Author: Si

Regardless of what happens in the play-offs, the Boro hierarchy are once again in a great position to secure the club’s future. Simon Fallaha discusses how it might be achieved

A hugely successful manager can be the best and worst thing to happen to any football club.

Am I being controversial? Maybe. But in my view, it definitely rings true. How often, in this beautiful game of ours, have we, as fans, put the manager on a pedestal only to destroy him before he and we know it? Or how frequently have clubs, after enjoying years or maybe even decades of reaching rarely attainable or previously unattainable heights under a certain manager, been left not quite knowing where we’re going after he departs?

I wonder if the Arsenal fans who spent years clamouring for Arsene Wenger’s exit are contemplating what structure their club will have in place now. Manchester United, as we know, have tried three managers since Sir Alex Ferguson departed and are nowhere near finding themselves at the top in quite the same way again.

With Wenger and Ferguson, and Don Revie, you had managers creating an enduring identity, their own family within the family of the club.

As James Corbett has argued, Revie changed the face of English football by being a “confidant to the players, psychologist, social secretary, kit designer, commercial manager, PR flak, dietician and all-encompassing ‘boss’ of his team”.

Revie’s Leeds were revolutionary, even if Brian H. Clough may have thought of Revie’s “family” as having more in keeping with the mafia than Mothercare, but that’s for another time.

Perhaps more significantly, much of what Revie did was carried forward to Boro when Jack Charlton became our manager. The white band that Charlton initiated is still iconic and the heroes of the 1973-74 side are still fondly spoken of today.

With all silver linings come clouds though. And Charlton’s would appear to be his team being found out, failing to replace John Hickton, refusing to spend available funds and leaving a year too soon.

Although I emphasise “appear”, because the blessing in disguise is that we were not as embedded in Charlton’s ways as, say, United might have been in Ferguson’s when David Moyes took charge at United.

That helped ensure that the likes of Craig Johnston, shunned by Charlton, made a proper breakthrough and that Charlton’s successor John Neal was able to reshape Boro into a more free-flowing, exciting team, even breaking the bank for players where and when Charlton wouldn’t have.

Alas, Neal made good on his threat to quit as boss when chairman Charlie Amer started selling key players – and Boro were off on a downward spiral.

Charlton didn’t capitalise when he had the chance. Neal wasn’t allowed to. And it is arguable that Revie, Wenger and Ferguson had done a little too much capitalising on their managerial opportunities.

There is such a thing as putting too much of yourself into the club – and, as Amer’s actions, and more recently Mel Morris’s and Steve Gibson’s show, that goes for chairmen too. (Whoever was smart enough to suggest that the difference between Paul Clement and Aitor Karanka in early 2016 was probably just a few points and a chairman deserves a medal, albeit with hindsight.)

Any club who allows a manager to take total control on the way to creating a successful dynasty is pretty much destined to become a Damned United once the “beloved” manager leaves.

It is bad enough that their immediate successors are left with an impossible job. Look at Clough and Moyes. It is possibly worse to wonder, although usually in the aftermath of a managerial spell, that if only the club as a whole had had the intuition, courage and conviction to build on the right positives while that manager was in charge, who knows what might have happened?

An alternative argument among the more parochial of us back at Boro is that some of those positives, especially in the modern era, aren’t really all that positive after all. That once-futuristic stadia, foam hands, foreign players who probably didn’t know where Middlesbrough was until shortly before they signed, continental tactics that didn’t suit certain individuals and expensive loan signings are the very epitome of the commercial over the communal, football as product rather than competition.

I suppose that in repeatedly trying to adjust to the cycle of football, Boro have found out that a little knowledge and the right amount of money can be a dangerous thing. Yet it can simultaneously be a very good thing. Helping the club to overcome the fear of failure mindset – which Tony Pulis has played his part in doing – has put us in good stead ahead of the play-offs.

The question is: which way now?

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As with Pulis, Aitor Karanka’s initial contract at Boro was for a short-term period. A mere eighteen months. His success in footballing terms, that is to say, building solid foundations and instilling the right momentum and belief to take a commanding collective five points clear at the top of the Championship with a game in hand – ironically after an eighteen-month spell of consistently good results – indicated he might be able to contribute to a long-term plan after all.

But success induces irritability, hubris and condescension. Or worse, cowardice. Too often the most successful people at any club dodge the difficult questions because they believe that, as long as they’re producing the goods on paper, they don’t need to answer.

For every fan that argued that the top two was the very least Karanka should have achieved with his resources around the time of Charlton, there would be those – including the man himself! – who would point out where we were before he took charge.

But even if statistical history paints 2015-16 as a success, what is the manager doing but trying to have his cake and eat it too? This was someone who appeared exceptionally proud of transferring his Basque characteristics of “faith” and “hard work”, along with a backwards-and-sideways passing methodology that had worked wonders for his country’s national side, to Boro. Someone who frequently appeared delighted at the strides “little Boro” had made under him, believing that made him untouchable.

Yet when things went wrong he felt he could fall back on being an “inexperienced manager” at a “small club”. It’s the equivalent of relentlessly getting down on your knees and begging to be taken seriously, only to admit that once you have been scrutinised, you’ve not as much to offer as you once appeared to.

Such a cowardly, critic-proof approach is not inclined to win you friends. And that goes for Boro as well as Karanka, thought of as far back as Bryan Robson’s time as the little club that tried and failed to buy their way into the big time. The 2010s were, in a way, like the 1990s repeating themselves, albeit with a Spaniard rather than an Englishman. (Similarly the 1998 promotion was remarked upon as the very least Boro should have achieved that year.)

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We don’t know as yet if Tony Pulis is going to invert, even subvert, the above or if he is merely a short-term solution while a proper long-term solution is found. It’s still too early in his reign, and while it is common in football for a club’s fortunes to turn around almost immediately when a new manager takes charge, that is often less to do with the manager himself and more to do with the players trying much harder.

Whatever way you look at it, does the buck really stop with the manager?

Technically, it ought not to. The rise and fall of the club should be collective. Yet when something has to change, you can’t sack the players. Or hierarchy.

Which brings me to: continuity. And what Claudio Ranieri did while he was at Leicester.

It is common for a new manager to bring his own people in with him, so he can feel like he is in complete control. But Ranieri didn’t do this.

Instead, his long-term comrade Paolo Benetti joined Steve Walsh and Ranieri’s eventual successor Craig Shakespeare as joint assistant managers of the club, with Andrea Azzalin coming into Nigel Pearson’s already established sports science team.

As The Secret Footballer put it, the Leicester players could work in familiar and comfortable surroundings, and “didn’t arrive for pre-season to find a world of new faces and new methods to be negotiated”.

Many clubs have caught on to this continuity game, and not just because of Leicester’s success. I have read that an owner of a big club has always believed in giving a manager everything he wants – but for many a manager, “everything” is not quite enough. And such a belief is normally a trigger for a sacking.

Nowadays, it is far more common to count on continuity. A club puts together a top notch backroom staff and a manager is simply told to work with them as best as he can. Jobs for the boys and cults are anathema.

Lest the continuity sound too perfect, there are instances where it can be misguidedly implemented. Eight managers have taken charge at Watford since Sean Dyche was dismissed shortly after Gino Pozzo arrived.

To CEO Scott Duxbury, this doesn’t seem a big deal: his argument appears to be that continuity in the infrastructure of the club is paramount, as the average life span of any coach, particularly at a midtable club, is a short one. Of around, say, two years. Either they will want to move on or you will want to move them on, but either way, things will remain in place, so the club is stable.

As logical as Duxbury’s argument sounds, writer Phil Costa has effectively challenged it: Watford yo-yo’ed for a few seasons before finding any kind of stability in the Premier League, and at one point during the last five years they spent £185 million.

Similarly, despite the advantages of a short-term contract – Watford’s current incumbent Javi Gracia, like Karanka before him, has an initial eighteen-month deal – every manager needs time to adapt.

As Costa said in January, “there’s a difference between changing the colour of your living room to freshen things up and frantically redecorating every six months.” And as Costa also implied, consistency is just as effective as spontaneity – something that Pulis’s line-ups and the form of Adama Traore are at least highlighting at Boro at the moment.

There are many positives for Boro to carry on from this season whatever happens at the Riverside, Villa Park, or Wembley. The key is to make sure that this time, we carry them on the right way.

Beneath the sustained communal triumphs and disasters of football lies something else entirely. Simon Fallaha explores the inherent individualism and egotism in “The Beautiful Game”

Let’s start with a roleplay.

You’re a centre-forward who has become accustomed to starting under a certain manager. But, most recently, things have gone awry for you.

At a time when the manager, and fans, really needed you to deliver the goods, you missed some “gilt-edged” chances in a 0-0 draw.

Despite this, you believe, quite rightly, that the dropped points weren’t entirely your fault.

You think you played as well as everyone else, and deserve a chance to put it right in the next game.

Unfortunately, you have “one of those days” at the next training session.

You miss chance after chance in training. The manager, visibly unhappy, switches you for your understudy.

The understudy, delighted to be given a chance himself, scores goal after goal, putting you to shame.

