AITOR KARANKA has piled the pressure onto the three clubs above Middlesbrough in the Championship table by telling them: “You’re the ones with promotion in your hands.”

The promotion race has turned into a four-game shoot out, with Boro playing the first of their final four matches this evening when they host play-off hopefuls Wolves.

The Teessiders are currently two points adrift of leaders Bournemouth, who travel to Reading, and a point behind second-placed Norwich, who travel to Elland Road to face Leeds, and third-placed Watford, who take on Nottingham Forest at the City Ground tomorrow.

It is surely inevitable there will be more twists and turns in the next three weeks, but Boro’s fate is out of their own hands, and Karanka claims that turns the spotlight onto the teams currently filling the top three positions.

“I think there is more pressure on the teams above us,” said the Boro head coach. “Now, we are fourth, so we are the team with less chance of going up than the teams above us.

“We have worked very well this season, and are enjoying the position we are in, and we know we can still get promotion at the end. But the pressure is on Bournemouth, Watford and Norwich because they are the teams at the top and they have better chances than us.

“Everybody thinks that it’s going to be a race between Bournemouth, Watford and Norwich. We still have to play Norwich, and everybody thinks it will be a difficult game for us, so for this reason, I think the other teams have more pressure than us.”

As a disciple of Jose Mourinho, Karanka knows all about the potential effects of managerial mind games, and his latest missive is clearly an attempt to deflect attention away from his own side’s run in and increase the heat on the current top three, all of whom won at the weekend.

On paper, Boro have much the toughest finishing sequence, with tonight’s game against a Wolves side who have won seven of their last 11 games preceding Friday night’s trip to Carrow Road to face Norwich.

The game with the Canaries has long been flagged up as a potential automatic promotion decider, and having suffered deserved defeats at Bournemouth and Watford in the last month, the Teessiders will be desperate to avoid an unwanted hat-trick when they travel to Norfolk.

That can wait until the end of the week though, and for all that the Norwich game has long looked like being a date with destiny, Karanka concedes it will be all but irrelevant if his players slip up tonight.

“If we start to think about the Norwich game now, we are making a big mistake,” he said. “If we lose against Wolves, we are going to lose all of our chances to get promotion directly.

 “If we lose this game, then we don’t have any chance after it because it’s not just a fight between Bournemouth, Watford and us, or Watford, Norwich and us, there are four teams for just two positions, so the main thing is to win against Wolves.

“The main thing after our defeat at Watford was to win on Saturday against Rotherham. We did that, and now we must focus on beating Wolves.”

One thing very much in Boro’s favour this evening is a home record that is the best in the Championship, with no one else able to match the Teessiders’ return of 14 home victories.

They have only suffered three home defeats all season, two of which came in a particularly disappointing week at the end of August.

Boro lost to Sheffield Wednesday and Reading in the space of seven days, and while it is much too early to be conducting a post-mortem into the season’s events, it is hard not to reflect on where Boro might have been had they picked up a victory in at least one of those games.

“You do look back and wonder,” said Karanka. “But when you look back at those days, you have to remember that I did not have a full squad. Patrick (Bamford) arrived a month or so after the first game, as did Jelle (Vossen), Ryan (Fredericks) and Yanic (Wildschut).

“That is something we have to learn from for the future because it is true that with three or four points more, we could be in a much better position than the one where we are. But the reality is that we are in that position and we have to keep going until the end with this squad.”

Fredericks is available to make his first appearance since the start of March this evening, and Karanka must decide whether to start with the Tottenham loanee or continue to field Tomas Kalas in the right-back berth.

Daniel Ayala will start alongside Ben Gibson at the heart of the back four, with his weekend withdrawal against Rotherham having been a precautionary measure, but Grant Leadbitter is unavailable as he completes his two-match ban.

Possible line-ups:

Middlesbrough (4-2-3-1): Konstantopoulos; Fredericks, Ayala, Gibson, Friend; Clayton, Forshaw; Adomah, Tomlin, Vossen; Bamford.

Wolves (4-4-2): Ikeme; Iorfa, Golbourne, Price, Stearman; Batth, Henry, McDonald, Afobe; Dicko, Sako.