Stoke 2 - 0 MiddlesbroughMarko Arnautovic at the double for Stoke to sink hapless Middlesbrough
Home team scorersMarko Arnautovic 29
Marko Arnautovic 42
This week Aitor Karanka said there would be no talk of relegation at Middlesbrough until they were in the bottom three. After their tepid 2-0 defeat at Stoke, that’s exactly where they are. He may need to start discussing it now.
Up until this point, Boro’s primary saving grace has been their defence, which before the game was better than anyone’s outside the top seven, but even that fell apart in the Potteries.
Marko Arnautovic got both goals for Stoke who, over the course of the game, were nowhere close to their best but they still easily beat a bloodless Boro side who have now gone 423 minutes without scoring a league goal. The travelling support seemed split on the topic of the manager, but unless something changes then Karanka is only taking them one way.
The Stoke manager, Mark Hughes, resisted the urge to make wholesale changes to the team battered 4-0 by Tottenham last week, the fit-again Glen Johnson and Geoff Cameron returning. Karanka not only changed personnel but also the system, with George Friend returning at left-back and Rudy Gestede making a rare start as the lone striker in a 4-5-1. January signing Patrick Bamford, who recently met with Karanka to ask why he hadn’t been in the team, didn’t even make the bench.
Stoke produced the first piece of notable football when a delicate one-touch move involving flicks from Peter Crouch and the always bubbly Joe Allen led to Ramadan Sobhi hitting the bar from close range. Then followed a 20-second passage of play so shambolic that Yakety Sax should really have been played over the PA: the ball was given away three times in rapid succession, and at one stage Ryan Shawcross was clean through on goal.
Stoke did take the lead in the 29th minute when Glenn Whelan looped a pass into the area from deep, Arnautovic took it down with a David Silva-esque left-footed touch, inched around the goalkeeper then forced the ball home with his right, splicing two defenders on the line as they desperately tried to block.
A second came just before the break, this one distressingly simple from Boro’s perspective. Whelan skimmed over a corner from the right, Crouch nodded it back and Arnautovic hooked it home from inside the six-yard box. The player that came closest to denying the Austrian his brace was his teammate Shawcross, who also trying to score, which summed up the poor quality of Boro’s defending. Shortly afterwards Johnson nutmegged Friend, and the Boro left-back received a booking for almost pulling his opponent’s shorts down.
Boro’s fans, who were broadly supportive for much of the first half, implored their side to ‘Attack! Attack! Attack!’, and offered a mixture of boos and frustrated howls of encouragement as the players trudged off at the break.
Karanka attempted to shake his team from their stupor by bringing on Cristhian Stuani for the anonymous Gastón Ramírez, a move that looked to have worked when Ben Gibson found the net from a Grant Leadbitter free-kick, but Bernardo Espinosa had strayed carelessly offside.
Arnautovic limped off just after the hour mark, and the game became extremely scrappy as Stoke’s play became more stilted and Boro still struggled to get within 30 yards of the opposing goal. ‘Aitor Karanka, it’s time to go home,’ sang a pocket of Boro fans, before being shouted down by others. More joined in with the bleak lament, ‘What’s it like to score a goal?’ and the exclamatory, ‘We’ve had a shot!’ when substitute Adlène Guedioura fired over from the edge of the penalty area.
Stoke came close to adding a third through Sobhi and Ibrahim Afellay, but in the end two was plenty.
Guardian
