Weak, spineless, not good enough not much more to say
Imagine spending 250M of your own money and ending up with that shower
Just not good enough. No steel, no fight, no desire. Portsmouth were much hungrier which says a lot. Can’t see us making the playoffs if we carry on playing as we are which is lower middle table form at best. Someone needs to read the riot act to wake everyone up.
Rinse and repeat.
Definition of insanity etc.
However we frame it, we continue to throw away opportunities and points on a regular basis. Norwich away and many other home games spring to mind as well as the latest example today.
Playing personnel not up to a top 6 finish despite MFC seemingly happy with the quality of squad?
In game management found wanting yet again?
For me we should be solid top 6….I think we have the 2nd highest wage bill after PL relegation teams. So what is stopping us progressing and winning games? 1 dimensional team over reliant on Doak and LL and pretty poor in transition as well as too open at the back. Non existent left side so lack of balance in attack. Why have these deficiencies not been addressed in terms of recruitment and in game management?
As a final thought before I get on with the rest of my life, which team will get to the Premier League the sooner - Middlesbrough or West Bromwich Albion?
@eboroacum. Excellent summary, says it all about players and management. 😎
Friend said we should replace Carrick with Dyche
What a shambles. No point mentioning the deficiencies. We all know what they are. They’ve been there all season.
Clearly, Carrick and Co. can’t sort them.
So what now? I can see the season disintegrating and fizzling out and another wasted season when , on paper, the squad is better than most.
I would be quite pleased if Boro could persuade Dyche to drop down to the Championship asap - I’d be confident he would improve the team and cut out silly mistakes and be a better bet to achieve a top 6 position to the present incumbents.
Goodness knows what kind of performance we’ll see on Tuesday- it’s hardly worth thinking about.
This team knows how to demoralise its supporters.
Philip of Huddersfield 👎👎☹️☹️
I can’t see Dyche wanting to come. He hasn’t forgiven us for Chesterfield has he?
Times a good healer plus he’s had a lot to put up with at Everton and so working for Mr. Gibson would probably be easier. Also, apart from, say Leicester there can’t be many more likely vacancies this season in the Premiership. Clearly this is all idle speculation by me and what matters is always the next game.
Philip of Huddersfield 👎👎☹️☹️
@philip-of-huddersfield I think I’d struggle to warm to him as manager.
I have wittered on many times about the chronic inconsistency that seems to be endemic in MFC and the negative impact it has on achievement. The key question has always been why the inconsistency exists and what can be done about it and I (along with many other fans and no doubt the management team at the club too) have been struggling to put my finger on it. Today a word popped into my head listening to today’s match commentary that I think characterises the team this season and the word is fragile.
I think I can explain what I mean by attempting an example. Imagine if you were a supporter of Burnley or Sheffield United and you heard that your team was 1-0 up at Portsmouth. You would then confidently expect your team to win the game nine times out of 10 by just 1-0 if necessary and you would be very surprised if they lost. That’s because these teams and others like them in seasons before are robust, solid, determined and strong. They have steel. We don’t. They are real promotion contenders. We are not. We are more balsa wood than steel and we crumble feebly in games that a real contender would win. We are fragile. How many of us today expected Boro to win when they went ahead? How many of us were not surprised when they lost? I think I know the answer.
I would argue that the fragility is costing us more than any potential weaknesses in team selection, tactics or substitute decisions. If Carrick and his team can work on identifying what needs to be done to change the mentality of the team from balsa to steel and at the same time eliminate the stupid mistakes that cost goals then there might be a marked improvement in consistency over time. Something needs to be done and it might require changes in playing personnel to bring in some players with the proven required mental strength, leadership skills and attitude that they can spread across the team. It might be too late to rescue this season but maybe we can hope that the endemic fragility will be addressed before the start of the next.
@martin-bellamy. I am not sure I would want Dyche either.
However, Carrick has now run his course. He has proven, to me anyway., that he is not capable of getting even the sum of the parts out of the squad he has, never mind more than.
He is a one trick pony, using a system that the squad are not consistently cable of delivering.
His back up staff are of little use also. A shambles of continual defensive mistakes with a CB in Woodgate alongside not able to improve them.
We have gone back over. Where is the previous transfer interest in Hackney, VDB and supposedly Azaz. Obviously they are not as good as we thought they were.
Unfortunately, Carrick has a 3 year contract which would be expensive to terminate, as there does not appear to be any other clubs possivbly queuing up for his services.
I thought he Boro had done pretty well by half-time. We were winning and should have been two up whilst playing with only ten men. Azaz was non-existent, a complete lightweight who was shrugged off the ball at every opportunity and contributed nothing to our game. Since his purple patch he has been a luxury player, who does little ,but who may just produce that moment of magic. Today there was no magic, and it was fitting that the winning goal came after he was once more so easily dispossessed and the ball ended up in our net just a few seconds later.
Today was yet another demonstration of the systemic weakness of our recruiting philosophy that has been one of the main discussion points on here over the last few days. We lack players who have the experience to captain the side, who can lead by example and provide the kind of midfield grit, experience and solidity that is essential to success in the Championship's marathon slog and was so conspicuously lacking yet again today. Carrick has tried to inject these qualities with the signings of Ayling and Edmundson, bur injuries to Ayling and Howson have left us short on the kind of know how that Pompey had in M-o-M Ritchie, who was, I would guess ,by some margin the oldest as well as the best player on the field.
