Friday 28 March 2014

A Bottle Top, Then Spirits Drop... But There's No Need To Throw A Strop



After months of what seemed like tentative, slow but worthwhile steps in the right direction, New Boro, or Boro Nil, suddenly looked to have regressed to form in the most Typical of ways.

We’d wanted goals. We got goals. But not in the manner we had hoped for.

To be frank, with the exception of George Friend’s goal, little looked to have changed on Saturday. We were as competitive, hard-working and solid as we have so far expected any side under Aitor Karanka to be. We had a goal to show for it too, and could have had more. Surely now, all we had to do was close out the game in typical Karanka fashion...

Hold on there. Let’s pause and rewind a little. “Could have had more”.

I am sure that managers often sit down and recount missed chances after a game they haven’t won, and hope they don’t live to regret them. This should have been one of those occasions for AK.

For this was the day that our luck at the back finally ran out.

On the stroke of half-time, our six-man-collective worked very well to nullify Ravel Morrison, Niko Krancjar and Joey Barton. When the impressive Jozsef Varga’s tackle, which you can’t blame him for attempting, was evaded, we had little choice to set an offside trap in the event of Dimi Konstantopoulous parrying an incoming shot. The decision on Yossi Benayoun’s goal really could have gone either way – unluckily for us, it went QPR’s way.

And with the equaliser notched, it was left for Harry Redknapp to give his side a half-time rollicking, tinker his formation to blunt the attacking freedom of our wide men, and settle for a result of any kind. At least until the presence of a certain bottle top handed three points to him, just seconds after Friend came inches away from netting his second and a possible winner for Boro. A clearly demoralised Boro backline made Morrison’s goal easy.

It would be terribly simple to conclude that apart from those three moments, Boro didn’t do anything wrong, per se. But to dwell on this would be to ignore the difficult question of why we didn’t hurt QPR enough when we had the opportunity. It’s one of the oldest clichés in football – you’ve got to take your chances. Making Dimi an unfair scapegoat or bleating “what can we do about hard luck and referees?” simply won’t wash. We ought to remember that our goal was fortunate too.

The most critical among us will probably point fingers, as usual, at AK’s 4-2-3-1 formation, which he unsurprisingly kept in place for Huddersfield.

Perhaps, it can be argued, AK *is* over-thinking things. Perhaps he is trying to train his team to play top tier football in the second tier, to swim with the best before they even know how to paddle with them.

Wouldn’t it make more sense, some believe, to sacrifice one of the two human shields of the back four and offer Danny Graham more support? Wouldn’t it be better to revert to good old 4-4-2 with our wide men bombarding down the flanks, and another attack-minded player, like Kei Kamara or even Lee Tomlin, to play alongside Graham?

But it is easier for us, as we speak with the benefit of a different point of view: fans with years of experience in this division, and knowledge of what seems to be required to get out of it nowadays. It’s also easy to forget, amidst our understandable frustration with the Karankanaut, that AK’s first full season in his first managerial appointment is not even over. He has never coached in the English game before. And he appears to be a man of integrity, a serious student of football who is trying to establish a successful pattern of play for Boro for both the short and long term.

A problem, perhaps, lies with the culture clash created by employing a non-English coach at an English club. It’s dawned on me that the managers who achieved most success at Boro (recently: McClaren), or at least truly felt like part of the club (recently , Robson, Southgate, Mowbray), were English. Recall that a similar culture clash occurred when world-class players like Emerson, Juninho and Fabrizio Ravanelli were planted in a team of mediocrities, and you get a hint of what AK also has to deal with.

And it makes you admire him even more when you realise that his formation was a serious success in the winter months! So – apart from the obvious possibility of us being “found out” – what has gone wrong?

I think that back then, the likes of Lukas Jutkiewicz and Kei Kamara were being employed as “supply forwards”, men who won the ball and frequently laid it back for the midfield to prosper. Danny Graham is not a “lay off” player – he is an out-and-out goalscorer, a fox in the box. If we are to continue playing him regularly, it is impossible not to conclude that the system must be tinkered with slightly to accommodate him.

Refreshingly, that is exactly what Karanka did against Huddersfield in the second half, replacing Nate Chalobah with Lee Tomlin and switching to a 4-1-4-1, with Tomlin in a supporting role behind Graham. The second half result – 1-0 in Boro’s favour with a very well taken goal by Albert Adomah, his second of the match – should not go unnoticed.

The final result – 2-2 – was not a statement of lack of ambition on Boro’s part, but more an indication that the season really is dead. A season that truly held promise not so long ago is fizzling out like a popped balloon, leaving fans glum about the future.

But the Karankanaut being deflated for now – deflated, not dead – is no cause for doom and gloom. The play offs were always a long shot anyway, and there are still eight games left. So let’s at least try and enjoy them.

And with “AA” back amongst the goals again, there might just be plenty to enjoy.

Up The Boro!

(Originally published online at the Evening Gazette, March 27, 2014.)

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