SINCE becoming Middlesbrough head coach, Jonathan Woodgate has made a pretty decent fist of keeping his emotions in check. Despite being a proud and passionate Teessider, who has always worn his heart on his sleeve, there have been precious few emotional outbursts, hardly any touchline explosions.

Two minutes into Saturday’s game at QPR though, and for a moment or two, the guard dropped. As referee David Coote raised his arm to rule out Daniel Ayala’s header after a lengthy discussion with his assistant, Woodgate headed down the touchline at Loftus Road. Just briefly, all the misfortune of the last three months, the refereeing misjudgements and rank bad calls, were swirling around his mind, impossible to ignore.

“I was walking up and down the touchline thinking, ‘Oh my God, here we go again’,” admitted Woodgate. “It was ‘Here we go again, here we go again’. You can’t help but wonder what’s going on.”

Ayala did not look offside as he headed home Marvin Johnson’s free-kick, but then landing on the wrong side of a knife-edge refereeing decision has been something of a theme of Middlesbrough’s season. On too many occasions, Woodgate’s players have struggled to recover from the psychological blow of having a close call go against them, so for all that they remain mired in the relegation zone, having now won just two of their 16 league games, their response to Saturday’s early setback was the biggest positive to emerge from a potentially transformative day in West London.

For once, the Teessiders did not fold. Even when they conceded two goals in the space of 20 minutes at the end of the first half, watching a one-goal advantage become a one-goal deficit, they refused to retreat into their shell. They continued to press and harry, continued to play the bright, attacking football that Woodgate wants to encourage as his trademark. They still find themselves in an extremely fraught situation, but they have proved they have the stomach for the fight.

“There’s a lot of good characters in that dressing room, who really want to do well,” said Woodgate. “It’s a good group. For the situation we’re in, there’s no negativity. Everyone’s positive and on the same song sheet, and you need that. You don’t want any negativity bringing you down, but all those players in there are really positive. That’s so important.”

It helped that, for once, the majority of Middlesbrough’s most powerful personalities were on the field. Darren Randolph was back in goal, tipping long-range shots over the crossbar and displaying some characteristically-brilliant agility as he clawed away Ryan Manning’s first-half header. George Friend was back in Boro’s back three, leading by example with the captain’s armband back in his possession. And Ashley Fletcher was back alongside Britt Assombalonga in attack, running himself into the ground as he pressurised QPR’s defenders to help elicit the error from Nakhi Wells that enabled Assombalonga to level the scores in the second half.

All three had been ruled out through injury last Wednesday, and all three were still regarded as extremely unlikely starters when Woodgate travelled to the training ground on Friday morning. One by one, though, they expressed their desire to play.

When clubs are struggling in the relegation zone, it is often said that a manager has ‘lost the dressing room’. Never mind losing his players, Woodgate has achieved the notable feat of finding a team in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Again, that augurs well for what will be a testing few months.

“On Wednesday, we had Randolph out, George Friend only just back in training, so I didn’t think he would be playing either, and then Fletcher out too,” said Woodgate. “But all three came and knocked on my door on Friday morning and said, ‘Gaffer, I want to play’. All three of them.

“They weren’t 100 per cent fit, but they said, ‘I want to play for you’. That’s top. The situation we’re going through at the minute is difficult, and we’re scrapping and battling, so they could have taken the easy option and not played.

“Darren could have said, ‘I’m not 100 per cent, I want to wait for Ireland’, but he played. George played even though he’s only had three training sessions. Ashley has been struggling with a calf strain, but he played. They want to play for us, and it was really positive for me to see that from my team. It shows what the players are like. They want to stick together, and they want to play for me.”

Woodgate has backed his players to the hilt this season, and his faith has finally been rewarded, not least via the return to form of Assombalonga, who was as good on Saturday as he had been bad the previous weekend at Derby County.

He might well have had a fourth-minute penalty when Lee Wallace appeared to catch him in the area, and showed no ill effects from his miss at Pride Park when he opened the scoring midway through the first half at Loftus Road.

Manning’s slip enabled Jonny Howson to break down the right, and having forced himself ahead of Grant Hall, Assombalonga angled a deft stooped header past Joe Lumley. His second goal was a classic piece of poaching as he latched on to Wells’ errant back-pass before chipping home a neat finish.

QPR boss Mark Warburton worked with Assombalonga for nine months when he was manager of Nottingham Forest, and regards the 27-year-old as one of the leading strikers in the Championship. Unsurprisingly, Woodgate was in no mood to disagree.

“I’ve said all along that Britt will score goals,” he said. “When he scored a hat-trick against Salford (in pre-season), I said, ‘That’s what he can do’. Every striker will go through patches where they don’t score and their confidence dips, but I’ve always had absolute faith in him. He’s a goalscorer and he will score. That’s not going to change.”

The main negative in Boro’s performance was the slipshod defending that resulted in QPR’s two goals, and that saw the Teessiders look vulnerable whenever a set-piece was delivered into the area.

Wells was afforded the freedom of the 18-yard box as he latched on to Ilias Chair’s through ball to slot home, and Hall was unmarked from a corner as he powered in the header that resulted in Randolph clawing the ball into Jonny Howson, who could only look on crestfallen as he deflected an own goal into the net.