MIDDLESBROUGH 2 Wanderers 0: SAM Allardyce can hit the freeze-frame button on his video as much as he likes; even if he could somehow show that referee Clive Wilkes and his assistants got it wrong, no amount of play-backs will alter the fact that Wanderers are in deep trouble.

In fairness, the Reebok boss glossed over some of the debateable decisions that may or may not have gone against his players at The Riverside on Saturday.

He had already taken a peek at one of the action replays and, tempting though it might have been, he was too honest to nit-pick when his side had been so breathtakingly swept aside in as near a one-sided contest as there could possibly be.

Boro were brilliant, far too good for Wanderers and no fair-minded manager would dissect matchwinning moves to contest such a deserved result as this.

With just seven points from eight games and his team now in the bottom three, Big Sam has much more fundamental problems to tackle.

In the two weeks leading up to the Spurs game he has to find some way of getting Wanderers back in the Premiership frame of mind - organised and resilient to take what is thrown at them and confident enough to convert the chances when they come along.

For if they do not grasp the nettle soon, they could find themselves fighting an even tougher battle to beat the drop than they had last season.

They are meant to have a stronger squad with more quality now and, with the experience of having survived their first season in the top flight, they feel they should be better equipped. But they don't have the benefit of the flying start that proved such an asset when times got tough last winter and they don't have Michael Ricketts terrorising defences and plundering goals.

"It's a worry for me and it's a worry for Michael at the moment," Allardyce admitted after seeing a glaring miss add to the frustration of his top striker not having scored in open play since January.

"He's had a couple of chances which, if he'd had them last year, they'd have been buried.

"We can only persevere with Michael and try to work through it with him. Once that first one goes in, which will come sooner rather than later if he keeps getting in the positions, he'll hopefully get back on the scoring trail because we need him to be like that."

It would be unfair on Ricketts to dwell on his 83rd minute miss. Boro were already 2-0 up and, on the balance of play, it could have been much worse.

Steve McClaren's men might have only managed three on target efforts in the 90 minutes but what the statistics don't show are the various near-misses at the end of breathtakingly incisive attacks.

That's spending power for you! In McClaren, Boro have one of the most respected tacticians in the game (he takes a break from Premiership matters to help Sven Goran Eriksson prepare England for their European Championship opener in Slovakia on Saturday) and in Steve Gibson they have a chairman who managed to muster £30 million for new signings, grafting creativity and finishing power on to the solid defensive foundation that was laid down last season.

Allardyce can only dream of competing at that financial level but he goes about his transfer business in his own way and is admired for what he does but shopping in the bargain basement for players other clubs do not want can be risky.

The improvement in the quality factor at the Reebok is measured by the addition of Akin, Jay Jay Okocha and Ivan Campo but there are no signs yet of any one of them giving him a return on his investments.

The young Turk looked a long way off being ready for the Premiership in the Bury game last week; the Nigerian is struggling to make the starting line-up; and the Spaniard, for all his charisma and flamboyance, needs to be more solid and disciplined in his performances, whether in midfield, where he played first half on Saturday, or at the back, where he operated in the second.

The fixture list has been cruel to Wanderers, pitting them against the division's top four in the first two months, but such is the life in the top flight where "easy" has no place in the vocabulary.

Boro proved to be the hardest of tests. Supremely confident, at the top of their game and, with his new signings warming to the Premiership, McClaren forecast before the game that his side was "well worth watching".

Not since being stunned by Fulham on the opening day of the season have Wanderers been so comprehensively outplayed - not even by Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal.

The fact that Boro were not 3-0 up by the time Ugo Ehiogu rose powerfully above Mike Whitlow to head home Geremi's corner on 23 minutes was only down to the odd flaw in the finishing. Massimo Maccarone, Alen Boksic and Joseph Job could all have scored.

Maccarone did manage to get the ball in the net at the end of one slick move but somehow the referee's assistant was sharp enough to spot a player offside in the turbo-charged build-up.

Allardyce's pre-match warning that the brilliant young Italian was not the only danger proved spot on. In fact Maccarone was relatively disappointing, completely overshadowed by the excellent Cameroon pair of Geremi and Job and embarrassed to miss a simple second half header that should have doubled Boro's lead.

George Boateng, Gareth Southgate and Geremi all went close in the second period but at least Wanderers were making a game of it after being given the runaround in the first quarter.

Such a game of it that, after Kevin Nolan and Youri Djorkaeff had tested Mark Schwarzer with decent shots at the end of promising moves, Boro actually snatched the decisive goal on the breakaway after Gudni Bergsson had agonisingly failed to get a clean header on Djorkaeff's corner.

Seconds later, with Campo having lost possession trying to keep the pressure on, Anthony Barness flattened by Job's crunching challenge and everybody looking in vain for an offside flag, Geremi was there at the other end, with Boateng for company, slotting the ball past Jussi Jaaskelainen.

"I haven't seen it but I felt it," Barness said of the Job challenge that left his team-mates furious and Mr Wilkes booking Nolan for dissent.

"I was jumping from a standing start and he was running at me ... so he might have had more spring. But it was a turning point because it came on the back of us nearly scoring and they've gone up the other end and killed the game."

Bizarrely, had Wanderers produced the quality of football they served up in the final quarter, they might have knocked Boro out of their confident stride.

Jay Jay Okocha was sent on out of sheer desperation and managed to deliver passes that gave Henrik Pedersen and Ricketts late chances and it was his clever switch of play that ended with Djorkaeff's shot clipping the crossbar.

But that was no comfort for Allardyce. Asked if he drew any consolation from seeing Wanderers create those late chances, he was honest enough to concede that the game was already lost, replying sharply: "Not really. No!"