Although there were heads in hands, there were few tears, and the conclusion of the match felt like a merciful bullet to the head to put us out of our misery. Most of my heartache was felt long and slowly over the past few months, and by now it is a relief to finally draw a line under this horrible season.
If there was one silver lining to this cloud it was the sight of Newcastle (the team who effectively sent us down) following hot on our heels after their meek surrender to Aston Villa. Most neutrals offered us kinder words than they saved for our local rivals, under the assumption that Middlesbrough are a properly run club and Newcastle are a circus show.
While we may not boast a wage bill to make an accountant weep or a sorting office for our steady stream of managers, I aim to show in this extended final article (and yes, it's my last one, so I'm calling it an article) that we're far from the orderly, well-run club many people seem to think. I've repeated two truisms over the last few months (we don't score, we concede too easily), and now's the time to show why that is.
Attack:
Every half-baked pundit has latched onto this area. 38 games, 28 goals: not even three goals every four games, only one match in which we've scored three times, no player close to ten goals in the season... we're rubbish up front. Truism #1: goals win games.
The problem with goals actually began at the very start of last season when we lost Mark Viduka to Newcastle and Yakubu to Everton. Almost thirty league goals walked out the door, and we never adequately replaced those two experienced and prolific Premiership scorers. We did stay up, however, because Downing scored ten goals last season and the rest did enough between them on top of that. Even so, we only surpassed three goals in a game on the final-day demolition of Man City, a result that boded well but proved to be a false dawn.
At the start of the season I said to whichever Boro fan was listening that we needed to start Mido up front with Alves and play Tuncay behind them, otherwise Mido would get upset and walk out of yet another club. Southgate thought differently, and played Tuncay alongside Alves with Mido coming off the bench. While Mido quickly helped himself to five goals from the bench to set up a promising first couple of months, Alves struggled and Tuncay, never an out-and-out striker, couldn't make up the difference.
Southgate saw his star signing struggling for confidence and was faced with a decision: drop him and let Mido play or stick with his man. He chose the latter, in the hope that Alves would gain confidence from the trust of his manager. It didn't work: Alves understandably felt the responsibility to score our goals, with Tuncay chipping in only infrequently, and he failed to deal with the pressure. Mido, for his part, quickly grew fed up of sitting on the bench when he was clearly the best striker at the club, threw a tantrum and stopped putting any effort in. He was shipped out and replaced by Marlon King, a Championship level striker who was never going to fill the void.
Downing's fine form of the previous season had deserted him: he didn't score once in the Premiership all season. Like Alves he felt the pressure on him to step up and provide the goals we needed, but his confidence was dealt a stinging blow by two penalty misses early on. The first, against Stoke, proved irrelevant but the second lost us the derby against Sunderland. He never got over it, and was rarely seen trying his luck thereafter.
Midfield:
Although we passed the ball well all season in midfield, this was no less a problem area than any other. The biggest problem was one entirely of Southgate's own making: he shipped out Lee Cattermole, George Boateng and Fabio Rochemback for low prices in pre-season – a trio with hundreds of Premiership appearances between them – and replaced them with a solitary French Under-21 international. Didier Digard has the potential to be as good as Boateng in his pomp, but he was inexperienced, unused to English football and lacking in back up.
Ironically it was Cattermole who injured Digard and left us with no tough-tackling midfielder, but such an event was gloomily predictable. Whenever Digard was out Southgate was forced to play Bates out of position in the holding role, or else give youngster Josh Walker a crack, and neither of them could hope to do a suitable job. It was a classic example of where Southgate went wrong: he sold experience and replaced it with raw youth in the hope of saving money.
Truism #2: you don't win anything with kids. Southgate should have looked to Manchester United and Sir Alex Ferguson for an example of how to integrate youth products: play them alongside experienced Premiership campaigners so they can learn and follow the example set by veterans and leaders. Instead, Southgate followed Arsene Wenger's misfiring principle of placing total faith in youth, and the result is a team that has made too many mistakes, lacked character and cracked under pressure. The price of relegation is valued at £50million these days, and that burden was placed on the shoulders of people so young they wouldn't even be out of university now if they weren't out on the pitch.
The other big mistake (and people higher than Southgate are responsible for this) was not strengthening this area in January. Steve Gibson coughed up less than £2m with which to chase Ben Watson of Crystal Palace: neither a suitable investment against the cost of relegation nor the kind of experienced, battling player we needed. Watson went to Wigan and everyone at Boro sat back in relief that they had kept hold of Tuncay, Downing and O'Neil. It was complacency at the wrong time, because all three of those players are going to leave anyway as a result of our transfer quiescence.
Defence:
This one is an amalgamation of both the faults explored above. Firstly, our defensive problems can be traced back to losing high-quality talent in previous seasons that was never properly replaced. When Gareth Southgate stepped up to manager, Ugo Ehiogu followed him out of the team, and we haven't had a consistent centre back pairing since. Jonathon Woodgate was brought in and formed a makeshift partnership with Pogatetz, but Woody was soon gone after Southgate mistakenly thought Wheater could replace him. While Huth and Wheater formed a new and initially successful partnership in defence, the German has suffered from injuries and the Englishman from inconsistent form. Chris Riggott was brought back from loan but couldn't cement a starting place. The result is three seasons of thrown-together partnerships, and eventually Southgate ran out of luck.
The other main problem was the familiar replacement of experience with untested youth. Mark Schwarzer was allowed to leave for free and Southgate passed up the chance to sign one of several experienced replacements: Paul Robinson, Thomas Sorenson, Scott Carson and Brad Friedel were all available but instead Southgate stuck with Brad Jones and Ross Turnbull. It took him several months to decide which he rated more highly, and it proved to be Jones: second choice to Schwarzer for many years and so quite obviously not a replacement of equal quality.
