ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE: West Ham Utd 2 Middlesbrough 1: IN THE end, Middlesbrough's 11-year stint in the Premier League ended with little more than a whimper.
A side long since stripped of confidence and utterly lacking in presence in front of goal wilted here, slipping into the Championship with a 12th consecutive away league defeat and a solitary threatening shot on target.
Gareth Southgate, a lonely figure in his technical area, surveyed the wreckage as this game, a campaign and an era at this club drifted away. Since returning to the top flight in 1998, Boro have won the League Cup, reached FA and Uefa Cup finals, nurtured an England manager – albeit far from a successful one – and established themselves as a conveyor belt of local talent. Their approach has won them friends, with the chairman Steve Gibson’s unwillingness to discard his young manager considered admirable even as this season unravelled.
Yet ultimately it has all proved unsustainable. Finances had been tightening in recent seasons, with a firesale of the club’s higher earners to follow. The likes of Stewart Downing, Tuncay, Jeremie Aliadiere, Gary O’Neil, Emanuel Pogatetz and Didier Digard are expected to leave. Afonso Alves, the club’s €13.5 million record signing, will follow if a buyer can be found.
“We have to bring some money in to go forward, and there are situations that I want to change, so there will be big changes, inevitably, to the playing personnel,” admitted Southgate. “In a sense, we might end up stronger for getting our finances in order over the next few months.”
That might be wishful thinking. Football has changed even in the decade since Boro’s last demotion, and relegation rarely proves beneficial these days.
Senior players have dropped like flies in recent months. The youth team graduates that remained sunk to the turf at the end in dismay yesterday.
They had arrived here knowing their best chance of survival had been blown at home to Aston Villa the previous week but, if other results went with them, a healthy victory here would pluck unlikely survival. True to dismal form, it was their part of the bargain that they could not fulfil.
This team appeared as rudderless as they were blunt. Junior Stanislas clipped their crossbar from distance though that proved a temporary reprieve. An overlapping Herita Ilunga duly fizzed a centre across the six-yard box for Carlton Cole, unmarked at the far post, to steer the ball back across two Middlesbrough defenders and their floored goalkeeper to establish the hosts’ lead.
Urgency only really flared in the period immediately after the interval. Tuncay slalomed away from a grounded Lucas Neill to feed Gary O’Neil, the winger’s low attempt flicking off Matthew Upson to find the corner. Yet even then Boro never really believed. Stanislas’s soft winner, struck hopefully from distance eight minutes later to dribble agonisingly through Brad Jones’s attempt to claim, seemed an appropriately downbeat way to depart.
Southgate is due to meet Gibson this week to discuss the future.
“I have to accept a large percentage of our supporters want a change of manager,” he said.
Guardian Service
