Breakfast at Warnock's! Middlesbrough boss lays down the law on players skipping meals after Coventry City defeat

Warnock was left bemused by a number of his players’ performances at the Coventry Building Society Arena as his side slipped to their second defeat of the season before pinpointing the cause as his squads eating habits.

The Boro boss is now looking at implementing a routine for his players to ensure nobody skips any meals ahead of games – and that certainly seemed to do the trick in midweek as Boro bounced back with a comfortable 2-0 victory at the City Ground over Nottingham Forest.

Boro host Blackpool at the Riverside this afternoon and Warnock arrives safe in the knowledge his stars are fully fuelled as they look to secure back-to-back wins.

“I know with certain players in the dressing room before a game if they’re okay,” he said.

“I knew one particular lad wasn’t himself on Saturday before the game. So my job then was to look at why that was the case. I had to look for a reason.

“When I looked I came up with this reason and I spoke to a couple of other lads who I was disappointed with and they were all the same.

“You tend to not want to get up for breakfast in the morning. You think ‘I’ll just stop in bed and have a lunch at midday’ or what have you.

“But you don’t realise you need stuff in your body between 6pm and 12pm the next day.

“You can’t just overload it later. You need to make sure you’ve got that fitness and that balance right. It was just a matter for everybody really. And the staff too.”

He added: “If we have to make them come down for breakfast we’ll have to do that, but it should be voluntary.

“That’s the levels we’ve got to go to though, we look at all sorts because it just wasn’t on.

“People can have bad games but the players I’m talking about don’t have bad games so I felt there must have been something more than just an off-day.

“I had to look into that and that’s what we’ve done.”

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