Aitor Karanka’s phone has been engaged quite a bit in recent days. The Middlesbrough manager has variously been advising his old pal Pep Guardiola about life in England and consoling his great friend José Mourinho over recent events at Chelsea but such conversations have only intensified his desire to reach the Premier League next season.
The former Real Madrid centre-half, more recently Mourinho’s assistant at the Bernabéu, would relish attempting to outwit Guardiola in England’s top tier next season and winning at Brighton on Saturday lunchtime would increase the likelihood of that happening.
Karanka’s team moved to the top of the Championship after beating Burnley at home on Tuesday night but are ahead of Chris Hughton’s side only on goal difference. Moreover Brighton have not been beaten in the League all season and seem unlikely to surrender that 21-game record lightly.
They will find themselves facing their division’s “Calendar Boys” after George Friend, Middlesbrough’s left-back, came up with the idea of 12 players posing topless for a calendar with all proceeds going to the families of former steelworkers devastated by the recent death of that industry on Teesside.
It is proving a big hit. “There’s a real community feel about this club and everyone here knows someone or has a relative affected by the closure of the steelworks,” said Friend – aka “Mr September”. “The lads wanted to give something back and everyone pulled together. The calendar’s revealing and exposing but it’s all for a good cause.”
Karanka can only trust that Friend, Boro’s reigning player of the season, and his fellow defenders are not exposed by opponents who did not really feature in the pre-season promotion predictions.
“Brighton are a surprise to many people but not to me,” said the Spaniard. “Everyone expected ourselves, Hull, Derby, Burnley and QPR to be in the race for promotion but I knew that Brighton have a really good, very experienced manager who has got them playing well.”
As befits a confidant of the former Barcelona and current Bayern Munich manager, Karanka encourages Boro to dominate possession, playing patient keep-ball at times but, as Guardiola may well discover at Manchester City, Chelsea or wherever next season, English football is a broad stylistic church.
Hughton, who knows all about escaping the Championship after winning the division at a canter with Newcastle United in 2009-10, believes he has enhanced Brighton’s chances of reaching the top flight by weaning his team off the essentially Spanish passing formula originally introduced on Gus Poyet’s watch.
“There’s no doubt the style of play has changed,” said Hughton in a recent interview. “With previous managers the formation would have been 4-3-3, which is very much possession-based football. I’ve gone to a form of 4-4-2. I just felt I wanted to get the ball forward a bit quicker. The style should still be possession-based but about trying to have as much of that possession as possible in the opposition’s half.”
Considering that Karanka has just appointed Victor Orta, a compatriot who has previously served as technical and sport director at Sevilla and Zenit St Petersburg, to a senior recruitment role it is hard to see Boro’s philosophy undergoing similar modifications.
At its best a broadly 4-2-3-1 approach described as “sophisticated” by Everton’s Roberto Martínez, another friend of Boro’s manager, is easy on the eye (and incidentally not dissimilar to the passing game introduced by Bruce Rioch as he led the Teessiders into the top tier in the 1980s) but sometimes the club’s fans would like to see their team forcing the tempo a little more. Now and then Boro could do with making the most of Stewart Downing’s football brain by getting the ball forward a bit earlier and a bit faster.
Marshalled by the excellent Dani Ayala in central defence they have kept five straight Championship clean sheets since losing 3-0 at Hull in early November and boast the division’s best defensive record. It bodes well for their automatic promotion chances but Karanka’s often heavily rotated team do not tend to be high scorers and must cope without the suspended David Nugent at Brighton.
With Hughton – whose side seem to have forgotten how to keep clean sheets lately – lacking the influential but suspended Lewis Dunk at centre-half, Boro have reason for cautious optimism. Karanka, though, knows better than to underestimate the man in the adjacent technical area.
