It is a day when football theatre is at its best, its most brutal. The Championship play-off final promises extremes like no other: the victors ascend to the Premier League where they will embrace the glory, the riches and the opportunities that could transform the lives of individuals and the future of the whole club; the losers get nothing except the sense that a campaign of 49 matches was just an elaborate setup to a sickening punchline. On Monday, Norwich City and Middlesbrough yearn to be the ones laughing.
Middlesbrough players seemed to think they would be spared this dramatic trial when they beat Norwich at Carrow Road just over a month ago, their 1-0 victory leaving them in prime position to achieve automatic promotion. The way they celebrated afterwards showed they suspected they had done the hardest work. But they lost at Fulham a week later before drawing at home to Brighton and ended the regular season a point behind Norwich. Both sides then came through play-off semi-finals – Middlesbrough beating Brentford while Norwich ousted their East Anglian rivals Ipswich Town – to arrange a showdown that gives Norwich a chance to have the last hurrah. If they achieve that, no one will smile more than their midfielder Alex Tettey, who scored the own goal that gave Middlesbrough that win.
“When the referee blew the whistle at the end I think I was in hell,” says Tettey. “It was really disappointing because we knew that if we won the game we would probably get one of those two automatic spots. That’s one of the reasons why the whole team is up for the game on Monday. We feel it is definitely time to win against Middlesbrough. We’ve beaten most of the top teams, including Bournemouth and Watford, but we just haven’t managed to win in the two games against Boro and we can’t have that, it’s just not possible.”
Not only did they not manage to win against Boro in the sides’ first meeting this season, the 4-0 defeat at the Riverside in November was their heaviest of the season and, in hindsight, spelled the beginning of the end for the club’s then manager, Neil Adams. Perhaps, then, Middlesbrough inadvertently did Norwich a favour, as Adams’s departure led to the recruitment of Alex Neil, who has presided over a radical improvement in the team’s form since he arrived from the Scottish Premiership side Hamilton in January.
Tettey has been so impressed by the 33-year-old manager that he says the club would already be in the Premier League if the Scot had been hired earlier. “If we had had him for the whole season, I would now be in Dubai or Barbados in the sun resting; we would definitely have gone up automatically,” he says. “I think he’s been brilliant. The way he approaches games, his tactics against teams and his one-on-one management have been very good.”
The Norway international has been especially impressed by the way Neil influences the closing stages of matches with substitutions and tactical adjustments that have turned a previously costly habit of conceding late goals into a penchant for scoring them or preserving leads. “I’ve been learning a lot from him this season both in games and at training. His tactics are completely different. There is no doubt when you go on to the pitch. He has given belief to every player and he’s been telling us that we can beat every team when at our best. When you look at the middle part of the season where we were better than teams but losing points at the end – if he had been here, with his tactics that would never happen.”
Middlesbrough, of course, provided an exception to that when they won in April, Aitor Karanka’s expertly organised defence rejecting everything Neil’s Norwich could throw at them after Tettey’s own goal in the eighth minute. Neil says he has watched that game multiple times in the runup to the final and stresses that it is vital to avoid conceding early again.
“I expect a different type of game to the one at Carrow Road last month, where an early goal changed the complexion of the match,” the manager says. “They sat deep behind the ball and defended for the rest of the game. I don’t see this game panning out that way at all. They will be difficult to break down but for us it will be a question of getting the balance right between defence and attack just by doing the things we have spoken about on a regular basis: getting out of the traps, making sure we don’t make any silly wee mistakes which can change the momentum of the game or bring unnecessary pressure on ourselves.”
Nathan Redmond did not start the match in April but is likely to do so on Monday, having become one of Norwich’s most penetrative players after developing his game the way Adams demanded, darting infield to cutting effect rather than always staying wide. If Redmond and Wes Hoolahan are deployed together, Norwich will fancy their chances of unhinging the Boro defence this time.
But Karanka’s side have able inventors, too, including Lee Tomlin and the winger Albert Adomah, and if their top scorer, Patrick Bamford, has recovered fully from the ankle injury that made him miss most of the semi‑finals, then the drama at Wembley could be shaped by several goals as well as tension, twists, epic joy and deep torment.
