Middlesbrough: Seven years of work has been undone in a little over seven months

Watching Bournemouth completely outclass Boro at a sun-kissed Vitality Stadium, it was almost as if the Aitor Karanka era had not happened at all. In the season before Karanka took over at the Riverside, Tony Mowbray watched his Boro team concede four goals in successive away games against Ipswich and Crystal Palace.

Fast forward a little over four years, and Steve Agnew has just done exactly the same thing. With Karanka out of the picture, and the Teessiders heading for a bruising return to the second tier, Steve Gibson finds himself presiding over a club that has crashed back to square one. Who is to say it will not be another seven years before Premier League football returns to the Riverside?

How has it come to this? How have the rewards of years of patient rebuilding been squandered in so negligent a manner? Relegation is not yet guaranteed – Boro find themselves nine points adrift of safety with five games remaining – but even with a home game against Sunderland to come on Wednesday, it is surely inevitable. Saturday’s performance reeked of a team that has given up. More alarmingly, it also smacked of a side that will not be easily repaired.

Karanka has to shoulder plenty of the blame for that, and while Boro only dropped into the bottom three in the Spaniard’s final league game in charge, the seeds of their return to the second tier were sown long before he finally gave up the ghost.

His entrenched conservatism hamstrung his side’s attempts to establish a cushion to the relegation zone, and when he left at the start of March, he bequeathed a squad with glaring deficiencies that reflected his desperation to keep risk-taking to a minimum. His man-management failings also resulted in divisions that are still glaringly apparent today.

Yet it would be wrong to pin all the blame on Karanka. Gibson must also shoulder his share of the responsibility, partly for failing to see this coming as his loyalty to Karanka meant he stuck by his boss as other clubs at the foot of the table changed manager to positive effect, and partly because of his choice as Karanka’s replacement.

Steve Agnew is a thoroughly likeable person, and is widely praised as an astute and innovative coach. Increasingly, though, he looks out of his depth as Boro’s number one. His tactical tweaks were initially regarded as breath of fresh air, but increasingly look like the desperate acts of a man floundering around looking for something to click.

He has failed to unite and motivate a group of players who appear to be pulling in different directions, and while statistics do not always tell the full story, when it comes to flagging up the failure of Agnew’s time in charge, it is hard to claim they are telling a lie. Agnew has picked up two points from his six games at the helm, and clearly that is unacceptable. Instead of a new-manager bounce, there has been a hastened capitulation.

Ultimately, of course, Agnew is beholden to the players at his disposal, and while there are plenty of members of the Boro squad who can look themselves in the mirror and be satisfied they have given their all this season, there are others who cannot make the same claim.

Chief among them is Gaston Ramirez, and if you ever wanted to witness the epitome of dereliction of duty, you could find it in the Uruguayan’s pathetic excuse for a performance at the weekend.

Clearly upset at being unable to force through a move to Leicester City in January, Ramirez’s attitude in the last three months has been abhorrent. On Saturday, however, it strayed into the realms of the obscene.

Barely five minutes had gone when he dawdled on the ball close to the visitors’ dug-out and was tackled. Any self-respecting professional would have chased back in an attempt to regain possession. Ramirez simply shook his head and wandered off in the opposite direction.

Nine minutes after that he was booked for an outrageous dive in the Bournemouth penalty area, and six minutes after that, his afternoon was over as he was sent off for a senseless lunge at Marc Pugh. Ramirez will claim he did not catch the Bournemouth midfielder close to the touchline, but the truth is it does not really matter. It was act of a player who couldn’t give a damn.

“It’s embarrassment really,” admitted Stewart Downing, when asked to describe his over-riding post-match emotion. “There’s a way of getting beat – but we just weren’t anywhere near good enough to be honest, all over the park.

“We were second best to balls throughout. It’s difficult when you go down to ten men, and they shifted the ball about and made it hard for us, but we didn’t make it easy for ourselves either.”

That is certainly true, and while Ramirez’s dismissal undoubtedly made life harder for the Teessiders, it was not the decisive factor in the game.

Boro were already two behind with 11 men, with Bournemouth having sliced through Agnew’s remodelled five-man defence within the first two minutes.

Both Antonio Barragan and Adam Clayton were at fault as Pugh’s slick one-two with Charlie Daniels enabled him to pull the ball back from the byline, and Josh King had the simple task of slotting home from the edge of the six-yard box.

The hosts doubled their advantage 14 minutes later, with Boro’s attempts to play their way out of trouble proving fatal.  Harry Arter robbed a lacklustre Clayton on the edge of the box, enabling Benik Afobe to beat Brad Guzan from inside the area.

Bournemouth’s third goal came shortly after the hour mark, and Clayton was again at fault, giving the ball away in his own half. Lewis Cook fed Pugh on the left-hand side, and the midfielder cut inside Calum Chambers before stroking a superb finish into the bottom right-hand corner.

By that stage, it was simply a question of how many Bournemouth would score, and their fourth goal was the pick of the bunch. Ryan Fraser rolled a free-kick to Daniels, who nonchalantly skipped past Clayton before firing a clinical 20-yard finish past Guzan.