MICHAEL Carrick mounted a staunch defence of Middlesbrough's approach and says he won't be changing his ways after Seny Dieng's costly error in the draw with Hull City.

Dieng played Boro into trouble late in the first half when his short pass to Lewis O'Brien led to the midfielder losing possession, with Jean Michael Seri taking full advantage of the error and firing the Tigers into a 2-1 lead.

Boro pegged Hull back in the second half through Finn Azaz, and Carrick jumped to the defence of his goalkeeper and his side's preference to play out from the back, and says it's resulted in more goals scored than conceded this season.

And he stressed that Boro need to make sure they don't budge from their beliefs, regardless of who they're playing and the stage of the game.

He said: “When is the right time to not do it? You get your success from it, so when do you decide we’re not going to do it now when that’s what we’re good at and what we get our success from.

"When you concede, it’s easy to say it’s a bad time to do it, we shouldn’t be doing it, or whatever. When we get the rewards, it’s fantastic football.

"I can’t fault the boys. All teams in this league who play in that way have conceded goals in that manner at times. Leicester have, Southampton have, Hull have. That’s not having a go at those teams.

"What we all feel is that we get more success in terms of building your style of play, in terms of gaining confidence in the game and being dangerous from back to front. We believe in it a lot.

"Yes. we got caught today, and if we didn’t we might have won the game. But that’s football. I think we scored the first goal from kind of playing out from the back, so I’ve got no problem with that."

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Carrick continued: “There was one goal at Leicester - Vardy’s - we kick it long with five minutes to go and they win the header and he goes in one-on-one to score and you’re asking, ‘should we have played it out?’

"When there is a goal goes in, it’s easy to dissect it and say you should do it differently. But we believe in it and that it gives us a lot of good in the game.

"Yeah, we can do a little bit better and we don’t want to concede goals from it doing it. But if you don’t do it, when are you ever going to play your football? Everyone thinks of the problem and not the solution. We’re a little bit more positive than that."