It goes without saying that the understudy and first-choice roles, as far as forwards are concerned, have been reversed by the time the next match comes around.

This is too much for you. You emotionally confront the manager about your omission.

The manager does not take kindly to being challenged. And you pay the price, remaining second choice under the manager as long as your former understudy is available for selection.

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How do we react to this, as fans?

Some, even most, are not inclined to be sympathetic. Especially if the manager is a hugely popular figure and the team are enjoying success as a unit, as was the case in this situation, adapted from real-life.

They will think that the centre-forward would have been better off to man up, keep schtum and deal with being benched. But how would we feel if suddenly demoted in our jobs?

Imagine your whole life having a point leading up to a certain time because a manager, or if you’re freelance, a client, depends on you, and then circumstance unexpectedly intervenes to reduce your privileges or remove them from you entirely.

The reality of football is that a player is expected to put on the appropriate face for the sake of public unity. It is common for a dropped footballer, for example, to appear as sad as everyone else after a defeat while smiling on the inside because his own chances of a recall are enhanced.

Here, the frequently promoted and celebrated myth of the team ethic trumping everything else is thoroughly debunked – it is the pursuit of personal success and greatness that drives football. That’s football’s beauty and its beast – passionate entertainment and painful egotism at once.

What we see, or what we choose to see, is all there is. If a player can’t make the transition from a small club, where he felt loved, to a better-paid but more demanding role at a bigger club, we tend not to see his personal struggles. We only see a player not succeeding like we hoped he would.

Or, in the case of Albert Adomah, not succeeding in the manner in which we wanted him to succeed. How often has an individual surrendered, or curtailed, his individuality for what, we are told, is the good of the team? Because he is not considered a big enough name or suitable enough player to lead or inspire the attack himself, he is given a clearly defined role which can be upgraded when the right time and the right player comes along.

Some would have advised him to be “professional”, to grin and bear it while Adama Traore gradually found his touch. But he had other ideas. Many will not settle for being a “commodity” just because “it is what it is” at bigger clubs, such is the value of a player enjoying his craft as well as admiring his graft. With that in mind, Adomah’s departure may have been messy, but it is understandable.

How easy it was, and I’m entirely guilty of this, for the long-distance analyst to laud the aspects of Adomah’s improving team play under Aitor Karanka, hailing the intelligent off-the-ball movement, all around commitment, organisational skills and accuracy of the passing.

How much more difficult it was for the paying fan and the player himself to have the entertainment siphoned away for the sake of professionalism.

It’s like, to another degree, comparing Romario to Andres Iniesta for their national teams. You may admire the latter’s dedication and subtly intuitive passing, but you’d have willingly paid to watch more of the former, despite his renowned laziness in training.

That is what separates the admiration of the analyst from the desires of the fan – head versus heart, rational objectivity versus emotional subjectivity. It’s what makes many a fan forum, or comments section, so interesting – multiple points of view from a series of individuals divided by opinion but united by wanting the best for their team.

The ugly side of individualism is something else entirely. Thanks to The Secret Footballer, I’ve read of instances where a manager was so much of a control freak that he wouldn’t even let the club chef cook with salt anymore. Or of a selfish captain who betrayed the rest of the squad when the club didn’t want to negotiate their bonuses, getting fully kitted out for the team photo while every other player boycotted it.

It seemed that his big moment was more important than the well being of the squad itself. They never forgave him, and as TSF said, “this lack of leadership contributed to a very tough time for the team on the pitch”.

In football, we may all want the same thing. That is to say, the best for our club and country. But we all want them in different ways. For managers regarded as cult heroes, selfishness is a common trait. If said manager resigns, or changes tactics during a game or a season, he is, in a way, admitting a weakness, because if the team’s fortunes improve, questions about why he didn’t quit or change earlier arise. It may well make him happier to stand by methods that work most of the time, so that he can be proved right and hailed as the architect of triumph. This, of course, is damaging for him. It raises insecurity and neediness. The desire to be reassured of his greatness is more important than anything. Not good.

Most seek self-assurance, not critical dissections or self-examination. And that rings true for players also. We all know that the dressing room wasn’t really a happy place to be even after the wins began to flow again at the end of 2015-16. But we needed to make it out to be, so as not to create a public veil of a mutiny not quite quelled.

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I started with a roleplay, so I’ll finish with one, adapted from a real-life situation and the writings of The Secret Footballer. It’s an example of how toxic the consequences of selfishness in football can be.

You are the manager. A successful manager, at that.

Not everyone agrees with your methods. Not everyone likes your manner. But, in bringing consistent success to a club starved of it for years, you have rightly earned something representing cult status in the area.

Things, however, have fallen off the rails in recent weeks. After being in control of your destiny for so long, a combination of rigid tactics and executive meddling, including the arrival of a player who doesn’t fit in with your plans, has broken the momentum of the collective you created.

Where you once seemed invincible, you are now vulnerable, and this has affected the confidence of yourself and the team. Nonetheless, you do enough to stay in touch with your end-of-season goal.

At least until it all comes to a head in an away match you are favoured to win, and dominate, but end up undeservedly losing.

An achievement that once looked a mere formality is now out of your hands.

On the surface, your lips are sealed. But inside, petulant anger is bubbling and boiling, waiting to explode in the dressing room.

There, you lay into forward-thinking players who failed to convert their chances and defenders whose positional play let you down.

You’re giving them one of the worst messages imaginable: it’s not my fault. It can’t be. If all of you had done the jobs that your huge wage packets paid you to do, we’d still be in control of our destiny.

One player is brave enough to pipe up and suggest that the strategy ought to be a bit more flexible.

Except you’re too proud to admit that you’re wrong.

So you spit your dummy out. You throw a giant wobbly. And you give the players another awful message: if that’s how you all feel, and none of you want to stand by the man who worked so hard to build the foundations for the success you’re enjoying, then I’m out of here. If all of you think managing a team is so easy, why don’t you try it?

Everyone can see you ranting childishly. But that’s what you want them to see. What you’re implying, as TSF puts it, is that “you care so much that you don’t care anymore”.

You storm out of the dressing room and find a hotel room for the night while the shell-shocked players travel back on the team coach, without you.

This wasn’t what you had in mind. You wanted the player who spoke to come running after you and tell you that he’s sorry. That it wasn’t really your fault, and that he shouldn’t have undermined your authority.

But it didn’t happen. And, as a result, you get more than a little paranoid. Your thoughts are no longer about the club, but about what the players, the staff and most importantly the chairman must now be thinking about you. The nature of the event ensures a sleepless night.

The next morning you return to the wife and kids. But the devastation, confusion and betrayal that everyone at the club who isn’t you must be feeling still isn’t a priority. Instead, you desperately wait for someone to call or text with an apology, telling you that they understood the pressure you were under. It doesn’t come.

Not for a few days anyway. By that stage, the panic, depression and frustration subside and the chairman chooses to pay a visit.

He convinces you that you must return to the training ground, and lead the team again, as we’ve all still got an important goal to reach. It doesn’t take a minute for you to shake his hand enthusiastically and tell him you’ll be right there, first thing in the morning.

Tellingly, he hasn’t apologised to you, nor has he said anything about the players feeling remorseful. All he’s said is that he wants you back.

But back at the training ground, that’s the last thing on your mind as you set out on your new mission: to remind everyone at the club of how important you are and to lead the team to their ultimate goal.

It doesn’t matter if the players are still talking about your temper tantrum, because you’re too focused on proving that if they’d kept quiet, rode the storm of your critique and accepted that wobbles happen at all clubs anyway, or something like that, all would be well.

Except things are still not well.

The team are ignoring you when they should be listening to you.

And why is this? Because, rightly, they still feel very hurt by the manner in which you deserted them after the unjust defeat. You expected apologies from them, but they’ve never heard an apology from you. Now, suddenly, you need them again? They won’t be your lackeys.

That’s their message. That becoming part of the club again must be earned. Before the previous game, for all the ups and downs, they had come to accept you as one of them. Now they can’t rely on you anymore. Your selfishness has been painfully exposed. Not understood as the momentary overreaction of a troubled soul under pressure, but as the explosive rant of someone who found that he wasn’t going to have things all his own way after all. A guy who wanted respect from everyone but respected no one.

In the direct aftermath, you do absolutely everything to make amends. The team start winning games again, you work extra hard in the office and when training, and you’re ultra nice to people and staff. You and the team achieve your ultimate goal for the season – but no one congratulates you or applauds your “recovery”, because what you’ve done since the dreaded dummy spit is everything that was expected of you as a professional anyway.

That is arguably the boundary and the price of the selfishness inherent in football.

It would seem that ditching over-complications and focusing on what attacking players can do instead of what they can’t has genuinely given Boro a new lease of life, says Simon Fallaha

“Luck is the forgotten arbiter of football destinies.
We are tactics-mad because, as humans, we like to
believe we are in control.” – Jared Browne, 2012

What is ‘Eurocracy’, in football terms?

I’m not sure anyone can put a finger on just the right words to use. But if you asked me, I’d simply say: a continental philosophy that places command, control, tactics, teamwork and managerial image over free-spirited, individual technique.

