Tarmo Kink: Fly Me Over The Pond, The Power Of One Man

Football at the professional and elite levels involves hours of preparation and meticulous planning.  Players' exercise to rest ratios are monitored, diets are created to achieve peak performance, and the mental state of players is constantly watched and reacted to by their coaching staff.

On the technical and tactical side of things, hours of work are poured into achieving a good performance in one particular fixture.  Opposition habits are studied intensely, and patterns of play are developed and rehearsed in order to beat a certain team.

The beauty of football, though, is that one player has the power to rise up and achieve a result simply through passion, focus and ability.  The plan to beat Burnley was in place, but clearly was not working.  Burnley are a good and recently relegated side who looked on course to continue our frustration for most of the game before fate intervened.

An Andre Bikey header looked to have Burnley ready to leave the Riverside with a win, a depressingly familiar pattern for Boro fans.  However, with 15 minutes left, Estonian winger Tarmo Kink was introduced and single-handedly turned despair to joy for the hardcore still in attendance.

Kink's goals owed nothing to tactics, nothing to the game plan, and everything to a man who was brave enough to produce shots on goal under difficult circumstances.

Kink has already shown he has the ability to frustrate—he has taken shots from silly angles and turned the ball over only to receive a roasting from the likes of Barry Robson on the field.  That criticism will not come as quickly now. Kink has an aggressive mentality and plays in an entertaining style that is becoming a rarity in the modern game.

Even Gordon Strachan acknowledged that the manner of the win was more to the brilliance of Kink than anything else.

“You can think too much about the game and sometimes you have play from the heart,” Strachan summarized. That is a message Boro fans will hope carries through to the Reading game and beyond.  On top of that, the manner of the win could spark a confidence that Boro have so clearly lacked for a long time now.

The beauty of the Burnley win is that it is what schoolboy dreams are made of—kids do not fantasize about snuffing out the opposition in midfield.  Kids dream about spanking a 94th-minute free kick into the top corner before celebrating wildly.

It happens even at the highest level of the game. The 2005 UEFA Champions League final is a classic example.

Liverpool trailed AC Milan 0-3 at halftime and all looked lost.  Steven Gerrard produced a magnificent display to spark a miracle comeback and allow Liverpool to claim the trophy when they won the penalty shootout.

Stephen McManus produced a similar moment of magic in Euro 2012, qualifying with a late winner against Liechtenstein.  The next day, the criticism of struggling against a European minnow set in, but watch the celebrations at that moment, and that was not the thought at the time.

These moments can happen in the Champions League, the championship, or even in school games, and the feeling is identical: a moment of euphoria where little else matters.  The feeling is brief, and the real world sets in after, but that brief feeling is why we love the game, and why no matter how often we moan we keep watching.

The beauty of football is it can come at any time, and it could be any player.  Who will our next hero be?