Middlesbrough have endured a weird and not-so-wonderful start to 2016, and must now hope Aitor Karanka’s about-turn is a catalyst rather than a millstone in their latest promotion push.

Clocks shifted, nights duly drawing out, it is that point of the season again that a referee-bullying Scotsman once referred to as “squeaky bum time”. If you thought the Sky Sports presenters were hamming it up in January when they described Burnley’s Monday night match with Derby County as the key to the ongoing search for the meaning of life itself, just you wait now they’ve actually got a bit of something to ham.

QPR aren’t involved, in any of it, and thank God (and Robert Green’s various pre-Christmas calamities) for that. If you consider that Rangers were in some form of relegation danger immediately prior to Neil Warnock’s arrival — and let’s face it at a team with Tamas Priskin in attack and Paul Hart in the dugout is almost certainly in mortal peril of some description — then it’s been six years since QPR got to this stage of a season with neither a relegation to stave off nor a promotion to fight for.

They’ve been successful on four of those six occasions — two survivals, two promotions, two relegations — but it doesn’t do a lot for your health does it? I was quite enjoying the 2010/11 promotion campaign, for instance, until the Ale Faurlin charges were brought by the FA, because I’d seen everything I needed to in the team to know it was going to win the league but then suddenly it didn’t seem like that would be enough — now we had to win it by a stupidly wide margin so they couldn’t take it off us. As one midtable side after another came to Loftus Road through March and April and parked the bus on top of Adel Taarabt’s feet I felt physically sick waiting for us to break the deadlock. By the time the title was won, and the FA were buried under a mountain of expert legal work from QPR’s well-paid counsel, I had the stomach lining of a 54-year-old air traffic controller.

Of course, it’s those seasons you live for, but it does help if it comes with a modicum of planning and forethought. QPR have been in a frantic state for years now, and it’s resulted in huge turnovers in players at great expense. How can you plan signings when you don’t know whether you’re going to be in the Premier League earning £150m in TV money next season, or the Championship where they bung you an envelope half filled with Tesco’s Computers for Schools vouchers two thirds of the way through the campaign (if they remember)? It becomes a self-perpetuating thing, and you go up and down like a bride’s nightie.

Which is one of the reasons why this was meant to be Middlesbrough’s season — and still might be. Given that Tony Mowbray did well in a similar situation at this level with West Brom, and is now performing to a high standard in the horrendously difficult circumstances facing anybody who touches Coventry City with the mucky end of a shitty stick, it’s a surprise his spell at a club where he’d previously been a living legend worked out as badly as it did. Even allowing for him inheriting Gordon Strachan’s predictably ill-fated ‘move all the players who look good playing St Mirren five times a season south, what can possibly go wrong?’ experiment, Mowbray’s Boro was a disaster played out in front of an almost entirely empty stadium. A real shame — a likeable man, seemingly a decent manager, a Boro demi-God, failure will have hurt him.

Aitor Karanka was Boro’s first foreign manager — which seems somehow odd given how quickly they embraced the influx from abroad in the 1990s with the likes of Juninho and Emerson — and came with Jose Mourinho’s recommendation. These days that would be treated like a prescription from Harold Shipman’s notepad but it carried weight then and over the season and a half he had in charge prior to this he transformed the club into one playing in front of good crowds and competing for promotion once more. The build has been steady, methodical and considered. The team has grown together, as a team. This was supposed to be its time.

Boro reached the play-off final last year, but choked at Wembley. The team bus arrived late at the stadium, they met a Norwich side that had been the form team going into the end of season knock-out after an inspired managerial appointment midseason, they conceded early on… it wasn’t their day. Shit happens and, as expected and tipped, Boro went roaring off at the top of the table through the first half of this season. They won eight of 11 prior to a 3-0 loss at Hull, then promptly went on another run of eight wins and a draw from nine matches immediately after which started with the 1-0 victory against QPR in the corresponding fixture. At the turn of the year they were ahead of Burnley by five points having played one game fewer.

Things have since taken a turn for the odd. First and foremost, Boro have won only five of their last 13 matches. Two of the five defeats they’ve suffered in that time came in the same week in January — to struggling Bristol City and Nottingham Forest — while the club was engaged in the latest in a string of attempts to prise Jordan Rhodes out of Blackburn Rovers. Rhodes is related to Boro’s Stewart Downing and Jonathan Woodgate (brothers in law) and coach Steve Agnew (uncle) and has been linked with a move to the Riverside every transfer window since dinosaurs roamed the earth. This time a fee was finally agreed — reportedly as high as £12m — but with that and the terms all agreed Boro seemingly pulled the plug for a week before changing their minds again and bunging it through right on the bell.

It’s since transpired that Rhodes doesn’t really fit into the team’s lone-striker system, and he’s scored just the one goal (sounds ripe for the usual QPR routine this one doesn’t it?). The Middlesbrough fans, who by and large seem to revere Karanka for the job he’s done at the club, grumble on and off about the Spaniard’s refusal to deviate from that system, and wish he would maybe throw a bit more caution to the wind sometimes.

That’s a feeling shared, if the jungle drums are to be believed, by a contingent of the club’s locally-based/brought-up players which in turn led to the bizarre situation a fortnight ago where Karanka walked out and said he didn’t want to manage them any more. He was absent for an insipid 2-0 defeat at lowly Charlton - who did well to perform to any kind of level that day given the circumstances around the protest-infested matchday but still had enough to beat Boro - only to then return to the club a week later and oversee a last-gasp 1-0 win against promotion-rivals Hull. It all brought to mind that time Brian Laws left Scunthorpe United (for the third time) and was immediately installed as second favourite to be his own replacement.

Karanka gave a pretty bland interview to Sky that night when, at one point, he tried to brush it all off as “Latin temperament”. To be fair, if your methods were being picked apart by Stewart Downing — who has done precious little to justify his pre-season fee and hype as the supposed returning hero — you’d probably feel like pissing off back to Spain with all your winners medals from Real Madrid as well. One imagines Karanka as Rowan the team building coordinator from The Office, simply walking away shaking his head and muttering “all a total waste of time” while Downing and Woodgate kiss their teeth and talk about “pressure” while pissing about with a guitar.

They say never go back, as a player or a manager, in football. Quite whether that applies when you were only away for a long weekend remains to be seen. Maybe he just didn’t fancy Charlton? Who can blame him. What happens next, to a team already in poor form, with three away defeats on the spin, and whatever mental baggage is left over from the Wembley no-show, is anybody’s guess.

For once we can enjoy as impartial observers, slowing slightly to look at the car crash on the other carriageway as we make our slow and steady way towards our summer holiday. Odd feeling all round isn’t it?

Links >>> Official Website >>> FMTTM site and forum >>> The Gazette local paper >>> One Boro blog >>> Northern Echo local paper >>> Middlesbrough Mad >>> Come on Boro forum

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TacticalR added 13:52 - Mar 31 Thanks for your preview. At one level it doesn't sound like much is wrong at Middlesbrough - in fact at the time of our last meeting with them they seemed to be the picture of managerial stability. At another level they are just another one of the clubs in the ever shifting pack at the top of the Championship, and that can lead to nervousness, headaches, and managers disappearing for long weekends away from it all.

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