It may sound rather modern, but it’s actually been around England for many years. The Liverpool Boot Room culture, Sir Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish were able to adopt elements of the continental game to obtain success either at home, in Europe, or both.

Suffering on the side lines throughout the nineties were two very individualistic squads, Roy Evans’ Liverpool and Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle. Throw our own Bryan Robson’s class of 1995-97 into that group too, such were the qualities of his attacking players in contrast with most of the defence – with apologies to Phil Whelan, Derek Whyte et al.

By 1997 the Wengerlution was taking shape and clubs were catching on to Eurocracy as a means of a path to the top. Chelsea joined in, as did Liverpool with the arrival of Gerard Houllier and the shift to a more solid and commanding style. Even Robson was not beyond building his success from 1997-2000 on a strong backbone and team players.

Generation after generation of Eurocrats – Mourinho, Benitez, Guardiola, Rodgers, Klopp, Wagner, you name them – have arrived and prospered to varying degrees since, with equally varying responses to their styles. Be they attacking or defensive, the need to command and control remains paramount. See: Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool teams and how they didn’t feel so confident when they weren’t allowed to dictate.

Arguably, Boro’s biggest Eurocrats of recent times have been Steve McClaren and Aitor Karanka. One need only contemplate their coaching pedigree, the experience that success on the biggest stages of all gave them, and how they attempted to adopt said principles into something concrete and successful.

And neither was entirely popular at Boro.

Were they the problem, I often ask myself, or was it the culture that spawned them which created limitations under each tenure? At best, things were genuinely good, even great. There was genuine moments of strong unity, at least on the surface, along with progress that either you hadn’t seen for years or didn’t think you’d see again at all.

That, frankly, is not the sort of ride that you want a naysayer – even if he or she is ultimately right – to derail. And with Karanka alone, I discovered joy beyond magic “No 10s”. I took great pride in watching confident, ball playing centre backs, commanding midfield generals, multi-purpose wing men and all-purpose forwards.

How nice it would be to just applaud and build on the merits. To accept that every story has to end sometime and leave it at that. But it’s not that simple. Because it’s quite common for Eurocratic managers to dig their own grave very deeply, very quickly. Such is their desire for control.

It doesn’t matter if the coaching philosophy is cautious or cavalier – the Eurocrat is likely to reach a point where he cannot take the team any further, but is too proud to admit it. The squad then see the vultures gathering over his head, the team start to drop more points, the fans get on his back, and it’s goodbye to any form of confidence, let alone command. That’s how you end up with games like Stoke 2, Boro 0, and a once imperious manager looking as white as a sheet.

Perhaps Eurocrat rhymes with bureaucrat for a very good reason. All those complex dossiers, lots of passing patterns, ‘subtle and artistic’ link-up play, meticulous research into tactics, training and image. You look at all that, and everything written about it, and think that it must amount to something great. But sometimes, it’s left looking like a puddle that pretends to be deep but really isn’t.

And the Eurocrat becomes the Emperor’s Clothes, a laughing stock who many are keen to either forget or remember as a figure of comedy. Like, in my opinion, the greatest comic bureaucrat of all time, Yes (Prime) Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby. It’s hard to forget “The Key”, where he is locked out of No. 10 for attempting to exert a little too much power. An instance of a somewhat obstructive but useful individual becoming downright oppressive and insufferable, and there was joy in seeing him receive his comeuppance.

On reflection it is also sad that it can come to that for the Eurocrat, for I would never want to discard his merits and methods entirely. Any analysis must be fair and objective, and there are many, many positives that can and should be both lauded and carried forward.

Still, continuously favouring the solid over the surprising and the workmanlike for the spontaneous will eventually guide any team to a dead end, regardless of how successful a strategy may be for whatever length of time. What an analyst may deem “putting an overpaid ego in his place” and “showing him who’s boss” can equally be deemed condescending to the player, and harmful to team spirit. It’s not a case of too much coaching, or too little coaching – but the right coaching.

Players don’t always need to be “corrected”. They need to be appropriately utilised for the good of the individual and the team. It is here where the Eurocrat can put his pride aside and learn from the more experienced man managers, thinking about what a player can do rather than criticise him for what he can’t.

This is where the recent success of Adama Traore under Tony Pulis comes into play. Were a coach overly determined to “correct” his game, as Karanka surely was, he would note, as The Secret Footballer did about Kyle Walker, that Traore has so much pace that his control (there’s that word again) simply isn’t as good as it ought to be, and that he would rely on being fast enough to catch the ball in time for a cross from the wing even if he over hit his first touch.

But, as TSF says, the pitch is only so big, and Walker would knock the ball out for a goal kick countless times, all because he ran out of pitch. “It’s like watching Forrest Gump.” (Now where have we heard that one before?)

He adds, “It is symptomatic of fast players that their touch suffers as a result of their pace” and that there are areas of the pitch where “a fine touch” and “good control” are essential. So Karanka would be far from alone in being immensely frustrated by Traore’s lack of a final ball. Yet TSF also notes – and I am entirely in agreement here – that coaches and scouts are “suckers” for pace. And so are fans.

For too long, I feel that we at Boro have been taught simply to be grateful for the dependable without being able to fully appreciate the unpredictable, the maddening even, that can take a team’s football to another level. Traore has no defined role, as such. He’s not what you’d call consistent. But he is, for all his imperfections, a special player, one who keeps bringing you back to watch the team.

And if that’s not part of what makes us love football, I don’t know what is.

It’s early days, but it may well be that Pulis’ arrival at Boro represents the first stage of a new cycle for the club. Where the cult of managers and all-conquering tactics is ebbing away into forwards being forwards, attacking midfielders who attack, erratic but lively wingers, full backs that defend, and reliable goalkeepers. An attempt to counter all the over-complications in “the beautiful game”.

Or, to put it simply…

“Football is a simple game made complicated
by people who should know better.”

Thank you kindly, Bill Shankly.

Now five months into his tenure, Simon Fallaha puts forward the suggestion that if Garry Monk is to make his mark, or find a voice, at Boro, he should not discard the past altogether but instead learn from it, building on the right positives

Bryan Robson, Steve McClaren and Aitor Karanka are the three longest-serving, and also, interestingly, my three favourite Boro managers since 1994.

Why is this? Opinions have never seemed so divisive as they have during their tenures. Be it the football, the recruitment, the press conferences, the image, the man management (or lack of it). It is swings and roundabouts, and it is also true that they were given a lot of money to spend, as our current boss Garry Monk has been.

But, in each case, I don’t think anyone can doubt the mark all three have made on the modern Boro story. Like Gareth “Arsenal-lite” Southgate, Gordon “Jockification” Strachan and Tony “One Of Our Own” Mowbray, they had a distinct voice. Unlike those three, they had the greatest means to implement it. And in doing so, they became masters of what I’d like to call the “Big Moment”.

Where do you want me to start? Uwe Fuchs. Promotion. The Riverside Stadium opening. Juninho. Emerson. Fabrizio Ravanelli. Home grown and adopted Teessiders making a mockery of the Manchester United defence. The old Wembley, twice. Paul Merson. Marco Branca. Promotion, again. Hamilton Ricard. Victory at Old Trafford, three times over. Benito Carbone. The Southgatian punch. Juninho, again. Bolo Zenden. Cardiff. Our first foray into Europe. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Mark Viduka and Aiyegbeni Yakubu’s goals. Beating the Premier League’s top three at home in the same season. The Road to Eindhoven, though not the denouement.

And, under Karanka alone? The Anfield penalty marathon. Looking Manchester City in the eye in that memorable victory at the Etihad. Grant Leadbitter’s celebrations. Tomlinho. Patrick Bamford’s breathless opportunism. La Bamba. Tomas Mejias, blunderer turned Old Trafford hero. Brentford at home in the play-offs. The new Wembley, though, again, not the denouement. A heart-warming Ali Brownlee tribute. David Nugent against Hull. Jordan Rhodes at Bolton. Brighton, both home and away. Pitch invasions and promotion. Gaston before Gasgone. Adama Traore terrifying Arsenal. Marten De Roon at City. Alvaro Negredo at the King Power, though, yet again, not the denouement.

There’s a trend emerging here, for better or worse. In isolation, these moments would make a wonderful story, critic-defying triumphs against the odds, pessimism to optimism, the ridiculous to the sublime.

But it is not wise to treat them in isolation. They should be seen as part of a bigger picture. One should not overlook that these very same big moments betrayed all three managers in the end, and Boro themselves.

It is seductive to lose oneself in the romanticism of it all, to simply embrace the moment while one can, and to tell the party-pooping naysayers to stop raining on the parade. To simply worship the heroes and smile about the memories. To appreciate who, what, when and where… without asking why.

There’s the rub. Boro’s “best” managers post-Lennie Lawrence, and indeed many of the fans during that time – me included, I’m not ashamed to admit – could all be accused of living for the moment and not contemplating the consequences. Being content with the occasional moment in the limelight, because, after all, we’re only Boro, and shouldn’t expect anything more. Being strictly sentimental when reflection is also called for.

