IN the 22 league games under Michael Carrick before Saturday's trip to Huddersfield Town, there were very few, if any, signs of what was to come in 22 second half minutes at the John Smith's Stadium.

In a bonkers quarter, Huddersfield were a team transformed and Boro capitulated in a manner nobody would have predicted.

One of the most impressive traits of Carrick's Boro has been their ability to roll with the punches. But here they were wobbled by Huddersfield's surprise equaliser just 22 seconds into the second half and never recovered.

If this was a boxing bout, the towel would have gone in from Boro's corner after Huddersfield ran in their fourth.

In fairness to Boro, they rallied to a certain extent and tried to make a fist of it, Chuba Akpom scoring his 25th goal of the season, but the damage had already been done.

Neil Warnock was full of it afterwards, as you can imagine. He said he was insulted when he saw that Huddersfield were 5/1 to beat Boro. What sort of price would you have got at the interval, with Boro ahead thanks to Marcus Forss' 10th goal of the season and in control, for what was to follow in the second period.

So what happened? Why did Boro so dramatically lose their way?

"I felt at half-time Boro might be over-confident because they were so much in control," was Warnock's assessment.

"I wasn’t too disappointed because our goalie didn’t have a save to make (in the first half).

“I just thought we wanted it that little bit more in that second half.

“That’s the Championship, isn’t it? I bet when they went in at half-time they thought it would almost be a piece of cake from there. But if you take your foot off the pedal in the Championship you get punished."

Warnock's belief that his side wanted it more than Boro is worrying but Carrick would certainly disagree. He made it clear afterwards that he had no issues with the attitude or application of his players, in the first half or second. What will have worried and undoubtedly angered Boro's boss, though, was the manner of the goals conceded. All four were soft and avoidable.

Conceding a flurry of soft goals was an unwelcome throwback to the early stages of the season under Chris Wilder.

For the first goal, Josh Ruffels eased through three half-hearted challenges before firing beyond a static Zack Steffen. Darragh Lenihan gave the ball away for the second goal, there were a couple of tame midfield challenges and Tommy Smith backed off Josh Koroma and let him pick his spot. Paddy McNair lost Matty Pearson for the third and Aaron Ramsey did the same for the fourth.

Individuals are name-checked there but in the second half Boro weren't good enough across the board.

Regardless of the fact it was Warnock in the home dugout, this was such an unlikely outcome. Take Preston out of the equation and Boro's only two defeats under Carrick have come against runaway leaders Burnley and a fine Sunderland team that were up there challenging for the top six themselves at the time.

Boro have so impressively negotiated the games you'd expect them to win and shown various sides to their character, which is why Warnock's suggestion that there might have been a bit of complacency doesn't really stack up.

Every team has their off-days at times it's impossible to apply logic but this needs to be a one-off and what's important is what happens next.

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“We’ve got to learn from it - look at the good and not-so-good," said Carrick.

It'll be a balancing act at Rockliffe in the coming days. There'll be analysis into what went wrong but no over-reaction from the head coach who said afterwards it was "hard to rationalise" what happened in the second half.

"I’ve said for a long time that we can’t get carried away because in football you can always have results where you can’t really understand why," he said.

"This was maybe one of them, but we’ll have to keep these to a minimum. Nothing has really changed from my point of view in terms of the mindset. I’ve said all along, it’s the end of the season that matters. That’s when the points are added up and until then we’ll take it one game at a time.

"This wasn’t what we wanted, of course, because we want to win every game. But that’s why we’ve tried to play it down to a certain point because we understand how tough this league is. We have to just move on, bounce back and look forward to a big game next up. We’ll be nice and positive come then.”

At 3.45pm on Saturday, Boro were just a point behind Sheffield United in the table. Come 5pm, the gap was six points, with the Blades having the benefit of an extra game to play, which ironically comes at Huddersfield.

"I told Michael at the end, I want them to go up now," said Warnock.

"I think he’s done absolutely fabulous in putting his arm around them and I think you can see a massive difference in them.

"We’ve got Sheffield United still to play, I told him."

Favours from elsewhere are required but Boro just need to look after themselves.