When it comes to transfers, MIDDLESBROUGH has definitely had more successes than failures in recent years, and Kieran Scott and his team’s approach has been a huge success.
However, last season’s January transfer window wasn’t a success. During his appearance as a special guest on BBC Tees this week, Scott acknowledged that “it was by far the worst window I’ve had at the club in terms of me doing my job.”
It’s reasonable to wonder why we’re reflecting on recent windows and a previous season given that eight months have gone by, Boro has switched managers, and they are currently leading the Championship standings before domestic play resumes this weekend.
But the challenges – and more importantly the key conclusion – to emerge from January aided Boro in what was a hugely successful window – and will no doubt continue to be a useful reminder in windows to come.
In short, Boro moved away from what had worked for them in January – “it was disjointed,” said Scott – but come the end of the winter window, and the way the second half of last season played out, it “reaffirmed” to Boro’s recruitment team that what they’d been doing previously works and they shouldn’t stray from that.
Not that Scott and the recruitment staff wanted to stray from it in the first place.
Scott didn’t point any fingers in his interview with BBC Tees, but it’s no secret that it was former boss Michael Carrick who pushed for the signings of Kelechi Iheanacho and Ryan Giles, for example, both of which backfired badly.
Not everybody was on the same page and I think it showed,” said Scott this week.
“I’m not going to butter it up. It was a frustrating window and I just felt we didn’t quite see eye to eye through that window.
“The thing that really caused us a problem was Emmanuel Latte Lath going a bit later than he should have done.
“He should have gone a bit earlier to give us a bit more of a window to do the work, but everything in the January window is a moving part.
“It’s not that simple sometimes. A lot of things were going on in the background that can slow things down, but that didn’t help.”
Scott added: “The January window is really difficult, certainly when someone was going to approach for a player, obviously Emmanuel.
“We knew that was coming. That does destabilise and causes issues and sometimes moves your focus away from what it needs to be on. But that’s the same for everybody, it’s no excuse.
“Everyone has the same things to deal with. I just thought when it got to the identification of players and working towards a strategy we’d had for a long time, it went a bit left and right at times and wasn’t as it should have been.”
The learnings from the January window formed part of the end of season review.
It was a reminder of the importance of everybody sticking to the strategy that has worked for the recruitment team in recent seasons, the strategy that brought players such as Morgan Rogers, Rav van den Berg, Aidan Morris and Latte Lath to the club.
“It just reaffirmed how we’ve worked at the club previous to that [January[ was right, and by the way that was with the people who were involved in January. Nobody was doing it on purpose,” said Scott.
“It was just a case of we stopped seeing eye to eye. It wasn’t conjoined like it had been.
“We take some lessons from that and it just reaffirmed to me going into the summer we needed to be on the players we want, the way we need to do it and we need to make sure we action that plan and not deviate.
“I think this window has gone back to showing when we have that plan and focus we achieve what we want to achieve.”
As boss Rob Edwards has said on several occasions over the course of the summer, everyone is now very much “aligned” on transfers.
Edwards’ appointment followed the dismissal of Carrick after an extremely thorough end of season review.
Why did that review result in Boro deciding a change of head coach was the best course of action? Scott basically summed it up in a couple of telling sentences.
“The review was done on the basis that if things were going to change we would have stuck with Michael,” he said.
“We weren’t given those assurance that things would move on in how we wanted it to be.”
Essentially, then, Boro chiefs hadn’t seen or heard enough from Carrick to suggest the head coach was willing to change or alter his approach in an effort to address the issues that so obviously plagued his side last season.
“It was a decision that was made between Steve, Neil and myself that we wanted to review what had gone on the season before,” explained Scott.
“We were disappointed to finish tenth, we were disappointed to finish eighth the season before.
“We were worried we weren’t really showing signs of progressing. It was a lengthy review because, to be fair to Michael and the guys, they deserved that. They’d been with us for two and a bit years, so it wasn’t something we were just going to do overnight.
“We gave them plenty of opportunity for us all to have a big discussion about how we saw things going forward. It did take a little bit of time, for sure, but on the basis that we wanted to make sure we did the right thing. Michael deserved that.
“Within three or four weeks there were a lot of meetings and a lot of reflections as well.
“We had to reflect on things and then come back and speak about things in more depth, so that was the reason why it took so long.
“They’d earned that right. We talked about a lot of things and I learned a lot of things during that period – about myself and about others.
“It was done properly and obviously we came to a decision at the end that it was right for a change.
“We perhaps didn’t feel we were going to move in the direction we all discussed and hoped for, and so the decision was made that we were going to start again and move Michael on.”
