HIS face, full of tears, was beamed across the world. But Middlesbrough fan Lewis Fryer, seven, is hoping it will be all smiles this weekend with his beloved side one point away from a place in the Premier League.
Last Friday, with Middlesbrough drawing 2-2 at Birmingham after Aitor Karanka’s men had been denied a late winner by the linesman’s flag, Lewis’s emotions got the better of him.
With the game in injury time, the Sky Sports cameras picked him out of a crowd of thousands of Boro fans behind the goal Jordan Rhodes and his team-mates were attacking.
His bottom lip quivering, tears ran down his cheeks knowing the chance to win the title was slipping away.
The image prompted an immediate rush of social media posts as football fans sympathised with his plight.
“The kid in the Middlesbrough end at Birmingham is killing me here. Poor lad in tears praying for a winner! Been there as a kid myself,” wrote @Donny_Vito.
It didn’t take long for word to get back to Lewis’s father Steve.
“Obviously, being down there you don’t know, but all of a sudden my phone started going mental with texts,” he said. “I was getting texts from people I hadn’t seen for years. Even then I thought it must just have been a quick glance, I didn’t realise they kept going back to him.”
Steve said Lewis, who is from Ingleby Barwick, near Stockton, and goes to Ingleby Mill school, was a die-hard Boro fan.
“He lives and breathes the Boro. For most people the target this year is promotion, but Lewis was desperate for us to win the league title, but he knew we had to win on Friday to have a chance.
“We scored the goal that was disallowed and we knew it should have been given and then we were just behind the goal when Grant Leadbitter’s strike was coming right for the top corner and the keeper got his fingertips to it.
“There was just two minutes to go in the match when the ball hit the bar and Lewis just knew that was the title gone. I think the emotion got to him.
“We had a good talk on the way home and said the title would be nice but in this league, it’s promotion that you want.”
Lewis, whose favourite player is Daniel Ayala, the scorer of the goal that wasn’t, said he could not believe he had been a star on TV.
“I thought ‘Oh my! Are you kidding?’” he said.
Lewis is going to Saturday’s sell-out match against Brighton with relatives, his father unable to get time off from work. He hopes if the cameras pick him out this time it will be because Boro are up.
“It won’t be an easy game,” he said. “But I think we will win.”
Meanwhile, an appeal to raise enough money for an unusual tribute to legendary Boro commentator Ali Brownlee has been successful.
Almost £1,000 has been raised through a GoFundMe website to pay for a banner to be flown over the Riverside Stadium on Saturday.
The banner will read ‘Everyone round my house for a parmo’, referencing Brownlee’s most famous radio commentary.
The BBC Tees presenter, known affectionately as the Voice of the Boro, died aged 56 in February after a battle with cancer.
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