@werdermouth “ It's no coincidence that Boro's best finish under Carrick contained quite a few PL-level players in Akpom, Archer and Ramsey with McGree and Howson fully fit too“
Not for getting we had Zac Steffen in goal on loan from Man City. 😎
@werdermouth A good analysis and thinking through it, a very tall order to achieve possibly even mid-table looking at the current squad.
If we remove the loanees, (only Doak and Travers have excelled in reality and we cannot afford the former and probably not the latter.)
Then we need a clear out before we start.
Glover, Dieng, but he is injured, out until possibly the end of the year.
Ayling is probably not going to be good enough, but on 30K a week, so we will be stuck with him. Dijksteel out of contract and not reliable enough. We can forget about Engel until 2026. Bangura has a big question mark over him, still injured, so hard to move on.
As Werder said we have four CB’s. None have real recovery pace. Fry would be OK if we had the right kind of CB alongside him possibly.
Edmundson is not good for Carrick ball and Lenihan has to be the same as Bangura. Will we get an offer for VDB.
I think we will lose Hackney. If we keep Howson, probably only a bit part player and he does not have sufficient pace now.
How good are Azaz, Whittaker, Burgzorg, McGree, Conway.
As many on here have said, some are lightweight, poor at defending, cannot tackle and go missing. Most would be difficult to get rid of if we wanted to thin out the forwards to bring in new players.
Then we will have the returning players we sent out on loan. Only Coburn looks as though he could be worth while keeping and again as werder said, probably not a Carrick ball player.
When one thinks about it, and I may have missed some players, the task to bring together a revamped squad that can fit into Carrick’s one dimensional system looks to be almost impossible to achieve.
Has anyone looked at the final Championship table, and looked particularly at the teams which will contest the Play-Offs. The BBC Sport App shows the last 6 games of the season with green marking a win, grey showing a draw and red showing a defeat. The table from 3-6 inclusive shows the terrible form of those teams which eventually qualified for the end-of-season mini-tournament. The table is mostly red!
Six games played by four teams - so 24 games at the end of the season. With the most recent games shown last, the list shows:
Sheffield United - LLWLW
Sunderland - DLLLLL (!!)
Coventry City - WDWLLW
Bristol City - WDWLLD
Normally you might expect at least one team to burst into the Play-Offs full of confidence after a run of victories. Here it appears none of the teams appear to be that fussed about promotion. It looks like a case of "After you, Sheff U. No - after you, Sunderland...."
Coventry City's form looks the nearest to "almost OK", helped of course by the last-game win over Boro. Not one of the other teams has won more than 2 out of the six games. The Play-Offs MIGHT turn out to be interesting and some good football MIGHT be played.
On the other hand the competition which is about to begin MIGHT be like a tennis contest today between Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka, Andy Roddick and Boris Becker. Players who once were capable of winning against the best, and who were extremely successful. But that was then. Their form now might see a win in a Very Seniors competition or a social game at the country club, but they'd hardly frighten an active player in the top 500. I don't think Leeds or Burnley would frighten the top 17 teams in England and yet they both finished out of sight at the top of the league table, with 100 points each. So any of the four Play-Off teams would be even less frightening.
I suspect we know next year's likely fate of the 3 promoted teams but for the Play-Off winner, it seems even more likely.
And another way of looking at things is to wonder what would have happened in the Premier League if the yo-yo triplets (Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton) had not been there. That three effectively insulated the teams in the lower part of the table from the real fear of relegation. The bottom three were always going to be the bottom three and if your team was only occasionally a reasonable team, you could be confident it would be safe. Without the gruesome threesome being involved, the prime relegation competition would have been between those comatose giants of football, all with BIG stadiums: West Ham, Tottenham, ManU and Everton - the next four in the table! That relegation struggle would have concentrated the minds a little!
The speculation's started already:
They've collectively amassed just 26 points from their last 24 games - should be a play-off to see who drops into League One really 😉
To put that in context - the bottom four clubs in the Championship have collectively amassed 27 points from their last 24 games...
I certainly hope not besides I don’t think his wife would appreciate coming back to Middlesbrough 😂.The speculation's started already:
Come on BORO.
@werdermouth - Hardly a sprint to the line. More like a gentle jog to warm down.
