How the window of opportunity opened the floodgates to failure

BLAME it all on the month of January. That's when it all started to go disastrously wrong for Middlesbrough after the club had rowed the boat out in a bid to strengthen the squad for a hoped for big push to secure a top six spot.

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It was all done for positive reasons. Michael Carrick was given the go-ahead by his supportive chairman Steve Gibson to bring in a handful of new players following a nervous December during which Boro won one of their six Championship games.

True, goal ace Emmanuel Latte Lath was lost to the Boro just after the start of the year, but Carrick and the recruitment team had every opportunity to give the team another burst of energy if they signed the right men for the job. However, goalkeeper Mark Travers apart, it became quickly evident that Boro's new boys did not look capable of bringing about an improvement.

In fact, there's a strong argument that Boro had a worse squad in the final months of the campaign than they had in December. Of course, you can't criticise any of the players for lack of effort. But effort counts for nothing if you don't get the results.

In their final 22 games, Boro won just eight times and lost 11. That hardly represents top-six form. There were surely occasions during the run-in when Gibson must have been wondering just what he had to do to open the door for Boro to get a side on the pitch that was consistently capable of winning games.

Certainly the fans were tearing their hair out at times even though they stuck with the club through thick and thin. On paper Boro did everything right. They signed not one player to replace Latte Lath but two in Morgan Whittaker and Kelechi Iheanacho.

They brought in Sammy Iling-Junior to take over from the injured Ben Doak, we assumed, they sorted out the goalkeeper dilemma by snapping up Travers, and they brought back the creative left-back Ryan Giles. They also signed George Edmundson on a permanent contract after he had been so impressive at the back in the opening few months.