MIDDLESBROUGH captain Jonny Howson believes that the club are still in the hunt for the play-offs this season but have to be wary of the gap to the top six growing even further.

Coupled with Boro’s defeat to Preston North End on Tuesday night, results on Wednesday evening Boro are now eight points off the play-offs.

While there has been impressive showings from Boro in Chris Wilder’s two games in charge, they’ve picked up just one point out of a possible six and currently sit 15th in the Championship table.

While the league table is bunched together and still in it’s infancy, Howson says they can’t afford to let their season slip away from them.

The 33-year-old said: “It’s got to come to a stage where you can’t keep saying that or you’ve got to be in that group that is challenging.

“You don’t look that far ahead as in ‘we need to be here at this stage’. I think whilst it is tight and grouped together, we’ve always got that chance but there’s got to come some point when we need to make our move now or you are in that group and we need to stay in this group.

“There’s different parts of the season where you are aware of where you are and you deal with it on them moments rather than looking to far ahead.”

After the 2-1 loss to the Lilywhites earlier in the week, Wilder’s side will be looking to bounce back when they make the trip Huddersfield Town this weekend.

The Terriers are in and around the play-offs but missed the chance to go into the top six losing 1-0 to Queens Park Rangers on Wednesday.

The Preston defeat was a hard one to take for Boro and resulted in the new boss calling the players attitude into question after letting their lead slip.

While the boss will expect to see a resurgence, the captain admits it’s a case of fine tuning the performance.

He added: “We’re obviously disappointed because we lost the game. That’s natural when you care about something and you don’t get what you want.

“I think once that settles down a bit, 24 hours later, then you realise that you can look back. There was positives, we should have won the game and there’s something to build on.

“A lot of positives to take but the bottom line is we didn’t win the game and you want to do that.

“It’s not a case of a whole heap of things that we’ve got to change. I’m a positive person and I’ll always believe that we can succeed and hopefully we can do that on Saturday.”

As for the task of reaching the play-offs, the club captain hopes that once they get their first victory, the results will start to follow.

Howson said: “Hopefully so and that’s obviously the aim. We’ve got to start off with game one, go from there and build on that.

“There has been positives. There has been a lot of good things even in this short space but the bottom line is about getting three points and trying to move up that table.”