That feeling is back. The optimism of wins against West Ham and Liverpool has rapidly dried up, and a fortnight after we looked to be turning the proverbial corner, Boro are back to scraping draws in the must-win games.

In the aftermath of the result I ran into my housemate, who had an expression almost as gloomy as mine. He's one of those poor misguided souls who follow rugby instead of football, and also a self-declared Welshman, despite being born in England. He'd been watching the Six Nations match between Wales and Italy, which he declared "disappointing".

"Did you lose, then?" I said in an empathetic tone.

"Oh no, " he replied, "We won. But we played all our reserves and the performance wasn't good… it wasn't an entertaining match. "

"Listen, " I said, patience straining somewhat, "Let me tell you the definition of disappointing. Boro have just scraped a draw against Portsmouth, which means we're almost certainly relegated now. If your team has won, you have no right to even think about being disappointed. "

Disappointment is the feeling. Disappointment in a match that looked on the fixture list like a precious win, disappointment in a £12million Brazilian international striker and above all crushing disappointment that a season that began with talk of Europe will very likely end with talk of Blackpool and Doncaster. The thought of relegation has ceased to be a shock because it has been looming large for so many weeks. We're left now with the dull, persistent ache of disappointment that a long decade in the top flight is probably over.

Of course, Boro can still survive. Mathematically it's far from impossible and there are still winnable fixtures over the next month, but how many still believe it will actually happen? The thousands of fans booing their own players for letting Peter Crouch saunter to a halt with the ball just outside the box side probably don't. Those chanting "We've only got one player" in honour of Tuncay's almost solitary commitment to the fight won't. And I'm beginning to think I don't either.

In the first half, almost every player aside from the indefatigable Turk looked barely interested in the name of the opposition, let alone in trying to beat them. Portsmouth were utterly average and yet they bossed the first forty five comfortably. Peter Crouch volleyed in to give them the lead, and while David Nugent was offside and obstructing Brad Jones' line of sight it would be perverse to complain about that, given Pompey played a short corner that no Boro player seemed to care about closing down, thus giving Crouch the chance in the first place.

Gareth Southgate had shuffled his pack by dropping Gary O'Neil against his former club and putting Aliadiere at right wing, with Marlon King moving in up front. It didn't work at all in the first half, so he responded by taking Ali off and putting Adam Johnson on in his place. It did the job. Johnson is still fighting for a place in the starting XI and so he has what precious few of the Boro team still possess: desire. He showed it and galvanised the team. We started to test David James and the England keeper had to earn his wage in the second half. Still Pompey held out and Southgate threw on Alves in a show of aggression.

The equaliser came from a corner in the last minute, Marlon King stabbing home the rebound after James parried McMahon's header, but Alves actually had a chance to win the game even after that with the very last kick of the game. Put through by exactly the kind of threaded pass he thrives on, the Brazilian lost his footing and hit his tame strike into James' body. Everyone in the ground held their breath as he collected the ball, but promptly felt that same ache once again: a solid gold chance to win the game and nothing but disappointment to show for it. We didn't deserve to win the match, but "deserve" has nothing to do with it in football: it’s down to who scores more goals. Any defenders of Afonso Alves amongst the Boro ranks must surely have given up the ghost at long last after that miss: lingering hope that the Brazilian would come good in the crunch turned to cruel disappointment as he failed once again with the goal at his mercy.

While the team (belatedly) showed the requisite guts, and Southgate the nous, to get back into the game and grab the equaliser, the relief at the end of the match was brief. So we scraped a draw when we could easily have lost. To be satisfied by such a result is to throw the towel in now, because drawing at home against a relegation rival quite simply isn't good enough to stay in this league.

Our next four games are against Stoke, Bolton, Hull and Fulham. The latter two are home matches. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have to win as many of them as possible. Six points is the absolute minimum we can take from them. Any less and they may as well start lowering the coffin and looking up train times to White Hart Lane for Stewey. The fans have all but ran out of patience, and we've ran out of room to slip up. If we play in these four games like we did against Portsmouth then my stint as a correspondent for ESPN will be cut short in May. It's been an emotional rollercoaster these past few weeks, but even if my next entry is laced with pangs of hope, the likelihood is they'll soon be erased once again and replaced by that grinding feeling of disappointment.