Middlesbrough are the anti-Man City on the slide…

during the Premier League match between Middlesbrough and Swansea City at Riverside Stadium on December 17, 2016 in Middlesbrough, England.

I write a lot about football, which inevitably means I write a lot of stupid things about football. One of the stupidest came after the second week of the current league season when I wrote that Middlesbrough’s games would be exciting to watch.

My only excuse is that those first two games, against Stoke and Sunderland, were actually rather thrilling. Twenty-three games later, Boro’s games have seen a total of only 46 goals, fully 13 fewer than Southampton’s, the next lowest at 59. The last time a top-flight team’s games finished the season with more than 13 fewer goals than anyone else was 20 years ago, when Leeds turned the trick.

The Whites’ manager for most of that season? None other than George Graham, who made a career out of keeping things tight at the back. And that’s exactly what Aitor Karanka is doing. He joined Boro in November of 2013, and for the rest of the season they had the best defence in the Championship. The next season they had the best defence in the Championship. And again the next season, promotion season. Karanka worked under José Mourinho at Real Madrid. Did I mention I predicted their games would be exciting?

The miserly goal totals have only decreased as the season has progressed. Their last six games have produced only seven total goals. The problem, of course, is if neither team is scoring much, you’re not scoring much yourself. And in fact Boro have only scored three times in their last eight matches, none of which they’ve won.

This would be embarrassing in any other context. But Boro are back in the top flight after seven years in the second division, and the only item on the agenda is survival. As everyone except Eddie Howe knows, the first thing you do is get the clean sheet. Boro have registered five 0-0 draws, four of them against teams higher in the table.

But now and then you need three points, and that’s a different task altogether. Boro have fewer wins than anyone in the division, and don’t seem to have a plan for getting more. As a result, after a decent first half of the season, they’ve been inching toward the relegation zone. Each win by a team below them means further jeopardy – they’ve already been overtaken by Swansea City – and the bottom three surely beckons unless they can find a reliable route to goal.

They had hoped to find one in the January window, a natural market for relegation candidates. It made the difference for Sunderland last year, and may do the same for Hull this year. And Boro tried, they really tried. For weeks they had Bojan in their sights, but he went to Germany. At one point a headline in the Middlesbrough Gazette read ‘Boro close in on Jesé’, but he went to Spain. At least Robert Snodgrass stayed in England, but he preferred the Thames to the Tees.

In the end, Boro wound up with Rudy Gestede, Patrick Bamford, and Adlene Guedioura. His brilliant cup volley notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that Gestede is anything more than a good Championship striker. Patrick Bamford might get strong marks in my literature classes, but not in Premier League action. Guedioura can bring only the faintest of impetus to the midfield. They’re no closer than before.

The odd thing is that they have the single most exciting attacking player in the league, the incomparable Adama Traoré, whom I’ll keep calling Tornado until it catches on. He’s been in and out of the line-up, mainly because the boss doesn’t trust him to defend. But the boss has also figured out Boro need goals, so Traoré has started the last four games in the hope he can make something, anything happen.

But here’s the killer stat. In 1117 minutes on the pitch, he’s delivered only 11 key passes. That means by far the most prolific dribbler on the planet creates less than a chance a game. Moreover, he has yet to record a goal or an assist, and his pass completion percentage is one of the lowest on the team. He’s a solo act, glorious to watch, but his very unpredictability makes it hard to combine with his teammates. At the moment there’s a No End Product sign around his neck, and flashing red.

So the side is stuck for creativity. Viktor Fischer is down the pecking order. Adam Forshaw has had a fine season, but he’s there to deliver the first pass, not the last. Unless Guedioura is having a monster day, the playmaker has to be Stewart Downing or Gastón Ramírez. For those keeping score, that’s one player who’s been told he can leave and another that wants to.

You can imagine how frustrating it’s been for Alvaro Negredo, who’s used to much better service. To say he’s been feeding off scraps is an insult to scraps. His technical skills have been underused because he’s playing primarily as a target man, behind only Sam Vokes, Christian Benteke and Troy Deeney in aerial duels per game. To be fair, though, he’s only played well in spurts, and has occasionally seemed off the pace. He’s 31 years old, and doesn’t seem to have drunk from the Zlatan fountain.

You can also imagine how frustrating it’s been for the supporters, who begged for Traoré and have been consistently critical of the safety-first approach. In the loss to West Ham, with Boro down a goal late, the Riverside fans chanted “attack, attack, attack!” At the ensuing press conference, Karanka, for whom the word ‘tetchy’ seems to have been invented, responded quite irrationally that he wasn’t going to play long ball no matter what the fans wanted. Needless to say, the fans weren’t chanting “lump it, lump it, lump it”, and why the heck did you buy Rudy Gestede anyway?

All season I’ve picked Boro to stay up, mainly because ‘defence keeps you up’ is one of those reliable sayings that mean you don’t have to think. There’s no denying the defence is good: Ben Gibson is a future England star; Calum Chambers and of late Bernardo Espinosa have played well; Fabio has been a two-footed revelation at full-back; Victor Valdés is showing his class in goal.

But backing Boro to stay up, although not quite stupidity yet, is looking less and less like wisdom. This coming weekend is an important test: they go to Selhurst Park to play a side that even under Sam Allardyce has only one clean sheet in eight. If Boro draw a blank there, the smart people may start backing the drop.

Peter Goldstein