Karanka in need of firepower as Boro draw blank

It MOSt certainly wasn’t how Aitor Karanka would have envisaged it but the Spaniard saw little point in concocting excuses.

there was just no escaping the fact this was a limp opening weekend performance from a Middlesbrough team considered Championship promotion favourites by everyone, from the bookmakers to the pundits to the neutrals.

After failing to muster a single shot on target in 90 minutes of toil against a disciplined and workmanlike Preston side, clearly a little more work needs to be done to live up to their billing.

‘I said before the game we would be making a mistake if we think every game will be easy,’ said Karanka (right).

‘I am not making excuses. I have a squad that I imagine is better than theirs but they played better than us. they were well organised defensively and they wanted the ball more than us. So we have to improve.’

It left you wondering whether on a tough afternoon such as this, someone of the calibre of Jordan Rhodes might have created and converted something from the few scraps Preston offered on their return to the second tier.

Boro’s pursuit of Rhodes, who has returned goal tallies of 28, 25 and 21 in his three seasons with Blackburn, has been well publicised all summer and a £12million bid was rejected last week.

this game underlined Boro’s need to bring in a reliable frontman having profited from the 19 goals of Chelsea loanee Patrick Bamford, now with Crystal Palace, last term.

‘Last season we had a lot of chances, which we missed. But today, we only had two or three so we need to create more chances,’ said Karanka, who signed a new four-year contract last week.

‘We have Kike and (Cristhian) Stuani and we need to bring in players who can score goals. Jordan is one name on the list and we have other ones.’

New striker or not, nearly 4,000 fans came to Lancashire brimming with expectation. Karanka’s new deal combined with the homecoming of Stewart Downing — a statement signing at £5.5m — meant Boro were buoyant. But they just did not get going, coming closest early on when Grant Leadbitter fired wide when well placed after a neat exchange of passes with Kike. Preston, back in the Championship after four seasons away, certainly did not look out of place and their summer acquisitions Jordan Pickford, Marnick Vermijl, Greg Cunningham, Paul Gallagher and Will Keane slotted into Simon Grayson’s gameplan well.

On this evidence, they will do far more than merely survive and they might have led when Manchester United loanee Keane saw a shot cleared off the line by George Friend.

‘ We’ve limited Middlesbrough to no shots on target which is some achievement given the players they’ve got,’ Grayson said. ‘I thought we extremely hard, carried out the gameplan and on another day we could quite easily have had a couple of goals.’