Cup Humiliation

BORO 0 - 2 Cardiff City
FA Cup Quarter Final

BORO, today, crashed out of the FA Cup at home to Cardiff City with by far their most humiliating performance of the season.

With Chelsea and Manchester United seeing cup defeat yesterday, this was BORO's best chance to make it to the final, Portsmouth being the only other Premiership side remaining in the competition after beating Man United.

However, despite a capacity home crowd to spur them on, BORO knew that Cardiff weren't going to be a walk over, or at least they should have known.

The opening minutes of the game belonged to BORO as they fired out of the starting blocks and put City under early pressure. But a darting City attack, just nine minutes into the match, cut open the BORO defence as they hopelessly appealed for a hand-ball against Stephen McPhail. Whittingham then weaved his way to the edge of the box before curling a right footed shot past the rooted Mark Schwarzer off the post an into the net.

The entire BORO team just seemed to die after conceding the goal and any game plan that Southgate might have had went completely down the toilet when BORO's play was reduced, once again, to long aimless down-field 'hoofs', which Tuncay was unable to latch onto, time after time. Afonso Alves barely broke into a jog and looked frustratingly lethargic, whilst BORO failed to utilize their wingers Downing and O'Neil.

Cardiff showed no real class but seemed to make every BORO player extremely nervous in possession. Stewart Downing made some promising moves along the left but couldn't find anyone with his crosses as even the BORO forwards were reluctant to push forward into the box.

Then, on 22 minutes, Fabio Rochemback launched into a reckless challenge on former BORO striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. BORO fell asleep as Whittingham's free-kick sailed through to Roger Johnson who flew into a diving header that, once again, smashed past Mark Schwarzer into the net.

BORO had few chances to get a goal back, but Alves came close when he cut in from the left and lashed a powerful driven shot at goal, Peter Enckelman made a good save and had little else to do for the remainder of the game.

Alves was replaced by Mido at half-time, after the team were booed off at the end of the first half. However the introduction of Mido did little to instill confidence in the BORO faithful after what they had witnessed in the first half.

Many of the home crowd thought that BORO had grabbed a goal back when Stewart Downing's curled free-kick seemed to loop past Enckelman, but the ball went narrowly wide and it just appeared it wasn't going to be BORO's day.

BORO completely lost the plot, much to the frustration of the BORO fans. They seemed to just launch aimless long balls down-field or find themselves back tracking from attacking positions. Many BORO fans were so enraged by BORO's abysmal performance that they decided they'd had enough with nearly 20 minutes still remaining.

Cardiff held on to the end and recorded the third giant killing of the weekend, after Barnsley astonishingly knocked out Chelsea and Portsmouth clinched onto a 1-0 victory over Manchester United.

Gareth Southgate offered a refreshingly frank assessment of BORO's performance, "Today, we got what we deserved. It's what happens on the day and we didn't deliver."

Attendance: 32, 896 (full house)
BORO Blog BORO Man of the Match: Stewart Downing

Quotes & pictures courtesy of Sky Sports (www.skysports.com/football) & BBC Sport (news.bbc.co.uk/sport)