As literary critic Alan Jacobs once implied, reflection strengthens true emotions while exposing feelings that are shallow and disingenuous, whereas a purely sentimental approach avoids reality and tries to keep people from asking questions. Questions that, when at least attempted to be answered, could provide more of an idea about why Boro continuously fail to make the most of the greatest opportunities that present themselves. And give more of an insight, perhaps, into how the same Boro that were dismantled by Aston Villa could dismantle Chelsea the following week, or the same Boro that ran on empty at home to Watford could fearlessly take on Arsenal soon afterwards.

Or how, to use a more recent example, Karanka and his collective alarmingly metamorphosed from being efficient, effective and in control to panicky, fearful and doubtful. A miniature self-destruction engineered by nerves, mind games and a cup defeat, after which which the manager and his team never regained their aura of invincibility. What once seemed wonderful turned toxic, narratives of “incompetent” coaching and “victimised” players staining the public face of the club in such a way that we are still reeling from it even now.

What to make of Garry Monk’s Boro? Or Boro as a whole?

Last year, we came “home”, to the Premier League, after a long hiatus. Today, one could be forgiven for thinking that Boro are homeless, unsure of whether they should be bouncing back immediately or treating this as a season of transition with a possible promotion charge.

So far, Monk has given us what I can call, at best, a handful of “little big moments”, aspects which, if reflected and built upon, could guide his Boro towards finding a voice for themselves. Traore bouncing off from what wasn’t really a naughty step to terrorise Bolton, coming from behind to win twice in the same game, a new goal hero in Britt Assombalonga, and Bamford’s playmaking and goalscoring attributes, at least until he lost favour and form. There has even been, to a point, Rudy Gestede’s redemption. Once seen as superfluous, he is now much missed in attack.

These “little big moments” arose from the creative and industrious sparks that our midfield and supply line has so conspicuously been lacking in for years. Two years ago I made the point that it is midfield, not strike force, that defines a club’s season, and I stand by that. Without the right support, strikers cannot thrive fully. Without the right protection, a defence cannot fully function. A combination of character, leadership, organisation and skill, not just organisation and skill.

“Character is just as important as skill.” When he said those words, Roy Keane was referring to Arsenal and what made the difference between Arsene Wenger’s champions of the past and stable nearly men of the present. And it was what made the difference for Robson’s, McClaren’s and Karanka’s Boro, in a big way.

Grant Leadbitter was Karanka’s Nigel Pearson, or Gareth Southgate, in that he was so much more than a player. He was, and still is, a leader, offering presence and character that still can’t be found anywhere else in the squad. Boro are not the same without him. Arguments that he will not last forever, he is now in his thirties, his engine is not what it was and Boro shouldn’t still be so reliant on him are all valid, as is the belief that transition is necessary in football and that bringing in the likes of Adam Forshaw, Marten De Roon and Jonny Howson was crucial for freshness and continuity.

Towards the end of Karanka’s reign, however, it was hard to ignore the suspicion that the manager was not so much naturally transitioning as attempting to maintain total control. Karanka was renowned for wanting his own way, something far more likely with an eager, willing newcomer than an independently-minded thinker. And the more prominent that mindset becomes, the soul continues to drain from the team until they are a shadow of what they once were, let alone what they could be.

Nowadays the absence of Bamford and Traore, neither of them Monk’s signings, has raised eyebrows. Regardless of unreliability, one knows what these players can offer to the team, and one would be disappointed if Monk was not to make use of their qualities accordingly at the expense of proving that his signings are the right ones. In other words, he should follow what Karanka did at the beginning and not at the end – build on the right strengths, making the most of the resources left to him.

Giving Monk the keys to the transfer treasure chest so soon has done him and Boro no favours, presenting the image of someone too keen to undo the sterility of the defensively-minded, deeply divisive regime that played its part in splitting the club. Often, those keen to highlight the negative aspects of a previous regime – I won’t go into all that here – tend to forget why we believed in it to begin with.

For eighteen months Karanka’s Boro were, for the most part, an imperious collective – and why? I take you back further, to Jack Charlton’s Champions of 1973-74 and Bruce Rioch’s Promotion Heroes of 1986-87 – the only teams to concede fewer goals than Karanka’s Boro circa 2015-16 since the war – and ask you to note that while, to the paying customer, goals are football’s oxygen and all that, having a rock solid defence gives you confidence, a feeling of relaxation. For if you take the lead, the game is almost certainly yours. When the right foundations are there, everything else will follow, and not just on the pitch.

However. The next step, which Karanka and even Robson proved incapable of taking, was evolving, not retreating. A year into Karanka’s reign and I couldn’t believe how confidently we passed the ball and how sublime some of our team play was, even if it was constrained by a safety blanket. Robson’s Boro were laughed at and ridiculed in 1996-97, and not unreasonably so, but we will never forget daring to, and living the, dream. Both managers, however, retreated when faced with pressure, playing it safer. In each case the mercurial and spontaneous were gradually eschewed for the workmanlike and dependable. Were Stuani and Nugent, or Deane and Ricard, as eye-catching as Tomlin and Bamford, or Juninho and Ravanelli?

It was a retreat. And while the results may have improved, the football didn’t. Passivity, and protection, had replaced activity and initiative. If a manager and a club harbour ambition, this is fatal.

Especially when spending a lot of money on players and aspiring to fit in with the top clubs in a division, something that Monk’s Boro have set out to do. We came to associate Karanka with fear of failure, but there’s also such a thing as fear of success. It’s also known as the “I want to be sure I’m ready for it” mentality, something that stops a club from getting what they really desire. Thus they stand still in time while everyone else goes for it. Like, say, Bournemouth. They weren’t expected to, and, at least financially, had no right to reach the Premier League, but went for it anyway and are finding their way. They’re a club Monk could learn from.

Now, one may conclude that freedom of expression for our attacking players is the answer, full stop. I’ve heard the “We have some good players, just let them play” argument before, and am aware that if too many individuals subvert their skills for the sake of a collective it is doomed to fail. But if a manager wants to find a voice, to make his mark, freedom alone is not the answer – a lasting impression is not solely created by players, but also by the restrictions imposed by the man in charge. Each restriction or order imposes upon the team makes it more distinct. Freedom on its own means chaos, which ultimately means boldly going nowhere.

That’s where I unfortunately feel Monk’s Boro are right now, and will continue to be unless we find a voice. It might be time for Monk to show his authority, to stir the players up a bit and make them take notice. It may well have reached the point where the players have “become complacent and started taking advantage. They might have done nothing wrong, just become a bit blasé about the results or their performances… It is then you have to crack the whip.”

So spoke Jock Stein to Jack Charlton in 1973 – and we know exactly how well the following season turned out for Boro.

The past isn’t always in the past for the Boro faithful. Simon Fallaha examines moving on in football, highlighting forgiveness, acceptance and re-acceptance in periods of transition for clubs

There was a moment in Boro’s largely dire return to the Premier League in 2016-17 that stood out, for this fan and analyst, as equally exhilarating and devastating. When news that Marten De Roon had gotten his head to a cross in the last minute score his first Boro goal, earning the team a point at the Etihad and sending the travelling fans wild, I was absolutely overjoyed, as any Boro fan in the moment would be.

This could, and still can, be remembered fondly. But not what directly followed. Before I knew it, the joy had subsided into sadly bitter vindication as I thought: “That ought to shut the moaners up.”

The “moaners” I was thinking of were those who, instead of simply embracing a good run of form from Adam Forshaw at the beginning of the season – which, like Boro’s season itself, fizzled out disappointingly fast – took the opportunity to have a pop at the manager, contemplating what would happen to him once De Roon was fit again.

Mutterings that then new fan darling Forshaw was only playing due to injuries and that they “knew” he would make a difference all along were pretty common. Too common, actually, especially in light of Grant Leadbitter and Adam Clayton’s proven partnership.

And rather extreme. It felt that seeds of toxicity that we thought we’d left in the past, along with that infamous weekend at Charlton, were being sown again, between perceived managerial favourites and perceived fan favourites. And worse, that De Roon, along with Victor Valdes, Alvaro Negredo, Antonio Barragan and later Bernardo Espinosa, did not seem fully welcome despite their clear efforts to fit in. Memories of calls for Valdes to leave after a solitary start are still frighteningly fresh.

In my view, this was hardly right and fair for any of them. The acceptance of new faces was proving extremely difficult. But – and this is true of both players and managers – is that an instance of toxicity, or reality?

It may seem churlish to dedicate plenty of angry and frustrated sentences to the dismissal of one coach, the omission of one or two players, one defensive minded substitution and two points dropped in one game when there is a club and squad that depends on support throughout an entire season.

It may seem ridiculous to believe a player isn’t up to it before he has even played a game. Giving newcomers the benefit of the doubt, after all, is part of the transition that happens all the time at every club in football.

And it may seem cruel to forever hold a grudge against a successful coach or player for a past misdemeanour that he would no doubt attempt to write off as a one-off, an unfortunate incident even.

I look back to Aitor Karanka’s tears following promotion, and can’t help wondering, albeit with hindsight, that they, a bit like my own unfortunate reaction to De Roon’s equaliser, were out of bitter vindication. At bouncing back from having his authority undermined and being spurned by naysayers for no good reason other than trying to make amends.

