MICHAEL WALKER SOCCER ANGLES: AS GORDON Strachan told it on Thursday, he recently sat around a table with Roy Keane, Peter Reid and Dave Jones.

They did some talking about their shared profession but mainly, Strachan said, they complained about it.

“Everybody’s the same,” Strachan said, “we all need three new players and we’ve all got injuries and problems. I was sat with Peter Reid moaning and groaning on one side of me and Dave Jones doing the same on the other side – he was winning the moaning competition. I just joined in. I was actually quite happy, but I joined in as much as anybody.”

It was an interesting, amusing little scene that Strachan portrayed. As gatherings go it was something of an Old Firm, not an inappropriate label given Strachan’s Scottish recruitment drive this summer and in January. As of yesterday, and these things can change, Strachan had brought eight players south of the border in two transfer windows. McMiddlesbrough, some have started calling the club.

But if it is to work, and this is a big season for Strachan and Boro, who are favourites for promotion, what he needs is a different version of his old self. Rather than the Old Firm, Strachan requires a new New Firm.

Back in the 1980s Strachan was a feisty, vital part of the Aberdeen team that, along with that of Dundee United, wrested League titles, European glory and the power in Scotland away from the west coast, from Glasgow’s Celtic and Rangers.

Those were the Old Firm and this New Firm was an invigorating challenge to their traditional status.

It was some effort that Aberdeen and Dundee United put up then and it will be some achievement if Strachan can replicate a portion of that success on Teesside. Automatic promotion would count for a lot in his first full season at the Riverside.

And Middlesbrough is a club ripe for a re-awakening. You can sense that after the curious hate-the-football but love-Europe years of Steve McClaren, then the downsizing and relegation that happened under Gareth Southgate, there is an appetite around the place to stimulate itself once again.

Middlesbrough require a fresh and entertaining identity and Strachan has been allowed time to give them one. That it is tartan in hue owes more to his last job as manager of Celtic than it does to his nationality (well, you hope), and to his belief that while “the Champions League tests your ability, the Championship tests your character”.

Looking at the clutch of Old Firm players he has signed in the last eight months, Strachan said: “The pressure of playing for Celtic and Rangers is relentless. You are not allowed to lose one game. That is the kind of attitude I want in the dressingroom here. I want players who aren’t used to getting beaten.”

On Thursday he named three players who would be departing, offers permitting. One was French, one Dutch, the other an Egyptian – Mido. It did not seem like coincidence.

The 53-year-old Scot paid due recognition to the overlooked fact that his Boro superiors let him make the key signings of Kris Boyd and Kevin Thomson from Rangers, and Stephen McManus from Celtic early in the summer. That meant Boro picked up the tab for wages at a time when there is no gate income.

Few clubs want to do that anymore because of the cost but Boro’s decision has enabled Strachan to get to work moulding a team right through a summer, rather than waiting until the season starts, ticket money flows and the August deadline looms.

In that sense Boro have a head start.

It began in June when Strachan informed his players their holidays would be interrupted by a boot camp in La Manga. That is often a place of rest for footballers but Boro players were faced with working with the Marines.

Strachan surveyed his squad then, struggling in the heat, and said: “The fans have had two pretty grim years. And then Corus went under. Not one player has the right to complain about any of this.”

The mothballed Corus steelworks acted as more than a metaphor for the town. It placed the modern economics of football in perspective – at least it should have – and Boro’s attendances suffered.

It seemed as if Strachan had come to terms with the fact that, unlike internationalist Celtic, Middlesbrough is a one-town club and a one-club town. That matters.

Then this week Strachan dismissed anything that doesn’t happen on a Saturday afternoon as “propaganda”. Blunt, but wrong.

Propaganda is one of his long-standing terms, and doubtless Keane, a player Strachan signed for Celtic of course, would agree.

Keane has been able to command fascination and column inches wherever he has been, but none of it disguises that his position is vulnerable. Ipswich did not win a league game until the end of October last season and a similar start this time might mean he does not make the “Old Farm” derby against Norwich in November.

He could have done without travelling to Teesside on the opening afternoon.

It would be no surprise to find that at five o’clock, Keane is again sat at a table with Strachan, moaning.

Daggers will be drawn for Sheffield Wednesday

WHAT WAS going through the minds of the men who ran Sheffield Wednesday when they beat Blackpool in February to move four places above relegation and to within six points of the team they had just defeated? How the Owls might soon mount a challenge to get back into the Premier League after 10 seasons out of it?

Alan Irvine had been at Hillsborough a month since succeeding the sacked Brian Laws. An upturn ensued but it was followed by a dip and then, on the season's final day, by a drop.

Fans, drip-fed speculation of an imminent American takeover, must have been sick.

And then they saw the fixture list for this season. Then they realised that this afternoon, as Blackpool prepare for the Premier League next week, Sheffield Wednesday, one of the biggest clubs in Britain, will host Dagenham and Redbridge.

"It's probably as big a game as we could've hoped to have had," said Dagenham manager John Still, neatly stating the exact opposite of what they will be thinking at 40,000-capacity Hillsborough.

Three years ago Dagenham were in the Conference and this will be their first-ever fixture at this level. As you would expect, the two clubs have never shared a league fixture. Dagenham are on the up. For Wednesday's records, the club from Essex are known as the Daggers.