Shortly before the season began, reports came in of a bid from Aston Villa for Luke Young, who'd had an excellent first season for Boro. The fans agreed it was mere speculation on the basis that there was no logical reason for the club to sell Young. A week later and he was gone. Southgate and Gibson promised a high quality, younger replacement but Justin Hoyte has unfortunately not filled Young's boots, and the £3million profit we made looks pathetic now.
The result of all this is a young defence without clear first choices and, in Pogatetz, a poor captain. The Austrian's disciplinary problems are well known, and he failed to lead by example. The inevitable outcome was plenty of defensive mistakes. Football truism #3: it only takes a second to score. By extension, it only takes a second to concede and our inexperienced, ill-lead, unclear defensive unit has all-too often switched off at crucial moments.
Management:
Here, I contend, is where this club has truly gone wrong. Steve Gibson is known for being a patient and generous chairman who favours stability, and this club is known for a rewarding youth policy, but we've been the victim of some shocking mismanagement in the last four years, and in the long-term this is where our problems really stem from.
If you want to know how a club goes from a UEFA Cup final to relegation in three years, look no further than giving away your best players for free. It began with Bolo Zenden in Steve McClaren's final season, but he was followed by Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Mark Viduka, George Boateng, Fabio Rochemback and Mark Schwarzer. Many of these players weren’t tied down with long-term contracts, and the club waited until they were free agents before negotiating. The problem with Viduka and Hasselbaink was their wage demands, but if the contracts had been signed earlier the players wouldn't have had the negotiating power that comes from the Bosman ruling. And if the club was never willing to match their demands, we could have at least sold them for tidy profits and reinvested that money, rather than letting quality performers go for free.
On top of these howlers, Gaizka Mendieta, midfield maestro and erstwhile hero, vanished from the face of the Earth after Gareth Southgate decided very early on that a massive player for McClaren wasn't good enough for him. Mendieta didn't want to leave and nobody came in for him, so he sat behind the scenes, training diligently and picking up a massive salary for two long seasons before being cut loose for nothing. The much-vaunted wage reduction that justified the removal of Rochemback and Boateng might not have been necessary if Mendieta's situation had been resolved earlier. And Lord knows we could have used him out on the pitch. Truism #4: form is temporary, class is permanent. A player who played in a Champion's League final does not simply lose all his ability over a single summer.
More than all of this, more than anything, we can trace back our problems to the very appointment of Gareth Southgate in the first instance. When McClaren left for the England job, the club approached Martin O'Neil, but failed. The official explanation was that O'Neil wanted to bring in his own coaching staff which the club was unwilling to allow: a frankly idiotic decision if it's true, given how well O'Neil has done at Villa. More likely, this story was a pride-stung cover story spread by Gibson after O'Neil spurned the club's offer. Alan Curbishley was mentioned, but that came to nothing as well.
Eventually the club got sick of rejection and promoted from with. Perhaps Steve Gibson had noble pretensions of nurturing young English talent in the technical area as well as on the pitch, but this was the biggest mistake of the lot. Premiership football is a massive, massive industry and the money involved is both vast and rising every year. No business in any other sector on Earth would promote a complete rookie to the most important management role, effectively responsible for millions of pounds of revenue, but at "well run" Middlesbrough we threw such prudence to the wind.
The warning signs of a rushed, ill-advised appointment were there in Southgate's lack of any coaching badges, a situation which required special dispensation from the FA for him even to take on the job he was grossly under-qualified to perform. The nadir of this farce came when British audiences heard Southgate offering colour commentary for broadcaster ITV during the 2006 World Cup when he should have been back home swatting up for his UEFA license at the very least, and preparing for his new job if he had any idea he was about to be approached.
Around Christmas 2006 as I watched Middlesbrough lose to struggling Fulham at Craven Cottage I demanded that Southgate leave. I claimed he wasn't the man to take us back into European football, and although I later revoked my sentiment and gave him a chance, time has proved me more than right. Year on year, as McClaren's highly successful squad has been steadily and clumsily disassembled to be replaced by a side built in Southgate's own image, we have gone backwards in league position, in points accrued and in ambition. It should be obvious now to Gibson, as it is to the majority of Boro fans, that Southgate is not up to the task, and so many of the problems I outlined above are down to his poor decisions.
The club may point to debts from the McClaren era as the explanation behind cost-cutting measures, but even if we assume that the free-spending of five years ago was not the fault of the club, it is still merely a smokescreen designed to disguise blame. The debts may be bad but they would have been much better if the club had sorted out player contracts properly and sold for profit rather than letting quality players go for nothing. And quite frankly, no matter how bad the debts are, the club's management chose to foolishly gamble our Premier League status by cutting down on squad investment, shipping out whatever big earners were left and gambling on youth.
Was it really a sound financial model to cut loose experience and neglect to invest in the squad, gambling over £50million on youth to stay in the league while saving some cash? From where we're looking now, it looks anything but. Yes, Middlesbrough FC owes Steve Gibson a massive debt of thanks for all he's done for us, but gratitude for past actions should not and does not exempt him from criticism, nor justify sloppy handling of the club's affairs.
As it stands, Southgate will still be in charge, youth will still be prioritised and Championship football is on the menu next season. Gibson's fabled patience will remain and we can only hope that it is vindicated. With the right purchases – a proven Championship striker is top of the list – we can bounce back at the first attempt. All it takes is for the players, for Gareth Southgate and for Steve Gibson to learn from their mistakes.
When we look back at the knife-edge of administration Gibson saved us from, or to the glory days and lavish expenditure of the McClaren era, we know that this club has both seen darker days and toasted better times. If there's one thing we should take from this experience, to raise our spirits in the lowest moments and to temper our profligacy in the highest, it is this:
This too shall pass.
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