Stoke bounce back to turn up the heat on Karanka
With around an hour gone, with shot-shy Boro trailing 2-0 and about to drop into the relegation zone, the chant went up from the 3,000 noisy Teessiders in the away end.
‘Aitor Karanka, it’s time to go home.’ It was met with a few boos but the first symbolic shots of discontent with the Spaniard had been fired.
This was a troubling afternoon for barren Boro and their manager. Stoke, thrashed 4-0 at Spurs last weekend, strolled to victory. Two first-half goals from Marko Arnautovic, the first a thing of beauty, secured it. At one point, as if to emphasise the Potters’ superiority, the unlikely pair of Glen Johnson and Peter Crouch brought out the tricks and skills. While he claimed not to hear the chant, Karanka did not dodge the inevitable questions.
‘If the chairman calls me, I will leave the day he tells me to,’ he said. ‘I came here because the chairman called me three years ago to help the club to be in the Premier League. I will leave the day that the chairman will say.’
Karanka may well point out that he saw this coming. Shortly before the end of the transfer window he seemed to hit out at a lack of support when the club failed to secure his targets.
‘There are a lot of problems,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not just one. If there was just one, we would fix it.’
For Stoke, there simply had to be an improvement on last week’s horror show.
Mark Hughes was ‘convinced’ he would get a response and had to wait less than half an hour. On 29 minutes, Arnautovic’s control from the impressive Glenn Whelan’s chipped pass was delightful. He deftly volleyed the descending ball on the turn through George Friend’s legs before dropping a shoulder and gliding past Boro keeper Victor Valdes. All that was left was for him to power a finish between two backtracking defenders and into the net. The Austrian’s second was a little more straightforward. Crouch headed Whelan‘s corner goalwards and Arnautovic, on the turn, stabbed it in from close range.
Hughes was impressed. ‘Marko was excellent,’ he said. ‘He had to come off unfortunately with some sinusitis. He is all blocked up and it was affecting his breathing but he gave us all he had and he’s obviously in a good place at the moment.’
The manager himself is breathing a little easier after the response. ‘We were very poor last week, albeit against a very good Spurs side,’ he said. ‘More often than not we are able to bounce back.’
Karanka, who lost Daniel Ayala after eight minutes, can see a silver lining for Boro, saying: ‘We are in the bottom three in March. For a recently promoted team to be in the bottom three for the first time in March it is because we are doing something well.’
Chants including ‘what’s it like to score a goal?’ and a celebratory ‘we’ve had a shot’ followed.
It did not feel like Boro were doing anything well.