When his Middlesbrough team fell apart and blew a three-goal lead against Sheffield Wednesday, a dejected Michael Carrick was left to explain the nearly unimaginable.
Ben Doak and Finn Azaz gave Boro a three-goal lead in the first half, and they looked as strong as they have all season (2). Even though Boro played well in the first thirty-one minutes, it only took sixteen minutes in the second half to fall apart.
Boro lost all control of their game barely two minutes into the second half after having been at the opposite end threatening to score a fourth seconds earlier.
On a day that was difficult to portray as anything but negative for them in the end, Boro lost Tommy Conway and Sol Brynn to injuries, gave up three goals to lose their lead by three points, and had Rav van den Berg sent off.
“It’s worse than frustrating,” Boro manager Carrick remarked after giving it some thought. To be in such a good position, to have so much control, to let it unravel so fast, to let it flip as it did… Because of the outcome, we won’t accept the positives as we should in the first half. We seem to have gained nothing from this experience. It’s not a very good day.
“It was a bit of decision making, a couple of half deflections for the two goals, it doesn’t take much for it to go both ways,” Carrick said when asked what went wrong while watching his team crumble. We made progress in the first half, but we neglected to address too many issues in the second.
I completely disagree with the sending off, but we cannot tolerate the game flipping that way. Although it’s quite simple to claim that we ought to have done a better job of controlling it, I believe that we ought to have. Everything adds up.
The match continued Boro’s concerning season-long habit of wasting points they may have gained for promotion-chasing Boro. “No, we can’t [keep throwing away points],” Carrick said after conceding so many points in the promotion race. Listen, we will still learn a lot from our abilities, but we are aware that we cannot play games for extended periods of time and then stop. We must have a level of performance that is constant. You have to finish it. We continue to put ourselves through more hardship than is necessary.
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