Middlesbrough Face Tough Challenge With Relegation Implications for Stoke City

Stoke City fell to third bottom of the Championship this weekend

The Middlesbrough team’s trip to Stoke City on Saturday might have a significant impact on the home team; according to one report, manager Steven Schumacher’s job will be under intense pressure should they lose. Before Middlesbrough’s visit, Stoke City is truly in a crisis, but it could make the journey more difficult than it seems on paper.

The Potters enter the match with just one victory in their previous seven games, a record that is sure to instill fear in the hearts of Boro supporters as they go to the Bet365 Stadium in a desperate attempt to improve their own recent bad play! Stoke’s 2-1 loss against Cardiff City on Saturday sent them into the relegation zone.

Even though Schumacher hasn’t been playing well lately, TeamTalk stated today that “a loss at home to Middlesbrough next Saturday may ramp up the pressure even further on a board who are desperate to avoid the drop.” The team will play on Saturday. Relegation would always have a significant negative financial impact. After overseeing 13 games thus far, Schumacher has lost seven of them, and the report implies that the board is seriously concerned about their performance.

“I can’t question the players’ efforts since I’ve been here. I think everyone can see that they’re trying, that they’re giving everything they’ve got and it’s just in certain areas that they’re coming up short. There’s still 12 games to go, that’s still a long time, a quarter of a season to go and it’s not over until it’s over.”

READ ALSO; ‘Stop messing with our lives’; Brentford’s Norgaard criticizes points deduction uncertainty, calls for clarity

It remains to be seen how Stoke respond to the growing possibility of being demoted to League One. Because they are fighting for their life, bottom teams frequently exhibit form in these circumstances that they haven’t displayed before.

Prior to this match, our sister site Stoke on Trent Live’s Potters writer Peter Smith writes that for Stoke, who were in the Premier League just five seasons ago, it is now “do or die.” According to reports, interim technical director Jon Walters called a meeting of all players and football staff on Tuesday morning at the training facility to issue a rallying cry and make sure everyone understood their roles within the team.

It’s something Boro will have to be wary of when heading to Staffordshire this weekend, with the high potential for Stoke to be fired up as a result. Michael Carrick’s side have been struggling in their own right in recent months and have only two league wins since the turn of the year – though perhaps encouragingly, they have both come away from home.

For as important as the game is being built up at the Bet365 Stadium, at the risk of sounding dramatic, it could be just as significant for Boro. For so long we’ve been looking up at the top-six and considering what Boro must do to catch up and crash the play-off party – even if of late that appeared increasingly optimistic. Defeat to Plymouth Argyle on Saturday almost certainly ended those hopes, with Boro now just nine points above the relegation zone and 11 off the top six.

Were the worst to happen for Carrick’s side on Saturday, they could suddenly find themselves dragged into an unthinkable relegation battle of their own. Depending on results elsewhere, they could find themselves just six points above the drop zone on Saturday evening, albeit with a game in hand.

As of right now, they are ranked 13th, and the realistic assessment is that they are too good and have too many teams between them and the bottom three to be caught up. But if they don’t demonstrate that quality on the field more frequently in their remaining 13 games, we might find ourselves in a similar situation to Stoke very soon.

That makes Boro’s challenge this weekend obvious. On Saturday, Stoke will probably be fighting for their lives. In order to meet that challenge, Boro will need to match their opponent’s level of motivation while maintaining the composure necessary to execute the game plan and demonstrate their superiority. It’s up to Boro to inflict further suffering on the Potters and make sure that they don’t have to worry about Boro watching them over the next several weeks.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Related News

You may have missed