A thank you to the poster known on here as Steve the Tea who posted this on my blog recently about the Middlesbrough game;-

"One staggering fact I unearthed was that in the first period we had just a 33% passing accuracy. In the second half it rose to 51% making a figure of 42% for the whole match. Middlesbrough’s passing accuracy during the game was approximately 50% better than our figure at 66%."

To put those figures in some sort of context, here's the Championship's passing stats for each team throughout the season;-

https://www.whoscored.com/Regions/25...ship-2020-2021

What this shows is that Saturday was not typical of us - we may have some of the poorest figures in the division, but our 42 per cent against Middlesbrough would leave us a long way adrift at the bottom of the table if was our normal figure. So, I think it's fair to say our figures on Saturday were shockingly bad and I suppose the big question is could this be put down solely to tiredness? My view is that it can't,

Our position in the passing accuracy and completion tables tells us that it would be daft to expect there to be any real improvement in those figures for the rest of the season and I would say it excuses Mick McCarthy from too much criticism for them because there's little he can do about improving them for now - given the rapid turnover of games, there's not much he can do about it in training either. However, we really do need to make Middlesbrough a one off because I don't see how a top six challenge can be maintained if we see too much of such low figures in the future.