A bitter vindication that he almost certainly carried forward to 2016-17 in a failed attempt to show that Charlton was no more than a “storm in a tea cup” and all was well.

But was it always no more than a “storm in a tea cup” to him? It’s not stretching things to think that he had a “you’re all being a bit dramatic over one game, substitution or player when we’ve a whole squad and season to think about” attitude towards the fans whenever something went wrong or wasn’t to their liking. The supposed “little” things at the time? They all add up in the end. They were actually crucially reflective of the negative aspects in his character, his approach, and ultimately in the players he most regularly selected to play in the team. Every decision has a consequence and every quirk sparks a reaction. One cannot hope to be forever “saved” by the right results.

A manager can be successful and a player can do his job well, but if the character of either rubs a fan the wrong way then there is no point trying to change his or her mind just because a feeling of unity would seem nicer for all of us. Briefly, theorise how patronising the final ten games of 2015-16 might have come across to some: the managerial saviour, hung out to dry by the “heretics” who wouldn’t believe in him anymore, relishing in being magically resurrected just in time to lead Boro to the Promised Land. A triumph that looked less professional and more personal.

For some, what a player or manager did, does, can do or might do on the pitch may be enough, but for most, I gather, it might not be. The rapid fall from grace of Gaston Ramirez has left an arguably irremovable stain over all the magical qualities he showed us on top of his game, and Stewart Downing has stood out – rightly or wrongly – as a symptom of a strong collective crashing and burning. More than that, Downing, for whatever reason, simply hasn’t delivered what his fee, wages and status promised. For his sake and ours, these are things that we must be willing to overlook if he is to be wholly re-accepted into the fold under Garry Monk. Personally, I still believe he has a part to play – but does everyone?

The consequences in the aftermath of Rudy Gestede’s wrongly allowed equaliser and the celebrations that followed have had serious ramifications for several who were at the Riverside that day in November 2014. To his credit, Gestede has knuckled down, acclimatised to his still relatively new surroundings and clearly won a series of fans over with his commitment. Unfortunately the scars still linger for those most affected three years ago, and we have to accept and respect that. Not everyone is in the position of being able to appreciate his form from a distance.

There is a compelling argument that analysis should be confined to footballing arguments and that the efforts of those on the pitch should not be undermined and embarrassed by exalting those off it. Strong and fair though it sounds, it misses the point that fandom and analysis are separate entities. The reflective analyst, for example, can dress up a combative draw as part of rebuilding, an adjustment period, or a learning experience for a player or a team. The emotive fan, psyched up by a momentary knee-jerk response, is much, much less likely to. Subjective passion overrules objective rationality in the heat of competition, at sometimes terrible costs, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

Of course, it’s not always personal. Some have welcomed Marvin Johnson’s potential and Ryan Shotton’s usefulness, others are not so sure about either player. I’m in the former camp myself, but I understand why some would be in the latter: the difficulty of the “benefit of the doubt” approach is that points may be dropped and confidence lost during the time it takes for the new faces to adjust.

And what of Britt Assombalonga? There is a feeling in some quarters that Patrick Bamford is being hard done by while our mostly misfiring Congolese marksman starts every game up top. From a distance, one can appeal for patience as he finds his way and hopefully, eventually, comes good. From closer up, frustration may be felt. Or worse, perhaps, an inkling that Monk is exhibiting what appears to be a common managerial trait, standing by his marquee signing until he silences the doubters or has absolutely no justification for starting him anymore. If it pays off, great – if not, we, as a club, will be paying many a price.

That is one of the many risks and realities that comes with accepting and integrating new arrivals – and it is the manner of how everyone accepts and deals with them that will determine how Boro move forward as a club today.

As Garry Monk approaches his first home game as Boro boss, Simon Fallaha looks into what his teams must do to charm the Riverside faithful. History shows that his task may be tougher than he thinks…

Nobody in the southern press, at least nobody opposed to Boro’s decision to sack Gareth Southgate, could understand why the decision was made to dismiss a manager who had taken his team to one point from the summit of the Championship.

Statistically it made no sense. Beneath the surface, however, it made perfect sense.

There are many factors that culminate in a managerial farewell, but a primary one is home form. “Home form is vital” is one of the biggest clichés in the football book for a reason – how your team performs at home can make or break you.

So it was for Southgate. Away from home his team had defeated Swansea (yes!), Scunthorpe, Sheffield Wednesday and Reading, conceding only one goal, and had only been denied more points at Coventry and Bristol City by late, late leakages. At home, a good win over Ipswich was the exception rather than the rule: remember laboured wins over Doncaster and Derby, an uninspiring 0-0 draw with Sheffield United (our next opponents!) and three defeats without a single goal scored, one of them being a right hiding against West Brom?

I am positive that the fans wouldn’t have minded, at least not as much, if the team had struggled away if they had performed at home. But Southgate’s Boro were doing brilliantly away, and struggling at home. And when the vast majority of fans are seeing you at home, and seeing you struggle, all the statistics in the world about possession won’t protect you.

Strike that… all the statistics in the world full stop. Perhaps.

Between 2014-16, Aitor Karanka’s home record in the league was thirty-one wins, ten draws and only five defeats. That should be more than enough, at least on paper, to counter criticism that he was merely happy not to lose games.

But, and this is the big but, how many of those thirty-one wins genuinely live long in the memory? Football isn’t simply about results, regardless of their significance to the team who attains them. It is, as Jorge Valdano said, not the information on the score sheet that lingers longest, but the aspiration for greatness and the feelings that engenders.

It is a key reason why memories of the infamous 1996-97 season still endure, regardless of a win rate of under 50% in the league – which was actually 20% before Christmas! Against Newcastle in the cup, and West Ham & Chelsea in the league, to name but a few, Boro produced breath-taking displays which inspired the fans to dream of previously untold possibilities never seen again.

Fast-forward to Bryan Robson’s most successful Premier League campaign and, aside from a Paul Gascoigne free-kick here and a couple of Hamilton Ricard lobs there, you haven’t much to talk about. Similarly uninspiring was the 2011-12 campaign – Tony Mowbray may have taken us to the verge of the play-offs, but there were no home wins worth remembering barring those against Birmingham and Southampton.

And there were just two home matches in 2014-15 that endured for similar reasons: Boro 2, Derby 0 and Boro 4, Ipswich 1. Games where we, to borrow that overused term, released the handbrake, expressed ourselves and dared to dream. The wins against Norwich & Millwall in the league, and Brentford in the play-offs, which produced ten goals between them, deserve honourable mentions too. But they were victories of the more controlled kind, sporadic individual brilliance mostly submerged for the need of the collective.

Ah-ha. The collective. The system. The product of burgeoning tactics and caution, the magical becoming the often machinic, the effective and efficient not entertaining enough for a typical home fan’s liking. The right statistics alone are not enough to make the increasingly expensive Riverside ticket worth purchasing, especially for those spoiled on the diet of 1990s “catwalk football” in the Premier League’s formative, less saturated, less evolved years. All that seems a thing of the past in an atmosphere dominated by results-driven functionality – soullessly regimented, risk-averse, adventure exuding methodology where points and prizes clearly matter more than attraction and aesthetics. It is not that the creativity is no longer there – when it shows, it’s actually sublime – but it is fleeting, submerged in a result over game, certainty over chance and statistics over style intent.

The pressure of style carries more emphasis when you combine it with a typical away side’s approach. It was common for teams who visited the Riverside to contain and look to strike, as Boro would for away games, as opposed to playing a more open game. When the opposition that played most openly arrived, say, Cardiff in 2016, the more exciting games tended to ensue. That was all very well. And it worked exceptionally well when Boro contained and struck most clinically on the road at Ipswich and Brighton, in indelibly commanding showings. But what about when a team “parks the bus”? Especially one not renowned for doing so? How do the fans, manager, and team react?

I point, again, to the home draw with Bournemouth in 2014 and the debate that followed it. On paper it’s an open and shut case against the “moaners”: the “for heaven’s sake, a draw is a common result in a top of the table clash, and the season’s still relatively young. What on earth are they making such a big deal out of it for?” rhetoric. But you must read between the lines.

Being disappointed not to win is one thing, but trying to justify the result instead of looking for improvements is another. It’s easy to assume that two good teams cancelled each other out. The reality seemed more that Karanka was not prepared for Eddie Howe to diverge from his attacking style, and had no answer once a strong start didn’t bring Boro’s customary “early goal”. It was as if our then manager was following a probability law: 85-90% of the time, we’ll win, so let’s prioritise saving the point. Whatever happens, that’s a continued unbeaten run and another clean sheet for the records. That kind of thing.

But how will that read with fans who have paid good money to see their team have a real go? There is a marked difference between achievement and entertainment – the former is easy to admire in the long term but hard to love in the moment.

What a team achieves on the home pitch has got to be worth it for the paying customer. A football ground is not, or at least should not be, the equivalent of an art house cinema, where every moment can be reflected upon, rationalised, dissected and admired for its “craft” and “depth”. All that comes afterwards for a reason. The best remembered football grounds are emotional cauldrons of noise, created by thrilling drama and momentary spectacle that “genius” tacticians, quality defending and passing accuracy can’t do on their own. And while it worked nicely for me to sit back and admire how coolly, calmly and sometimes clinically Karanka’s Boro stroked the ball around, it’s not so hunky dory when you’re in the stadium and haven’t seen enough shots on target.