Funnily enough I did wonder about Gary O'Neil as possible replacement to Carrick back when Boro had lost 5 in a row - he certainly had had his ups and downs as a manager in the PL and seems to favour a high-energy pressing game that may be better suited to the Championship - though sounded like he can get a bit annoyed with his players when things go wrong and doesn't accept players not putting in a shift.
@stircrazy Whether he stay or goes, one thing is certain, I believe.
Mr Gibson will make the decision quickly. If HE decides the club need another Coach, then the more time he has to make that choice the better.
After all, a new Coach may well have a very different take on the players we have, who goes and who may come in.
I know it is only May 5, but time is of the essence, as they say.
Didn't gary oneil get booked so he would be suspended and could go play golf when at boro. Or is it teesside urban myth
"Call me cynical but I can almost smell the briefing of Kieran Scott in this article as the finger of blame is pointed at Carrick. I noticed the absence of a comment that acknowledged that it was Carrick who first recommended Ben Doak to the Boro recruitment team."
Absolutely right, Werder. The recent pieces by Scott Wilson, widely described as "hard hitting" are nothing of the sort. We know from past experience that criticism of the Boro hierarchy has led to the banning of two journalists from the ground and press box, that one of those banned is now Wilson's closest colleague on the Echo, and that the whole episode led to other supportive Gazette journalists, Tallentire and Vickers, being moved on.
So my assumption all along has been that Wilson's highly critical pieces pointing the finger at Carrick, and only Carrick have been put out with the blessing, and probably at the instigation of someone within the Boro hierarchy, rather than from Wilson's desire to put his job on the line for the sake of his journalistic principles
Similarly there was a quite disgusting little squib from Craig Johns in the Gazette online today on Carrick's failure this season with an accompanying survey asking readers to decide whether Carrick should get the sack or not.
I was minded to leave a comment suggesting that in the interest of balance an article might appear tomorrow on the our recruitment failures this season with a similar survey on whether Kieron Scott should be sacked or not.
Oh and what about a survey on whether Tony Mowbray might have more to offer as a Director of football ?
I noticed that by this afternoon the offending article had been removed, and wondered whether this might have been at the instigation of the man who only a few weeks ago had given his vote of confidence to his head coach.
Scott's media briefings against Carrick, carried on throughout the season, are now coming to a head. The two men seem to be at complete loggerheads. Should Carrick be condemned to the same fate as Warnock and Wilder then we would have the extraordinary situation of three genuine football men with credentials, experience and honours which have earned them the highest and widest degree of respect throughout our national game losing their jobs at the expense of a totally ineffective individual whose CV would be hard pushed to fill half a sheet of A4 paper.
Whilst I was typing the above piece, Craig Johns must have been on the receiving end of the mother and father of all rollickings.
His original article has now re-appeared hastily rewritten at three times its original length putting contextual provisos into his criticisms of Carrick's "failures", adding a long section on the case for Carrick and a further section on other factors to be considered.
It all adds up to a frenetic rewriting and rebalancing of the original piece under pressure, I imagine, from the Boro hierarchy.
I would assume that the Director of Football has also been given a severe slap on the wrist. I hope that his Machiavellian relationship with the local press comes back to bite him.
As long as he didn't get booked to play crazy golf...
Let's not forget that Kieran Scott has been linked in recent months with a move to Crystal Palace as their sporting director and that may be at the heart of pointing the blame at Carrick for recruitment failures in the press.
If there is tensions between the two key members of staff then that is never good for a club as it is surely something that gets talked about between players - remember Latte Lath's rather cryptic parting message about things behind the scenes which he said were best not mentioned.
Without trust between footballing director and head coach then it won't lead to the best decisions being made for the team - in that sense Tony Mowbray is probably one of the most honourable men in football and would never get involved in such matters. If Scott leaves then there's no better person who always had a great eye for player too when scouting on a limited budget.
I would have TM as director of football, don't think he would want to do it
You're probably right, I'm sure Mogga would rather be a manager - it seems to be in his blood!
Would the Diasboro cognoscenti swap Carrick for Mowbray as manager? Not to work alongside MC, but as his replacement?
@werder and @lenmasterman - I HATE IT when clubs are at loggerheads with their local Press. I remember a lengthy Cold War between Newcastle United and THREE local papers in 2015.
