For 30 minutes it was all going so well. David Wagner described it afterwards as “one of our best away performances this season” and for that half-an-hour he was right. Ashley Barnes’ scruffy but effective finish was more than City deserved

Unfortunately, for it to be a good performance it has to last 90+ minutes and this one was rudely interrupted just a third of the way in by, what looked to me, like a ridiculously harsh refereeing decision by Bobby Madely.

We can mull over the worthiness of said decision all day – for me, it was engineered by Jonny Howson’s theatrically over-the-top reaction to Borja Sainz making contact with his leg – but doubly concerning was City’s limp reaction to the sending-off.
Some teams use the perceived injustice of going down to ten as a way of galvanising themselves and, as a result, being resilient and hard to break down.

Not City.

They held the line for just seven minutes before poor defending, which had little to do with being down to ten men, allowed Marcus Forss to fire home from close range.

Game over. Thirty-seven minutes.

Such was the psychological shift borne of the Sainz dismissal, from a position of almost total domination, City went on to offer virtually nothing. By comparison, Boro, who had a tetchy Riverside on their backs for most of the opening half hour, were emboldened and made the extra man count to devastating effect.

For the rest of the evening, Boro keep...