That’s the extent of the task Garry Monk is facing – achieving success and pleasing the fans. But the responsibility cannot rest with Monk and the players alone. The fans, at least at the start, have got to look within and give that extra bit of support required to the new regime. As Andrew Glover put it in 2012 when contrasting away and home support:

“At other stadiums Boro fans know they have to play their part and fulfil their side of the deal. In turn the team has probably come to expect good backing and give an extra ounce of effort from time to time. At home the majority just sit and wait. When the goals don’t come, the mumbling starts and the booing during and at the end of games leaves the squad feeling apprehensive about playing on their home turf.”

That was then and this is now. Fair enough. But it is an issue worth raising nonetheless. Especially because it is not unique to Boro. Roy Keane once recalled the crowd being “curiously quiet” when Manchester United fortuitously scraped past Dynamo Kiev in a Champions League home game they had to win. It was as if, in his words, they had resented the absence of the spectacle they had come to see.

Any crowd would be delighted with a hatful of goals: to many, after all, they’re football’s oxygen. But the fans also need to be there for the team during the hard days and nights, when the team really needs a lift. Boro have no divine right to an automatic promotion place and I’ve a sneaking feeling that Riverside visitors will remind us of this sooner rather than later.

The first of whom, Sheffield United, have a recent history of uninspiring, even painful visits. Apart from the booing endured following the scoreless draw I mentioned earlier, there was an absolutely dire 1-0 win against a Blades side then managed by the late, lamented Gary Speed. A Scottish striker many of us would rather not talk about – alright, Kris Boyd – scored the only goal amidst the gloom.

With the current Boro team still to gel and Sheffield United more than likely to be “up for it” after a decent start to their Championship return, I’m expecting a much more interesting encounter. And if it helps to bring the Riverside fans back, win or lose, then so much the better.

A first Boro goal for one of our new forwards would be a good start – and a good omen.

In going for what seems to be the correct combination of character and talent, the new Boro manager is already winning Simon Fallaha over

My favourite Aitor Karanka signing was David Nugent. Not, it must be said, because there’s any concrete statistical evidence to prove it: it’s doubtful that Nugent, or Nuge, made more runs, completed more passes, won more aerial duels and made more tackles than any other Boro player in 2015-16. His goals per game ratio definitely wasn’t the highest either. But he was the shot in the arm that a team looking to overcome the tag of nearly men needed. Being born with the ability to score and create is one thing, knowing just where and when to pop up, on and off the pitch, to raise everyone’s spirits immeasurably within a matter of minutes or a split second is another. There are few moments in 2015-16 that match the gloom-to-boom of Nuge’s late, late winner against Hull, his crucial assist away at Bolton, and his heart-warming post-promotion celebration weeks later. Like so many players before him, Nuge had no reason to see Middlesbrough FC as anything more than a job, but he never acted like he was passing through or using the club. He was neither a badge-kisser nor egotistical, just a hired gun who called the right shots at the right place at the right time by being as true to himself as a player and as a character as you could hope for. One liked him. One wanted to hang out with him. One even wanted to be him. His skills were deceptively modest and imminently relatable, the kind that an everyman could aspire to replicate.

It is why I remember and regard Nugent more fondly than Alvaro Negredo, Mark Viduka and Fabrizio Ravanelli, regardless of their superior technique, pedigree and goal tallies: a “we’re too good for this” feel uncomfortably lings over the famous Italian, Aussie and Spaniard. It is also why, looking back, Jordan Rhodes’ short Boro career is looked upon with disappointment, because behind Rhodes’ staggering goal record rested a genuine persona of dignified humility. Rhodes was a more crucial part of the team than Karanka cared to appreciate because he was always human, always real. He was never too good for the club.

Nugent, and Rhodes, are the kind of players and characters that I am convinced Garry Alan Monk has his eye on as he settles into the Boro hotseat in the early days of this new era for Boro. People who, like Monk himself, may not be as local as Tony Mowbray or David Wheater, but will respect the difficulty and relish the prospect of a promotion challenge in the Championship while also inspiring and unifying communal spirit. Now, I would never claim to object, even today, to the presence of Negredo, Viduka and Ravanelli, or the team building of Karanka. At their best, regardless of how often that came, their skills and his teams really were something to behold, the finishing savoured, the solidity and passing admired. But alas, they were reflective of how, to borrow the words of Boro fan Chris Bartley, Boro’s soul was being eroded, little by little.

To use an example, the progressive elements and relentlessly positive statistics of AKBoro – which convinced me to plead for patience back then – were not enough, in many eyes, to cast a shadow over an eventually punishing legacy of sterility and narcissism. We’ve been there repeatedly: a few world class players thrown into a team of mediocrities, signing past-their-best stars with a “one final pay cheque” vibe to them, bringing in big names from Scotland on inflated wages, or insisting that all individuals subvert themselves to the manager’s collective: all, despite varying and even indelible degrees of success, without a thought to future or eventual consequences. Bryan Robson, Steve McClaren, Gordon Strachan, Aitor Karanka, you name them: we’ve often aimed high, and we’ve regularly been badly burned.

Which is what makes MonksBoro, which, to me, looks like a back-to-basics ModestBoro, so refreshing. Free of the effective but machinic stranglehold that grips not only teams of Karanka’s ilk but frankly a great deal of top-level football – see Jose Boreinho’s United – I sense greater liberty in Boro’s squad, the kind that is to be expected with a fresh start. The manner of his early signings – at the time of writing, Cyrus Christie, Jonny Howson and Martin Braithwaite – suggests that this is a man who likes the seasoned and dependable with a touch of the unpredictable, the sort of character-and-talent combination key to promotion.

If an equally seasoned and dependable forward, be it Britt Assombalonga or someone else, joins, we will then have four proven Championship forwards, along with George Miller, in our ranks, a fine blend of flair, instinct and usefulness. At least as long as Patrick Bamford regains his confidence and Cristhian Stuani, if he stays, is allowed to be the poacher we all know he can be. Perhaps playing Rudy Gestede alongside him will help?

What we learnt, the hard way, from Orta and Karanka, is while it is right to look for players with more skill (Negredo) and pace (Adama Traore) once you aspire to greater things, you have to be sure you’re signing the right kind of character. You would have thought we’d learned this from Strachan, Moaner McDonald and Bully Bailey – as I once illustrated, on-pitch statistics can be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

Our latest set of new names may not excite to the extent Negredo and Victor Valdes did, but what they lack in obvious glamour, they may well make up for in commitment and integration. These are prominent virtues of a successful start.

That said, I have two reservations. One is that we must accept that this is a serious period of transition. At the time of writing, the spine of Dani Ayala, Ben Gibson, George Friend, Grant Leadbitter and Adam Clayton, all of whom have been at the club for at least three years, is still with us – and three years should be the optimum period for any footballing spine to prosper. Some of those names, if they stick around, are young and hungry enough to continue thriving, but at least a couple are not the Championship force they once were or seemed. It might be time for Adlene Guedioura to earn his corn.

Secondly, this “modesty” is both an asset and a weakness. Do we wear our roots, our failings, like some kind of badge of honour? If we find it hard to accept the ugliness in the PL, are we forever destined to be the beggars at the banquet, the water drinkers among the wine lovers, grateful for the scraps from off the top table?

Once a manager plays with the big boys, or even competes to play with the big boys, he is bound to deal with strong characters who will not be so submissive to his whim. Sooner or later, as Karanka found out, not everyone will want to play to the manager’s tune. People will outgrow him. Trust once gained from the chairman will be trust lost before he knows it.

Unless, that is, he can grow with his characters rather than force them to conform. Can we trust in Monk to do so? It’s too early to say, but for now it certainly does appear that Monk is, without signing or being a local boy, as close to the essence of what Boro is about as we could hope for. He could be our managerial David Nugent, a man who is accustomed to and knows how to be promoted from the Championship.

Yeah, I think I’m already a fan.

Sometimes looking the part can be more than enough. Simon Fallaha explores managerial image and how it seems the answer to everything… until it all goes belly up

The contrast between the two head coaches during Chelsea’s 3-0 win over Boro at Stamford Bridge was extremely interesting.

Antonio Conte, an Italian legend, the animated magician who crafted a title for the previously faltering Blues in his first season in England. A saviour and hero for his visible passion, confidence and charisma as much as his dedication to the football.

Steve Agnew, the… er… coach. That’s it, really.

No touchline expressions out of the ordinary. No big interviews on detailed dossiers or on how much his family loves the area. No continental appeal. Just a football coach assigned with lifting a free-falling side shorn of all confidence and cohesion.

Many a fan wants their coach to be more than a coach. A figurehead. A symbol of promised, or delivered, progress. A cult figure. Management is as much, if not more, about personality than football in this media-saturated world.

Remember when Tony Mowbray came to manage Boro? It took just one sentence to bowl us over.

“This has always been my club ever since I was a little boy… I can still smell the Bovril at the back of the Holgate end.”

