Middlesbrough upwardly mobile under guidance of Chris Wilder

Dael Fry tries his best to remain measured but before long candour prevails. “Everyone’s really excited,” concedes Middlesbrough’s former England Under-21s centre-half. “The atmosphere around the place is absolutely fantastic, everyone’s buzzing, everyone in the town’s talking about promotion.”

Since Chris Wilder succeeded Neil Warnock as manager in early November, Boro have collected 20 points from nine league games, rising from 15th to sixth in the Championship. They travel to a third-place Blackburn side coached by their former captain, manager and enduring hero Tony Mowbray, on Monday aiming to reinforce suddenly realistic automatic promotion hopes.

Wilder does not really do coy and he has duly galvanised his players with sometimes brutal honesty and vaulting ambition. Euphemism is out as the former Sheffield United manager’s brand of high-energy, high-pressing football revitalises Boro’s squad in front of steadily rising attendances at the Riverside.

At this rate there should be no need for Steve Gibson to pursue any more lawsuits of the sort embroiling Boro’s owner in his attempt to extract around £40m in compensation from Derby, arguing that their circumvention of the EFL’s financial fair play rules denied the Teesside club a play-off place in 2018-19.

To many neutrals – not to mention Boro fans – Gibson’s legal action against a club now under real threat of extinction seems as ill-advised as his decision, in 2009, to sack Gareth Southgate as manager and replace him with Gordon Strachan. Overall, though, the owner has got much more right than wrong at the Riverside and, more than a decade on from the Strachan nadir, Wilder’s installation appears among his most inspired manoeuvres.

Seven wins from the last eight