The likes of Lee Cattermole, James Morrison, Andrew Davies, Matthew Bates and Adam Johnson have all emerged as genuine Premiership prospects alongside the already established Stuart Parnaby and Stewart Downing. This tally puts him ninth in the Premiership’s goalscoring charts, above the Chelsea duo of Didier Drogba and Hernan Crespo, and is a considerable achievement given the club’s flagrant mediocrity in league play.Īpart from the addition of the Nigerian to the squad, McLaren’s legacy at the club will be the impressive crop of youngsters that he has been able to blood this season. Despite not always managing to break the ageing but often spectacular strike partnership of Mark Viduka and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Yakubu has been the club’s top scorer this season with 13 goals. There’s little doubt that the most successful recruitment of the season was that of striker Aiyegbeni Yakubu from Portsmouth. Once again McLaren somehow rallied his troops to hit back with another stunning quartet of strikes, even managing to rev the previously kaput Massimo Maccarone into something approaching roadworthy order.īy and large McLaren’s signings during the summer of 2005 have done little to set the globe ablaze, with defender Emmanuel Pogatetz and midfielder Fabio Rochemback adequate at best. The drama didn’t end there, as a 1-0 defeat in Romania was swiftly followed by the loss of two early goals at The Riverside in the second leg of that encounter. Unperturbed, they roared back to rattle four goals past the Swiss outfit to book a semi-final date with Steaua Bucharest. Two goals down from the first leg of their quarter-final tie with Basle, Boro suffered yet another set back when they conceded the first goal on home soil in the return fixture. This Jeckyll-and-Hyde-ism extended to their creditable European run also. Within a week of the Villa debacle the team perplexed the critics and everyone else including themselves as they handed champions Chelsea a 3-0 pounding at The Riverside. That had followed a 7-0 pasting at the hands of a previously wobbling Arsenal at Highbury, and things looked dreary for the dreary man who now finds himself in the England hot-seat. The season’s nadir came at home to Aston Villa in February, when one long-suffering fan saw fit to hurl his season ticket in the general direction of McLaren and his coaching staff following an abject 4-0 defeat. Instead of bothering the top six this term, Boro concerned themselves more with avoiding the drop to the Championship for most of the season, with a level of inconsistency akin to that of a 500 year-old schizophrenic trying to lead two hobbits to the fires of Mordor. Though they left it late, this was exactly what they achieved in 2004/05 when Robbie Fowler’s botched penalty denied Manchester City a chance to dust off the passports. It would not have been unreasonable for Boro fans to expect the side to push for qualification for Europe via their league placing. Throw in the club’s desperately awful showing of 14th in the Premiership, and the argument that expectations have not been met by the now outgoing manager Steve McLaren gathers momentum. It leaves the fans to reflect on what might have been, with an FA Cup semi-final defeat to West Ham United adding to the feeling of ‘if only’ on Teesside. Instead the 4-0 thrashing suffered at the hands of the Spanish outfit shows the club in a manifestly alternative glow. It’s perhaps crude to suggest that the success or otherwise of Middlesbrough’s season hinged on one result, but victory in last Wednesday’s UEFA Cup final over Sevilla (May 10) would have been the club’s greatest ever achievement. New England kit available for pre-order.