If this proves the result that kills ­Middlesbrough's increasingly frail hopes of remaining in the Premier League, the verdict would be suicide.

If you had asked a rank stranger to football to name the position that Gareth Southgate filled for England, he would have been hard pushed to ­recognise the Middlesbrough manager as a one-time central defender. This was not a team that played remotely in his image.

When they arrived in the north-west on Friday evening, Southgate had sent one of his backroom staff to pick up Tuncay Sanli, who had flown directly to Manchester airport after his midweek exertions with Turkey. Since Tuncay played with the kind of verve and ­confidence that was absent elsewhere, it was a gamble worth taking. However, it might have been better had Boro pulled off another half a dozen passengers at random from the Istanbul flight, given them a red shirt, and asked them to defend.

With Middlesbrough effectively six points from safety because of their goal difference, ­Southgate did not attempt to disguise his ­embarrassment or his opinion that if Boro do not overcome Hull on Saturday, they will be as good as ­relegated.

"We have shot ourselves in the foot again and the team knows exactly how I feel," he said. "We have to beat Hull on Saturday, there is no question of that now.

"You can see why we are where we are; we did not do enough of the things you need to win football matches. We have attacked well, we have hit the post and scored a very good goal but we have ­conceded some dreadful goals and you can see from the body language of the team that there is a lack of belief out there. My responsibility over the seven remaining games is to ensure that we at least play with some pride."

Those who had travelled down from Teesside to support a side that had last taken a point away from the Riverside in November and who had not scored an away goal since 6 December, began with swelling chants of "attack, attack attack". It might have been better had they demanded some basic competence from a side that was strangely set up with three centre-halves and three forwards.

"Systems don't matter," Southgate reflected with a wave of resignation. "It's how you play." Afonso Alves did strike the post, and Gary O'Neil, who will miss the next two critical games through suspension, beautifully finished a near-perfect pass from Tuncay.

But no formation can legislate for Emanuel Pogatetz's failure to cut out Ricardo Gardner's routine cross that led to Kevin Davies tapping in at the far post for Bolton's opening goal. There is no team-talk that could predict that Robert Huth would duck out of the way of Matt Taylor's free-kick that somehow drifted into the corner of Brad Jones's net for the third.

Even at 38, Southgate would have backed himself to deal with another Taylor free-kick which Johan Elmander, a striker who looks shot through with self-doubt, was able to steer into Gary Cahill's path. Only once could Bolton claim they scored a well-worked goal – when Gardner wonderfully controlled Taylor's crossfield pass and shot home in almost one movement.

But they were already 3–1 up and Middlesbrough, so often held up as the model of a Premier League club, with a young English manager, a supportive chairman and a side largely developed from their own academy, had run out of time and hope.

"After 31 games we are the lowest scorers in the division and every time Bolton put the ball in our box we looked like conceding," Southgate said. As an epitaph for a season, it was damning.