I don't want a supine Press, frightened to air any cricticisms of the local team for fear of being "banned from Press Conferences and the stadium". Proper criticism, when things have been going wrong or where unconscionable events have been taking place away from the public gaze, seems perfectly reasonable and what the Press is there for. I suppose if a club bans certain journalists there is the risk the counter-action is for that journalist to say: "That's it! I have been banned from the club so, with nothing to lose, I will tell you what has REALLY been going on at the club and let the supporters decide who to believe or sympathise with." The journalist might watch the game on TV or online and, with a better view than in the stadium, give proper consideration to the performances of the players or the tactics employed by the team coaching staff, and report them. No longer having a preferred status with the club to protect, he might tell the truth. Some skeletons might be shaken out of their cupboards and explanations given for events which, at the time, seemed mysterious or even unfathomable but, in the light of that further information, becomes understandable.
To have a club controlling the information to come out seems a little bit like modern day Russia or North Korea. But then again, you will all know one of the two main newspapers in Russia was called Pravda (which ironically means "truth" or "justice"). The other main paper, Izvestia, was the offical organ of the Supreme Soviet and its name translates as "news".*
Of course the other side of the coin is that if the relationship is truly shattered, it will have an effect on the club AND the Press. News stories about the local club might be a big driver in the paper's sales - though I guess that counts for less these online-days. We are all led to believe that clubs put advertising in the papers and the loss of that might hurt the Press pocket. On the other hand, the local Press, sometimes more sympathetic to the local club than the club deserves, is the conduit between the club and its supporters, and it comes free if you cultivate the local journalists. Big companies pay a lot of money to advertise. Presumably they think it worthwhile or they wouldn't waste their money. So if the Press were to be banned by the club, the other side to that is the Press laying an embargo on the club. How would that be greeted by the club and its supporters?
In the real world, the relationship between a club and its local paper has to have something in it for both sides. The club might hope for a sympathetic explanation for any on-field difficulties from its local papers and will hope the pubicicity and information about games to be played will improve the prospects of selling tickets. The papers will hope that, when something of interest happens, their friendly football correspondent will be the first to find out about it from the club and so will steal a march on other sources of news. But that can only work if the people involved are being sensible and realistic.
A club at the bottom of the table and whose manager is letting his contract run down so he can take up a job with a club in a lower league, will hardly gain any credibility from stories in the local paper saying how well things are going and that everything thing is fine. It won't benefit the club or senior officals in the club to drip, drip information into the ears of the local Press to further one side of the story just as much as it isn't in the interests of the club to peddle misinformation which will, eventually, be shown to be untrue. If we neither believe the Press nor the club, we'd be in a prettty grim situation. Either honesty or silence shouldn't be above people in sport (or the Press), should it?
* Both papers are/were, of course, the purveyors of only the truest of truths.
One of the strong messages now being put out by the Gazette is that the reason the January window was the worst for years, was that most of the choices were MC's. The implication being that this was flying in the face of the much more sage advice of the recruitment team.
Diasborians May remember a few months back that I had been talking at length with a club member.
During the discussion it was revealed that all was not well behind the scenes and unfortunately it has come to pass that this has been transformed onto the playing side of the Boro.
As a consequence the team have not performed and we are where we are.
Let’s see what develops further but I believe that the failure to gain promotion will prove only to be part of the story yet to unfold!
Not going to promote rumours or tittle tattle it’s just a sorry state of affairs!
OFB
Would the Diasboro cognoscenti swap Carrick for Mowbray as manager? Not to work alongside MC, but as his replacement?
Why would he want to, Barnsley away before his sack was ugly
Diasborians May remember a few months back that I had been talking at length with a club member.
During the discussion it was revealed that all was not well behind the scenes and unfortunately it has come to pass that this has been transformed onto the playing side of the Boro.
As a consequence the team have not performed and we are where we are.
Let’s see what develops further but I believe that the failure to gain promotion will prove only to be part of the story yet to unfold!
Not going to promote rumours or tittle tattle it’s just a sorry state of affairs!
OFB
Mr Bob you tease the great unwashed, schrodingers rumour
So if you do know what really happened in January, or know someone that knows someone who does.......
Never doubted it
@forever-dormo “ * Both papers are/were, of course, the purveyors of only the truest of truths.”
As, of course, are all of the UK’s fine, unbiased newspapers. 😉