Fly Me To The Moon column: Inside Middlesbrough's fans forum as Neil Warnock answers supporters' questions

This week Neil Warnock attended his first fans meeting, well, apart from a few brief unscheduled head to heads when he has been out and about on the electric bike.

A sign of the times was that the question and answer session was held via Zoom. Organised through Middlesbrough Supporters Forum it was an opportunity for representatives of different fan groups and message boards to pose questions to the man in the Middlesbrough hot-seat.

Those representatives stretched geographically as far as Manhattan, where Ellen of Boro's North American contingent was able to act as a conduit for ex pat as well as North American born and bred Boro.

It was a meeting that Neil Warnock has wanted since first taking up the Boro hot seat. Many times he has told journalists at weekly press conferences just how much he misses the interaction with the fans.

In fact going further than this Warnock has said that the fires that have driven him through 1500 games of management would have long smouldered and been extinguished if his many seasons of stewardship had been played out in front of empty stadia.

He loves the back and forth with supporters. The love hate relationship many have for Warnock the football personality melts away when personally interacting with a warm, sincere, genuine football man who is also very witty.

A bubbly personality, he definitely has a glass half full rather than empty and is keen to underline that philosophy of life.

Every action he takes is guided from experience, arrived at on a journey that has taken him between Chesterfield and Crewe as a player and Gainsborough Trinity to Boro as a manager. It is method that has been tried and tested and honed along the way.

Man management and psychology are always to the fore. Just as in this meeting, although we cannot meet face to face in the flesh, he first wants to know where every person is from.

His answers are addressed individually to Paddy from the disabled supporters or Jen from One Boro forum. Those answers were never yes or no but full of rich detail, so much so that originally booked for thirty minutes Neil Warnock actually stayed in conversation for over 90 minutes. It was a full match with time added on. But not by a referee.

For fans starved of a real bond with the game this is a precious opportunity and Neil Warnock is promising it will be the first of many chances for fans to chat with him online.

Hopefully this can expand to Q and As that can be broadcast to reach out to so many of us currently isolated from the rest of the football community.

This personal touch seems in stark contrast to the Project Power Grab of the self-proclaimed big six, looking to ring fence their hegemony of the sport just now.

Their sweetener to the EFL of the precious money needed to save the lower leagues tastes a lot like blood money to football fans. Hopefully it shocks the remainder of the Premier League into action to take away from the six any moral high ground.

EFL clubs are absolutely desperate for help and clubs like Burnley, Wolves, Leeds and even Man City need to remember the levels where they have risen from in the not too distant past.

Along with the PFA the Premier League clubs as a whole must now act together quickly and decisively to bail out the football pyramid and steal the thunder of the would be despots.

Neil Warnock is a football man through and through. The vast majority of that career has been spent striving and succeeding in the Football League.

He really seems to get how football is all about the supporters and without the fans there is no beating heart to the sport.

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Richard Mennear, Football Clubs Editor