At that stage, and as difficult as the first two months or so were on the pitch, the football didn’t seem to matter as Boro’s identity and eventual belief was restored by one of their own. Eventually, and sadly, Boro freefell, Mogga’s halo slipped, and Aitor Karanka arrived.

And again, albeit in a different way, here was someone with the makings of a cult figure. A protege of Jose Mourinho. A native of the World and European Champions. A player and assistant coach at the one and only Real Madrid. Someone who would build new foundations at Boro and take them to the next level.

Less than a year later, “little Boro” were scoring twice against mighty Liverpool at Anfield, losing only after a marathon of penalties. The fans, players and coaches had done the club proud in a unifying, courageous showing that inspired Boro to continue challenging at the top of the Championship.

But, to paraphrase Eamon Dunphy, there was a consequence: the story of Aitor Karanka and Boro was no longer that of a football coach and team. Tactics and team selection were irrelevant.

Karanka’s transformation from ordinary coach to cult leader was effectively completed that night. And with it came an undeniably joyous and momentous journey, but one where the most dissenting of views about the football and the coach were not welcome, lest they burst the bubble.

The facts from Anfield that night reveal that Boro failed to beat a weakened Liverpool team. The facts of Karanka himself, soon to be initially exposed in an ugly fashion at home to Blackburn, reveal that beneath this likable family man, imperious looking leader and seemingly smart tactician rested a volatile explosiveness, the worst aspects of a control freak who couldn’t handle his big plans being derailed.

To me, at least, the horrible naughty steps, costly hissy fits and not-entirely-explicable omissions could be forgiven, if not forgotten, so long as the momentum and results were the right ones. Which they were, mostly, for two years. But, far too often, it was progress of the most sterile kind, with an emphasis on defence ahead of the attacking principles that Mowbray had worked so hard to restore.

So why, for so long, was this overlooked?

It’s only speculation, but I think the answer is simple: after years in the wilderness, our favourite men in red were being taken seriously. The value of being shown the limelight by someone who’d seen it repeatedly, the pleasure of saturation media coverage for the right reasons before and after big cup ties, the sentiment of being made to feel important with a Real Madrid alumnus in charge… it was too much to resist, despite clear signs that all wasn’t well.

And all really wasn’t well, as early as a 0-0 home draw with Bournemouth in late 2014. There are so many ways in which a result like this could be, and was, rationalised: they were a good Championship side, they were top (and eventually won the league), they were on a long winning run, and it wasn’t as if Boro didn’t have their concrete chances to win, namely Adam Reach hitting the bar. Most of all, we were “only Boro”: nobody expected us to be among the promotion challengers, and we had plenty of time to put things right over the course of the season. So surely we were only being realistic.

The flip side of the argument suggests that no team should settle for a 0-0 draw regardless of the circumstances or the quality of the opposition. And it’s equally reasonable to argue that managing expectations is an easy way for limited coaches turned cult leaders to retain their Messianic status in the eyes of fans, minimising upset when the team doesn’t win, sentiment overlooking reflection. When all is hunky dory, cult leaders will feel like they’ve all the time in the world. When it isn’t… well, March 2016 and January 2017 say it all.

Karanka may argue that despite the overall defensive intent, there were more than enough sublime passes and goals to hint that they could indeed achieve something more with the right time. And that Boro were often just one more chance taken, one more good final ball or one fewer defensive slip away from better results.

He’d be right. To a point. But the trouble with Karanka, and many a cultist, is that he and his teams repeatedly seem on the verge of transcending the very good to the truly brilliant, but they never really make it – the team are too deeply embedded in his personality and ways to make that extra step. If so much goes so well for so long, the cultist may feel he has no need to change, and therefore both he and the club will be less prepared when things do go belly up.

Many a “cult manager”, and Mourinho falls into this trap too, is equivalent to a parent who wants to indulge in the privilege of guiding his child for as long as he possibly can, unwilling to truly accept that the child must grow and learn. Because of that, said manager is danger of becoming increasingly aloof, trapped in a cloud. The once inspirational personality transforms into something more oppressive. Insecurity and neediness come to the fore, the desire to be repeatedly reassured of how “great” he is fatally taking precedence over the club and the players.

It is only when he is very badly burned that he appears to learn his lesson – and even then, the relief is only temporary. At the time, I praised Karanka’s comebacks from unwelcome expulsions, naughty steps, hissy fits and terrible performances as a reward for being patient, as all supporters who love being in line with a cult do. But they were equally torturous and frustrating. Karanka could be perceived as someone who did thoughtless, mean things, then “made up for it” with a giant sentimental gesture that planted our head in the clouds for a while. Hull and QPR at home, and to an extent Bolton away, were the epitome of it, memorable finales drawing a veil over painful turgidity. In other words, he was as much a “hero” for “bouncing back” as a “villain” for digging the hole in the first place.

Criticism of Karanka did seem horribly extreme – if you can’t enjoy winning, and being promoted, then there’s something wrong, isn’t there? – but he made his own bed by seeking the limelight to the extent he did. Like his mentor. When it is clear that preserving image and pride takes priority over the well-being of the club and players, there is no other way for the cultist but out. That is when it dawns upon even the coach’s fans that their one-time could-do-no-wrong hero is, after all, fallible, and that the dissenters might just have had a point after all. That, as the more cynical of us may say, you can fool all of the people, but only some of the time.

A lesson to be learned from Aitor Karanka’s tenure is this – as appealing as basking in the upward mobility of the cult of personality might be, it is our job to retain a level of objective judgement about what could be better. Without, of course, going overboard.

Too many players too soon, poorly thought through recruitment, and lack of integration spelt the end for Aitor Karanka after three years of steady progress, writes Simon Fallaha

In the near-immediate aftermath of Aitor Karanka’s departure as Head Coach of Middlesbrough FC (phew – long sentence!), perhaps we should take a breather and briefly review 2016-17 to date. We may well find that we should not permit ourselves too much surprise at the Boro’s failings.

Now, you can point your finger at our beleaguered ex-manager all you want, but it will not change things. For all his considerable limitations, he had a modus operandi to get us into the Premier League and he achieved this, with the added bonus, if you can call it that, of leaving us in a position where we can still escape the drop. Albeit later than many would have liked in both cases.

The reality is, man for man, the Premier League experience of this Boro squad, especially in a relegation scrap, is limited, or worse, virtually nil. Let’s look at the new arrivals from last summer in a “starting XI” kind of way.

Valdes/Guzan, Barragan, Chambers, Espinosa, Fabio, De Roon, Guedioura, Adama, Fischer, Ramirez/Gestede, Negredo/Bamford.

We have signed the effective equivalent of an entirely new side since last summer. But is it a Premier League collective? Compared to our rivals, you’d have to admit… not really.

There are players in that group that have shone at the top level, for top clubs, but their availability was another warning. You couldn’t just expect the likes of, say, Victor Valdes, Antonio Barragan, Alvaro Negredo or even Fabio da Silva to return to Premier League football and hit the ground running with a high performance level, as if they’d never been away. For those who had never played in England before, say, Bernardo Espinosa, Marten De Roon and Viktor Fischer, it was harder still. They needed to be surrounded by the right character if they were to prosper as Boro wished. And it is still open to question if Boro have found, or even can find, this character.

One club where character is not in short supply is Burnley. At least eight of their squad from their ill-fated, low-scoring return to the Premier League in 2014-15 are still on board today – Tom Heaton, Michael Keane, George Boyd, Sam Vokes, Dean Marney, Ashley Barnes, Ben Mee and Scott Arfield. Former crown jewel Danny Ings was sold at a very healthy profit, and Sean Dyche smartly and spontaneously invested the proceeds, parachute payments and later promotion money in the likes of Andre Gray, Joey Barton, Steven Defour, Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady. The rewards are currently there for all to see.

In praising the Clarets, I should emphasise “spontaneously”. Unlike Boro, they are not the kind to be outfoxed or destabilized by “that wasn’t in the script” moments – under Dyche they are the kings of party pooping and timely boosts. Once upon a time, they couldn’t win a game in the Championship and their front men, including one Jelle Vossen, weren’t cutting it. Before you knew it, Vossen was back in Belgium, Gray had arrived, and the victories came along. Similarly, the signings of Hendrick and Brady went through right at the end of the transfer window – the right players at the right time.

By contrast, although it was said that Boro did good business early, we concluded both transfer windows by selling Albert Adomah, Adam Reach and Jordan Rhodes. In the greater scheme of things, perhaps, whether their replacements were any better or not was irrelevant – the concern was more down to whether or not their replacements were right for Boro. Reach was a talented academy product, Adomah was a very popular player, and Rhodes was a proven goal scorer at a time when Boro needed goals.

The wrong players to sell at the wrong time, then?

It would matter less if we could say that their replacements are legitimate improvements.

But even if they are, at least on a technical level, do they connect with the area, and Boro, in quite the same way? Do they plug into the ethos of the club and what it is all about?

High-profile recruitment is, and always has been, a gamble. Arrivals like Victor Valdes and Alvaro Negredo can, in a way, be likened to Emerson and Fabrizio Ravanelli. Their ability can delight fans and inspire everyone on the pitch to play above themselves.

