Say goodbye to Middlesbrough, who have been relegated from the Premier League

There we are, then. Chelsea had little problem dispatching of Middlesbrough, defeating them 3-0 on Monday night, and the Premier League has its second relegated team of the season. Boro are down with Sunderland.

The kindest thing we can say about Aitor Karanka’s relentlessly cautious approach to Boro’s Premier League season is that it might not have been the consequence of simple, base cowardice. That he presumably had the best of intentions. That he wanted to keep things tight, avoided thrashings, and hope that the balance of low-scoring games would break in his favor.

But while we can’t judge what Boro didn’t try, we can what they did. It didn’t work. What’s more, it didn’t seem to jibe with their preparations for the campaign. There’s more than one way to treat the Premier League, after all, and the first principle of football is to make the best of what you have. Two seasons ago Burnley came up, kept their purse strings tight, got beaten a lot, and went down again. And they have since returned, better for the experience.

Yet Boro splashed heavily and ambitiously over the summer. Alvaro Negredo, formerly of Manchester City and Valencia, arrived to score some goals. Former Barcelona, Spain, and Manchester United legend Victor Valdes arrived to keep them out. A move for Borussia Dortmund central defender Neven Subotic fell through, but the exciting Viktor Fischer joined from Ajax. In all, 12 new players arrived, for not insignificant fees and, presumably, wages.

Which meant that the disconnect between apparent ambition and actual approach was stark and disappointing. Valdes did well enough between the posts, but Negredo spent most of the season drifting around in unsplendid isolation, starved of service and support, watching helplessly as his team passed the ball around sideways, miles behind him. Boro might as well have saved themselves some cash and held a raffle among the fans to pick a striker. At least that way one of the supporters might have enjoyed their day.

There is perhaps a broader question to be considered here, about how newly promoted sides who want to stay up should approach the question of survival. Boro avoided the hammerings fine: Only Hull City have scored more than three against them, and that came after Karanka had been thanked for his service and asked to clear his desk.

They even managed to avoid losing all that often; their total of 13 draws is more than any side in the Premier League bar Manchester United, and seven more than fellow relegatees Sunderland. Not losing, though, isn’t as useful as winning. It isn’t even half as useful. A frankly risible five wins all season saw them relegated as the lowest-scoring side across all four of England’s top divisions.

What happens down in the Championship is hard to predict. We can probably assume that a number of this season’s arrivals will depart for top-flight football somewhere across the continent, which might work against Boro’s chances of making a quick return. There is also the search for a new permanent manager. That Aitor Karanka proved pretty handy in the Championship ...

Ultimately, Middlesbrough’s main problem this season wasn’t that they weren’t good enough to stay in the Premier League: that can happen to newly promoted teams. It’s that they were cringingly unambitious and, as a result, appallingly and ineffectively dull. If you’re going to be bad, at least be fun. And if you’re going to be boring, at least make sure you can pick up the occasional win.