Michael Carrick knows Middlesbrough's home form in the last 12 months has been nowhere near good enough and feels the frustrating Cardiff City draw highlights how everyone can do their bit to improve it.

Boro were unable to grab a win in their first home game of 2025, as Emmanuel Latte Lath's early goal was cancelled out by Calum Chambers. With 78 minutes still left to play at that point, a poor game of few chances saw Boro fail to make possessional dominance count in an underwhelming 1-1 draw as Boro's struggles at the Riverside continued.

Having started 2024 with defeat at home to Coventry last season, Boro only managed 10 wins from 24 league games in the calendar year. This season, after this latest frustrating draw, Boro have just six wins from 14 games at the Riverside now. Hopes that 2025 might change it were shortlived, in another frustrating Riverside outing.

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“100% [it has to be better],” Carrick said after on Boro’s poor home form. “I say it to you all the time, it's a number of things. Maybe teams set up a bit differently, which is football. That's fine, we do it sometimes.

“Maybe that expectation and the energy between me, the players and the supporters. We have to be more positive and make things happen and believe that things are going to happen. You give yourself a better chance if that's the case.”

Ultimately it was just a massively frustrating afternoon for Boro - and not for the first time this season. For Carrick, he worries that it created an atmosphere around the ground that meant his own players didn’t handle themselves as well as they should have, particularly as numerous decision appeared to rather harshly go against them.

“Frustration is not the right place to be when you're in a football game trying to win it,” He said. “Letting the lead slip was a big part of the game. The longer the game goes, the deeper they end up defending and the less space there is. Sometimes you have to take that as an opportunity to go and make things happen.

“It's a mindset for me, the players, the supporters as well, it's important when we're chasing games we don't focus on what's just happened but what's next and creating that energy and positivity. We didn't really have that today. We tried a couple of things and tweaked in the second half to create that spark but couldn't quite find it.”