Gareth Southgate has been forced to throw Afonso Alves into Premier League action sooner than he would have liked.
Southgate forced to blood record signing
Gareth Southgate has admitted he has been forced to throw Afonso Alves into Premier League action sooner than he would have liked.
Middlesbrough's record signing made his debut in the 57th minute of the 1-0 win over Fulham when he came off the bench to replace Lee Dong-Gook.
But Alves was unable to get into the game and was left isolated up front when goalscorer Jeremie Aliadiere was replaced by George Boateng with 14 minutes to go.
Riverside boss Southgate would have preferred to give the £12million signing from Heerenveen time to build up his fitness and find his feet in England, but is short of options.
Well short
He told
Sky Sports News: "He's had a lot to deal with and in an ideal world we wouldn't have involved him for another two or three weeks.
"But we're not in a position to do that so we had to throw him in from the bench. He's not had a match for six weeks and not trained with a team for a month, so we know he's well short at the moment.
"But it will have done him good to get a feel of what the Premier League is about."
The match was far from a classic, but Southgate was happy to take an important three points despite Boro not being at their best.
Groove
He added: "You can't play free-flowing all the time, every game is different. We've played lots of good football this season and not got any reward for it.
"Our intention is still to entertain and to try to play positive football but we didn't quite get into that groove but we got the win.
"Fulham caused us problems with the way they played and we didn't get to grips with it particularly well. We changed our system to try and counter-act it once we'd gone ahead.
"We got the all-important goal and then we had to be resilient and grind it out a bit.
"That's great credit to the players because some of them have had three games this week, with a tough local derby. Mark Schwarzer's been to Australia and back and gave a fantastic display.
"It was important we got that win. The performance wasn't exactly as we'd have hoped by the result is the important thing."
