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Michael Carrick's Middlesbrough message ahead of visit of Tony Mowbray's West Brom

Middlesbrough head coach Michael Carrick <i>(Image: Tom Banks)</i>
Middlesbrough head coach Michael Carrick (Image: Tom Banks)

MICHAEL CARRICK played down the significance of Middlesbrough dropping out of the Championship play-off places after a 2-1 defeat at Portsmouth.

Boro fell to seventh position in the table ahead of tomorrow night's home game with a West Brom side now managed by Teesside legend Tony Mowbray.

“At this point it’s really not about playoff places, it’s about us doing the right things for longer,” said Carrick. “The play-off places will take care of themselves.

“We certainly know what we can do, we’ve showed by the amount of games we’ve put ourselves in good positions. That comes from a lot of really good things and we need to do those for longer, it’s as simple as that.”

On one hand was a failure to add to Emmanuel Latte Lath’s 30th-minute opener, on the other two lapses of concentration at the back.

“At the end of the first half and at the beginning of the second half we had chances to go 2-0 up, good opportunities really that we didn’t quite take,” Carrick said.

“The game is always on a knife edge at that point. We spoke about concentration, and at one moment the game can flip. We’ve come from quite a straight-forward situation in many ways and then the game changes after that.”

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Carrick was as concerned by the failure to defend the lead given them by Latte Lath as the inability to add to it.

“You can’t score three and four goals every week,” he said. “We’ve put ourselves in positions, we were one-nil up today. A lot of the time that has to be enough, we have to make that enough. You can’t expect to score loads of goals every week and then everything is going to be fine.”

Carrick thought that the failure to come back after Pompey had levelled hinted at a mentality problem.

“That is the magic ingredient we’ve got to find and put into play,” he said. “It’s hugely disappointing, something we’ve got to do something about and find the answer.

“The second goal was important. We have got to manage the game better and deal with little setbacks better. That was a goal that came from nowhere. It was an incident, it was one moment that we let slip and the game from there changed. But that’s football. It’s part of the challenge.”

Anfernee Dijksteel and Riley McGree missed the match with what Carrick called “little niggles in training - hopefully little” but he sounded less optimistic that they could face West Brom than Luke Ayling or Aidan Morris, who both returned from injury as late substitutes. “They are back around the group so that is a positive.” And any positive is welcome after this latest disappointment.