Boro Mania

I have tried to stay positive recently, bemoaning luck and refereeing decisions for poor results and giving Gareth Southgate and his team the benefit of the doubt. However, following up the poor showing against Fulham with an awful display at the Riverside against Everton is really starting to worry me. Going up against a team with no centre forwards, playing Tim Cahill as their striker, Boro showed absolutely no abilty or desire to win the game and were deservedly beaten.

Middlesbrough now find themselves fourth bottom, just above the bottom three on goal difference, with World Champions Manchester United to play on Monday. I don't think anyone can argue that we are right in the mire now and will be battling for our Premiership lives in the second half of the season.

I'm not going to write a match report we all saw what happened, instead i'm going to dissect a few points that need addressing.

Firstly, in my opinion, this game was lost in the midfield as was the Fulham game. David Moyes had Phil Neville, Marouane Fellaini and Mikel Arteta playing across the midfield against Julio Arca and Gary O'Neil and to be honest it was men against boys. Arca had probably the worst game I have ever seen him play in a Boro shirt, he couldn't pass the ball and his lack of pace was chronically evident. Gary O'Neil was pretty much anonymous, except for one good strike on goal, and Fellaini in particular was too much for Boro.

Without Digard, who was bought for the future lets not forget, the centre of our midfield is by far the poorest in this league and it's no suprise we are finding goals hard to come by when our only outlet is hitting long balls up to the forwards because we lack the ability or confidence to play it through the midfield. This MUST be addressed in January, we need some leadership in the middle of the park, somebody who can keep the ball, pass it and move forward with it.

Up front Mido got the nod ahead of Afonso Alves and to be honest I didn't agree with it at the time and I think it was a mistake. Mido seems incapable of playing the target man role, he was continually dropping deep or drifting out wide and while I applaud his desire and work rate it often left us with nobody up front. What is the point of Mido crossing balls in from the flanks when he is supposed to be the one getting on the end of crosses?

I personally would have liked us to show a little ambition and play Mido and Alves up front with Tuncay in the midfield.

For all the talk of Mido wanting out and him not being committed to the cause I think it was another player who looked like he was already on the A1 southbound. Gary O'Neil looked to me to be just going through the motions as he hopes a return to Pompey materialises. Maybe i'm wrong and maybe he was just completely outclassed by Everton's midfield but either way he is not good enough to play in the middle against any team with decent players.

Stewart Downing had another really quiet game as all the transfer talk appears to be affecting him again, Adam Johnson came on and showed a few flashes of brilliance with a pretty poor dive in between. Once Johnson came on and quickly beat the Everton fullback twice, lifting the crowd, everybody was screaming at them to keep giving him the ball but for whatever reason he saw very little possesion after that.

Once again we looked incredibly shaky defending set pieces, from Turnbull flapping at a few (Everton did seem to target him in the first half but I still thought he looked very nervy) to the defence leaving Everton players unmarked we were lucky not to concede more goals.

A run of bad results is not the end of the world and ordinarily I wouldn't "over-react" by writing something like this on the back of a 1-0 defeat at home to Everton, but the nature of these results is extremely worrying and unless we start to pick up points we are well and truly in the mire. With Man Utd coming up we can probably safely say it'll be a miracle to come out with anything, the important games are going to be Sunderland and WBA where a minimum of 4 points really is required.