But their wage and status can also cause friction within the squad and resentment among the paying public, who may well perceive them as proof of the George Graham maxim that if a player doesn’t see his new club as a step up, he’ll think he’s doing you a favour by being there.

To a lesser extent, you have Scott McDonald and Nicky Bailey. Both made a positive contribution to the Moggalution in its most upwardly mobile times.

Yet you cannot quantify a signing as good or bad solely by on-the-pitch statistics.

McDonald’s tally of forty goals, beaten only in the last twenty years by Mark Viduka and Hamilton Ricard, and Bailey’s very good 2011, are fine achievements on their own terms. But those terms are sadly piddling when you consider their moodiness, a transfer fee of roughly £5 million between them (high for Boro at the time), and large wage packets. They were bought to be part of a promotion team – what they did do may have raised our hopes here and there, but ultimately amounted to nothing. In short, the ends simply didn’t justify the means.

The same certainly couldn’t be said for Rhodes, his purple patch of five in seven giving us both an invaluable lift and crucial points on the way to promotion. Far fewer goals from a more expensive signing, but a much bigger difference made by someone who truly appeared to have connected with the club.

Connection. There’s that word again. By the end of 2012-13 most of Boro’s coaching staff had a “connection” – they were locally born ex-players, along with Craig Hignett and Mark Venus. When Karanka arrived he quickly made his mark by bringing in his own men. It may have been neither parochial nor popular but there was a necessity to it, for the name of progress.

Fast forward to 2016 and Boro’s promotion heroes have overcome countless challenges to triumph as a unit. Now they, like Mogga’s backroom staff, have a feel of a family that doesn’t want to be broken up. But to build a platform for survival in the Premier League, needs have to be placed ahead of wants. Head must, reluctantly, take precedence over heart.

But a team needs heart and personality as well as brain and skill. Otherwise the club will no longer move in the right direction. And by bringing in too many players, too soon, the strength, momentum and belief of the Boro collective was irreparably damaged.

At the centre of this we have the unfortunate case of Adomah and Daniel Ayala. Their all-around development, the curbing of their erraticism and the maturity of their football brains should have been Karanka’s greatest legacy. Alas, one left the club under a cloud and the other now effectively resembles a central defensive Daniel Sturridge.

It didn’t have to be like this. It is understandable for a manager to be exceptionally frustrated at either having his authority challenged in the heat of the moment or not having their best defender available when he needs him most. But there comes a time when you must accept that nothing goes according to plan all the time. One must learn to forgive and trust, to be as patient with his players as he wants them to be with him, if not more. To guide them through the bad times. Taking pride from improving eager, willing newcomers – for example, De Roon and Espinosa – is one thing. Learning to integrate the newly high-profile talent you yourself contributed to improving is another.

This, and more, played its part in the lead up to the transfer window of discontent, the winter of very tough love that spelt the end of Aitor Karanka’s steady progress on Teesside.

Today we find ourselves picking up the pieces and scrambling for positives amidst the debris of wrecked dreams. We can admire the commitment of De Roon. We can enjoy the speed of Adama Traore. We can praise Valdes’ improvement – despite his errors, he has kept us in many games. We can take delight in the beautifully taken goals Negredo actually has scored. But has the cost been worth it?

I’m reminded of 1996-97, when it took drastic in-house divisions, freefalling to the bottom of the table and a points deduction for Bryan Robson to finally wake up and smell the coffee. The playing styles of both seasons, coincidentally twenty years apart, may seem like polar opposites, but both have been mainly dire for similar reasons – poorly thought through recruitment and lack of integration.

I guess, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Typical Boro. Or am I wrong?

When Steve Gibson summoned Aitor Karanka to take charge of Middlesbrough FC, he was hiring more than Boro’s first foreign manager. He was hiring a symbol. Someone who would take Boro beyond their parochial shell and into the dreams, and realities, of twenty-first century top flight football while retaining the local pride that made Boro unique.

Under Tony Mowbray, Boro had restored that pride. We had at times played exciting football on an unenviable budget. But we had lost that feeling of belonging at the top.

Then Karanka, or Aitor, or AK, came along. Now, AK had won titles and European Cups. He’d worked for a manager who’d won titles and European Cups. His homeland were then World and European Champions. He clearly felt entitled to win, to succeed, to compete at the very top, and wanted everyone else to share his desire, faith and commitment to the cause in a unified atmosphere. It is the kind of arrival that, when it goes right, fuels upwardly mobile momentum – and before long, it almost certainly did.

Having taken time – albeit significantly longer than fans would have liked – to lay strong defensive foundations and steer the club clear of danger, the team were granted license to move forward, and how they responded. After just under a year in charge the confidence of a newly unified and imperious Boro backline had spread to the rest of the team. A model of stylish solidity and patient, passing probing, a commanding collective, had gradually emerged from the shambles of a sadly-never-forgotten first half at Barnsley in October 2013.

Of course it was far from all sweetness and light – there were naughty steps, costly mistakes, painful fall-outs and the most typical of Typical Boro heartaches to come on the way to the Premier League, but it was an unforgettable, remarkable and admirable journey.

So where did it go wrong?

On paper it would not appear to have gone wrong. Boro have been promoted after a seven-year absence from the top flight, are in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, and are out of the bottom three, a situation that, at first glance, a lot of managers would gladly take.

But football is played on grass and mud, not paper, and the dour fare that the paying public have generally seen at the Riverside and on the road this season neither inspires nor motivates. There have been exceptions, but they’ve been small oases in a much larger desert.

In a way, early season contentment with a 17th place finish was a breath of rational air, which spoke to a long-term plan of establishing Boro in the Premier League. But, for Boro, it also falls into what writer Nick Miller called the who-are-you-trying-to-kid camp. A club that has invested so much money in and fan base that have waited so long for a return to the top will not, and cannot, simply be pleased with consistently and inescapably hovering above the drop zone, especially not in the manner Boro are.

There is no easy answer for this current malaise, but part of the blame has to lie with Karanka’s handling of individual skill. Despite brilliance, consistent or otherwise, from totems and wingers like Muzzy Carayol, Emmanuel Ledesma, Albert Adomah, Lee Tomlin, Diego Fabbrini, Gaston Ramirez, Adama Traore and home boy Stewart Downing, the strengths of Karanka’s Boro – AKBoro – have mainly sprung from the power of the consistent collective. Two of the most memorable AKBoro victories, at Manchester City and Brighton, sprung from a team effort focused on containment, keeping a clean sheet and sprinkles of individual class when it mattered. As perfect as those afternoons may have seemed then, is it unreasonable to suggest some may have preferred the shackles of the system to be let loose a little more?

With AKBoro, the offensive personnel have been traded over with almost alarming regularity. It is not that each set of signings, at least up until Ramirez and Jordan Rhodes, weren’t an undeniable improvement on what came before – it was more concerning that AKBoro, despite incredible statistics, struggled to find the right attacking blend. And with Boro no longer coasting on the goodwill of a title race or promotion, it is harder to attract or retain the right talent. Hence, perhaps, the underwhelming January signings and the trouble with Ramirez.

When a collective is no longer moving in the right direction, individual brilliance, more than ever, is required to raise it from stagnation and kick it into gear again. This is exactly what had to happen in January 2016, when the tide of the Karankanaut began to turn from the crest of its wave.

As talent in the squad grew, so did wages. And egos. And there can be little doubt Karanka was not wholly comfortable with this. As harsh as it may sound, we could say this arguably spoke to a relatable but unfortunate insecurity in AK’s character back then. It came to a head post-Rotherham, when an undermining of his authority in the heat of a promotion battle going wrong led to a threat to leave; theoretically, a possible psychological ploy to be reassured of his importance to the cause. It didn’t work. His bluff was called, and by the time he realised what he’d done it was too late. Of course, he came back and made up, and Boro made it up, but serious cracks had been exposed in a once imperious facade. As under Bryan Robson, we were thought of in some circles as a small club who tried to buy their way to the top and either failed, or nearly failed.

Karanka has sadly not learned his lesson over this unfortunate reverse psychology. What exactly did he hope to gain by naming Boro’s biggest win of the season as our worst performance of the season? In fairness, it was not a very good performance at all, and he may well have been reminding his players not to get carried away, but to make a public utterance like that, at Christmas, when we are so starved of wins and goals, invites fan theories that the manager is unhappy the team did things more their way than his. Sometimes you’ve got to play the game – and that time, he didn’t play it.

Patience has regularly been a virtue with AKBoro. We have seen that. But it is hard to ignore the feeling that this time, we have sailed into a storm. A manager once in control and seemingly at one with the club (remember the celebration in the stands against Derby?) looks like he is now fighting vainly to hide his desperation and edginess. We feel your pain too, Aitor, but at this time we need a positively strong figurehead to guide us to safety – and you must convince us you can be that again. We have the tools, the foundations, the goal difference and the position to build a successful end to the season, but we don’t seem to have the momentum and belief. It may still work out – but have we enough reason to believe that it will work out?

We can but wait. And hope that AK’s Boro can once again remind us why we dared to dream.