IN THE film Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland - playing the whirlwind-hit but still winsome Dorothy - says to her dog: "Somehow Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more".

Dorothy's remark is meant to suggest that things aren't normal and the world is out of kilter. And it was exactly that feeling I got last week on hearing the details of Middlesbrough Football Club's compensation claim against its Premier League rival Liverpool.

The gist is that Boro want £6.5m from the Merseysiders for poaching the German player Christian Ziege. The club is claiming a whole range of losses as it insists that the midfielder was a talent on a par with Pele and David Beckham.

He was apparently central to the future of the club and without him Boro can never taste glory. And so TV cash, gate receipts, money for the league placing and merchandising are all rolled up in the claim. As are Terry Venables' wages of more than £850,000.

Venables was brought in for about six months to help the floundering Bryan Robson and keep Middlesbrough in the Premiership. Now, I don't want to pre-judge what will be heard in the High Court in January, but surely Middlesbrough are on the shakiest of ground.

How can it possibly be said with any degree of certainty that had Ziege stayed, then more people would have come into the ground, and therefore a claim for lost gate receipts of nearly £800,000 is justified? Why not go a little further and suggest they'd have eaten an extra pie each, and claim a couple of grand for them too? Down at the Riverside they are surely not in Kansas any more. And yet a big blast of real life was felt elsewhere in North-East football as Sunderland's players agreed to defer at least a percentage of their wages until 2004.

This is probably one of the noblest footballing gestures since, well, since I allowed Ian Thomson to borrow my Alan Ball-style white footy boots at Junction Farm Infants School.

It's heartening to see the very people who got Sunderland into the predicament of First Division football actually taking responsibility for their actions.

And that sort of reality check is something that should be emulated by Middlesbrough.

- lan Reeve is Business Correspondent, BBC TV North East & Cumbria.

Published: 23/07/2003