Source: Telegraph
Stewart Downing: Middlesbrough must focus on winning
Downing is set to captain his hometown club when they face Fulham at the Riverside on Saturday and as the build-up began he warned there can be no room for error after a victory against fellow strugglers Hull last weekend gave the Premier League's third-bottom club a lifeline.
"We're determined to win again, we have to win," said the England international. "There's no point letting all the hard work we've put in go to waste.
"Overall, I thought we thoroughly deserved the win on Saturday, although I'll admit I thought, 'Here we go again' when we conceded another sloppy goal from a cross.
"But we responded well. We had all the talk beforehand from Hull saying that we were this and we were that and we don't do this and we don't do that.
"We showed that we didn't need to come out and talk, we did our talking on the pitch and were the better team by far. We can't worry about what other teams are doing, we just have to do our bit and I'm confident we'll get out of it, especially if we play the way we did against Hull," Downing said.
Downing's side enhanced their survival hopes with a 3-1 win over Phil Brown 's Hull last Saturday and even though the skipper did not score the three points more than made up for that.
"It was great for Batesy (Matthew Bates) to score his first goal, and what a time to do that, but to be honest, we don't care who scores," Downing added.
"We just need goals and that win on Saturday has given the lads a visible boost. We have to do it all over again against Fulham and there's no reason why we can't.
"We have a lot of hard games but teams don't like coming to the Riverside where they know they're in for a hard game."
Meanwhile, manager Gareth Southgate has promised Boro will go on the attack against in-form Fulham following their success against Hull.
"You can't throw caution to the wind but we have to continue to push forward," Southgate said.