We have a record of getting rid of players capable of providing an effective shield to our back four. Sam Morsy is the classic case, but we could have picked up Alex Mowett for a song, and even Lewis O'Brien had a midfield toughness and resilience that has been absent for some weeks now.
I recall Carrick two years ago speaking about his own recruiting priorities saying that he had a "strong leaning towards quality over quantity...with an emphasis on first-team ready players as opposed to squad depth focus". What he has been bequeathed is a large squad with too few quality players of proven experience.
I'll risk being a hostage to fortune by saying that I think the Boro job would be of zero interest to Dyche. He is an old school manager, who would want control of recruitment and transfers. The idea of his being a coach doing his best with whatever Kieron Scott provided him with would surely be anathema to him. Indeed when Wilder was accused of disloyalty for showing an interest in the Burnley job when Dyche left, I suspect that the appeal of the post was that Burnley were looking for, not a coach, but a manager in the traditional sense. That's what Dyche was, and that was Kompany became with all of the freedoms and responsibilities that that entailed. Just as I can see perfectly well the attractions of those freedoms to Wilder after his experience with the Boro, I can also envisage Dyche's reluctance to even consider being just a coach under Scott's tutelage.
Pompey's equaliser, of course, came from our left back's lack of awareness of what was going on around him. It is a weakness we have identified on here ad nauseam in a player whom we had apparently been tracking over a number of years.
Dyche, Pulis, Strachan... who would you choose?
Give me Carrick, Mowbray or even Woodgate anyday over the dinosauruses of football. So no thank you to Dyche.
As Len said, Boro were decent until HT. Portsmouth is a difficult place to go to. We kenw that before hand. So no big surprices there. Why we callapsed in the second half is another thing.
Morris looked rusty for the first 10 min when introdused but after that he looked class. I really look forward to see him playing again. Is he ready to start on Tuesday? It will be difficult, let's see. But we need him or Howson back as soon as possible.
As disappointing as the result was yesterday, we have injured players coming back now. WBA could come to soon for Dieng, Ayling or Morris to start, but let's hope we see some of them anyway.
And finally, we were much stronger in attacking from the left yesterday. It was very seldom when we gave the ball to Doak. Why was that?
Still 19 matches to go in the league. Up the Boro!
@lenmasterman you are correct Len.
Borges just doesn't seem to be at the races. He gets left flat footed on the wrong side of his man too many times. MC put Engel on for him yesterday and it may be that will be the last we see of him for a while. I would prefer Engel/McCormick to Borges.
@chris-from-barlby. Unfortunately Engel had replaced him before Ritchie scored his second so his introduction offered no improvement on one of our continual weaknesses. The reported recruitment of Ryan Giles offers no comfort whatsoever. 😎
Sad to learn this morning that the pompey fan who was taken ill at the start of the game passed away; no one should go to a game and not come home. 😎
If there is one drop of consolation to be squeezed from yesterday's performance it is that no club in their right minds will think of meeting Liverpool's valuation of £30m for Ben Doak on his current form.
The prospect of his being with us for the rest of the season was considerably enhanced yesterday, and that has to be good news, because losing both Latte Lath and Doak would surely effectively mean an end to our season. If we can hang on to Doak, and Carrick/Woodgate can come up with a couple of quality loans (and ditch all thoughts of Giles) then we are still in with a fighting chance of a top six finish.
It's an unlikely scenario, I admit, but I'm an optimist and retain my faith in Carrick.
It is so disappointing that Boro’s soft underbelly once again provoked embarrassment and irritation in equal measure. How many more times? Carrick says he knows he has to solve it but he shows no sign of actually being able to. Ryan Giles definitely isn’t the answer. Len is right when he says that Carrick can’t coach leadership and grit, but if we don’t get some of this very soon from somewhere, then we can say goodbye to the playoffs.
Mind, even if we were to make them, by some miracle, then I really wouldn’t fancy our chances in what are the season’s most competitive games. And if by some even more miraculous miracle we were to reach the Premiership, heaven help us! I think there’s a very strong chance that we would just come straight back down again without massive reinforcements of real quality, witness what is happening this year (and in several others) to the 3 promoted clubs from last season.
Len said he still has faith in Carrick. Mine is fading rather too quickly right now. I’ve loved the way his Boro plays football when it clicks properly, and I’d love to believe that he has what it takes to get us to the Premiership. But I’m really not convinced. Dyche might give us a stronger defensive mentality, but at what cost? Everton fans apparently loathed the industrial, heavy-duty stuff he instilled in his squad, even if that meant they stayed up. Pulis mark two. But it begs the question: how long should Carrick get? If our form continues to disappoint, and it starts to look more unlikely that we’ll make the playoffs, should we be seeking to bring in somebody else to boost our chances, either as a replacement, or à la Venables, in order to assist MC?
My view is that if we don’t make the playoffs this season with what is the strongest squad (potentially) we have had for years, then I think MC would be on very thin ice indeed, if he’s still with us.
We have massively missed Morris.
I accept that when Boro players click, playing well, the football is good to watch and the team often wins. The problem is that happens too infrequently. I think several players are playing below standard - below their ability. The question is "Why Carrick doesn't seem able to lift them?" And this weekend yet another bottom of the table team which Boro has failed to put away.