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Time for old heads! - Date: 2 Oct 2009

Two weeks can be a very long time in football and that has proved to be the case once again with Middlesbrough Football Club since the last article I served up.

We had just gone second in the table on 16 points from seven games after a fantastic 3-1 win at Sheffield Wednesday on the Tuesday evening. The talk of promotion to the Premier League was wafting around Teesside and the young players were being lauded for their impressive early season performances.

Since then a run of one point from the following three games, which has seen us being battered 5-0 at home to West Brom, capitulate at Coventry to throw away a two-goal lead in the last 12 minutes and then crash to a horrible 1-0 defeat against Leicester City at the Riverside!

It seems to me that Gareth Southgate is gradually
sliding back into his bad old management style which cost us more than dearly last season, while the players have now lost the belief which had them flying only a fortnight ago.

Poor substitutions, team selections and managerial decisions look to have put a dampener on the team spirit generated over the summer.

New signing Sean St Ledger has been drafted into the starting XI without having to fight for the shirt and young defenders Jon Grounds and Tony McMahon were wrongly made the scapegoats for the West Brom defeat along with keeper Danny Coyne.

Then looking at the make up of the Boro side, which is predominantly youngsters, it appears that they had started to believe the hype building around them following a solid start and got complacent. Now it has swung the other way and confidence is ebbing away, there is nobody in the Boro squad to settle them down.

Last time Boro were in this division in 1997-98 we had the likes of Nigel Pearson, Andy Townsend, Neil Maddison, Gianluca Festa and Mark Schwarzer to provide a very experienced nucleus of players who could keep the younger squad members on track.

Now we have Danny Coyne, who has been inexplicably dropped for golden boy Brad Jones, the sub-standard Julio Arca and injury-prone Gary O’Neil, who does not play as much as he or we would like him to.

Therefore the lack of calming influence required to avoid the points’ give away at Coventry and home defeats to West Brom and Leicester is non-existent in the current side.

The loan window is still open and, unless Gareth Southgate does not want to see the club slide further down the Championship and have the fans continuing to rebel against him and vote with their feet, he needs to pull an influential old-head signing out of the bag as soon as possible if there is any chance of improving their Championship betting odds.

Whether the funds are in place to set up such a deal remains to be seen, but sacking Southgate apart which seems like it is never going to happen, this could be the fine line between success and failure this season!

Written by Craig Smithson, a Middlesbrough season-ticket holder and a sports writer who blogs about football betting.

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