wall for professional football in New Zealand.

At this point the club effectively went bust, with bids being invited to rescue the franchise and a deal was duly put together with a wealthy new backer. However as part of the deal the club was relocated to Wellington at the other end of the North Island - which is a little like relocating the Toon to Brighton - and it was renamed “The Wellington Phoenix”. Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand but is much smaller than Auckland and is effectively a green field site for football. It therefore represents something of a gamble, and to me the long term future of the club still looks uncertain despite the usual relentless hype by Sky TV aimed at apathetic Kiwis. On a brighter note, The Phoenix has retained its membership of the A-League and is still competing, although results have been mixed - fingers crossed they can make a go of it this time.

So there we have it. We may be playing boring Route 1 football. We may have a manager who looks like a giant chipmunk and blames everyone but himself for our problems. The press might hate us and things might get worse before they get better. But let’s console ourselves, at least we don’t support the Football Kingz. Now that would be a real disaster!

Happy New Year everybody and howay the Magz!