Frontline: Battling for the Boro

Steel made Teeside and Teeside made steel. For decades its blast furnaces forged both metal and men and earned the area the nickname "the infant hercules." Many of those tough steel men were united on Saturday afternoons on the terrances of Middlesbrough Football Club. And some of the hardest of all became the forerunners of one of football's most notorious holligan gangs: The Frontline. The Frontline came together in the late sixties, when its founders went to matches wearing pit boots, mining helmets and donkey jackets and fought equally tough dockers from places like Millwall and Everton. Soon young men were bolstering their numbers in Doc Marten boots, skinhead haircuts and Crombie coats. Terrace culture had arrived and football would never be the same again. The Frontline went on to become one of the most active soccer mobs, their reputation built not on weapons or numbers but on their courage and grit in toe-to-toe battles. Their loyalty was unsurpassed and they would travel through the night to take on the London and south coast firms, thought their bitterest rivals remained the 'Mackems' of Sunderland and the Geordies of Newcastle. From the club's dog days of the 1980s, spectacular reinvestment has brought dramatic on-field success and a huge expansion of support-but The Frontline have never gone away.Theone, John is the author of 'Frontline: Battling for the Boro' with ISBN 9781903854181 and ISBN 1903854180.