Best league in the world? It's a load of rubbish! THE BIG PICTURE.

WHAT a terrible league! Four rich teams and a handful of hapless hangers-on followed by a parade of pathetic, shapeless, spineless shadows of teams that just happy to make up the numbers.

Boro have been woeful. They have equalled a 99-year old record and lost 10 away games in a row; have scored the fewest goals in the British professional game this term and have looked like Dead Men Walking for months.

They have repeatedly started with a lightweight strikeforce, have used square-pegs in round holes as an article of faith, chopped and changed tactics and teams and played rush goalie against two of the best teams on the planet.

They appear to have resigned themselves to their fate, lack any shape, spirit and belief and have managed to numb their own crowd into stunned resignation as a Golden Age shuffles off with a whimper.

Yet incredibly, they are still in with a chance of staying up! That is ridiculous. Boro should have been deservedly dead and buried weeks ago but somehow still have a final chance to crawl battered and bruised from this embarrassing car-wreck of a season.

What does that say about the quality of the abysmally average teams around them? Week after week the rest of this Legion of the Damned have been presented with simple opportunities to end our suffering once and for all.

All it would take would be one win for those just above the dotted line to show a bit some bottle and haul themselves to safety and ruthlessly slam the trapdoor shut behind them but they can't do it because they are rubbish too.

Of our rivals for the drop Newcastle are a woeful multi-managered mish-mash of millionaire mediocrity. Sunderland a rag-bag of average individuals pushed into the top flight by a fear that has now dissipated leaving a void. Hull are lower league ordinariness promoted above their station suddenly struck by a deadly vertigo.

All have had their chances to finish us off in recent months and failed miserably and are now hoping we ARE actually as bad as we seem and don't somehow fluke a late run.

We have done our best to help them, nervously playing one up front a home to stutter to ineffective draws at home to equally inept fellow strugglers Blackburn, the Mackems and Portsmouth.

We have even handed all the points on the road to rock bottom West Brom, one dimensional Stoke and boring Bolton.

But still, with three games to go Boro could stay up by default and take their place in next term's anonymous gaggle of frightened makeweights... a group soon to be boosted by the presence of mighty Wolves and Birmingham plus one other lucky whipping boy to be.

What a depressing prospect. And what an indictment.

Tomorrow the two teams who have proved in the previous pair of demoralising outings that they are from a different football universe to Boro will go head-to-head in the Champions League semi-final.

Brace yourself for a tsunami of sickly saccharine sycophancy as the on-message Murdoch media gush a torrent of superlatives over a star studded spectacular they will insist proves the Premier League is "the best in the world." That notion is a travesty. The Premier

League is awful. How else could this Boro side still be alive and breathing? Those two teams and their fellow conspirators in Liverpool and Chelsea have used their unhealthy financial muscle to distort a once competitive arena into a sick parody of a sporting contest.

The Premier League is fast becoming as empty a charade as the Scottish League.

In this moneymaking sham the top four are nailed on. Only the order is at issue.

Their de facto permanent Champions

League membership and the obscene cashcade that follows from it only serves to reinforce the gulf between them and the fawning underlings who scramble around in the dirt for crumbs brushed off the top table.

The bottom half of the Premier League are scared stiff to take a risk and compete.

Survival is the be all and end all. The sum of their ambition is a nervous eternity of water-treading.

And even the 'best of the rest' are no great shakes, desperately clinging on to the big boys' coat-tails as they take their turn at the annual illusion that they can throw enough money to crack the glass ceiling.

Everton, Villa, Manchester City, Spurs... all spending heavily to seize the chance to compete in the early rounds of the UEFA Cup before bricking it and fielding weakened sides in order to concentrate on the real cash flow and glory of being seen as a cut above the dross in the Premier League.

Fantastic. Sporting glory. It's what we dreamed of as kids: finishing ninth every other year.

And yet, despite all that, despite the knowledge that this is a poor league, a moribund culture and an emotionally unhealthy environment that can only foster resentment, frustration and low self esteem, do we want to stay up? You bet your backside we do! And can we stay up? Of course.

All we have to do is be less inept than Newcastle plus either Hull or Sunderland over the next three games. That is far from Mission Impossible.

Will we? That depends on the team finally showing some steel and 'wanting it more.'

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