THERE was relief all round after Middlesbrough avoided a first home defeat of the season, but Callum Brittain thinks Saturday’s second-half performance was proof of a developing strength.
Boro battled during the second half to claim a point courtesy of Hayden Hackney’s header ten minutes before time from Brittain’s brilliant deep cross to the back post.
But Middlesbrough had struggled to find the breakthrough before that to cancel out Josh Windass’ deflected shot from distance that had put Wrexham ahead in the seventh minute,
In fact, had unmarked Kieffer Moore headed in Lewis O’Brien’s cross earlier in the second half then there is every chance the Red Dragons would have left Teesside with three points.
But Hackney’s own header ensured a point for Middlesbrough and also maintained an unbeaten start to the Championship season at the Riverside.
The challenge, Brittain feels, is to keep building on that by ensuring Middlesbrough continue to deliver positive results on home turf.
Brittain, who will be preparing for two away dates now against Watford and Leicester before welcoming Birmingham to Teesside on November 8, said: “We’ve got to make this place a fortress and make it a hard place to come.
“It’s massive to keep that record going. We feed off the crowd and they were amazing again on Saturday, especially the second half when they could see more intensity.
“It’s a massive thing in this division to be strong at home. That second half when we were probing for that goal and the energy of the crowd kept us going and kept us believing.
“When you feel that, we just had to keep plugging away, keep doing the right things and react the right way when we lost it. I think we did all that second half and were unlucky not to win in the end.”
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Without a midweek fixture, Middlesbrough can spend the week focused purely on the trip to Vicarage Road on Saturday.
But Brittain makes no secret of the disappointment felt among the group after failing to deliver maximum points against Wrexham, while struggling to get going in a first half when Phil Parkinson’s side deservedly went ahead.
The full-back said: “We’ve got to get the recovery in now, take a look back at this one and see where we can improve and then use that extra time on the training pitch to go into next week positively.
“It’s definitely mixed emotions. I think we showed second half that if we played that way the whole game we could have definitely won the game.
“But we have to take the positives. It’s been a long week and we’ve taken seven points. We all knew it wasn’t good enough first half. We needed a rocket up the backside for the second half.
“We’re a very tight knit group. There’s a lot of new players so we’re still gelling on the pitch, but we’re tight off it. We take responsibility and we knew that first half wasn’t good enough.
“But it takes character to come back in the Championship. We take seven points from that last week and now look to the next game.”
