WHEN Jordan Rhodes completed his deadline-day move to Middlesbrough, he was described in various quarters as “the final piece of the promotion jigsaw”. As any experienced puzzler will tell you however, having all the pieces is the easy part. It’s successfully putting them together that presents the challenge.

Aitor Karanka will be wrestling with that challenge during the final three months of the season, and having publicly admitted that a failure to secure promotion will be down to “his own mistakes”, the Boro head coach cannot afford too many more afternoons such as this.

David Nugent’s second-half header might have prevented a third successive defeat, and enabled Boro to move alongside Hull City at the top of the table, but it was a rare positive moment in an otherwise disjointed display that saw the Teessiders outplayed for long periods by a Blackburn side who had spent last week mourning the loss of their best player to the Riverside.

Should Rhodes have started? With the benefit of hindsight, you’d have to say yes, although Karanka’s desire to keep faith with the majority of the players who had taken Boro into an automatic promotion position was commendable, and it wasn’t as though Nugent was spurning a succession of chances in a lone striker role before Boro’s new £9m man was introduced for the final 13 minutes.

It’s hard to see how Rhodes would have troubled his former employers had he been playing instead of Nugent, such was the dearth of creativity and invention in the rest of the home side, so the key question Karanka is going to have to answer over the next few weeks is whether structural change is required to enable his remodelled squad to flourish.

Boro’s best spell of the game came in the final 12 minutes, when Rhodes and Nugent were paired together and the home side switched to an old-fashioned 4-4-2 formation. Leicester City have successfully debunked the notion that the system, complete with genuine wingers, is archaic, but Karanka has always been incredibly resistant to playing two orthodox strikers alongside each other. Will that have to change in the remainder of the season?

Or is the answer an abandoning of the twin holding midfielder model that sees both Grant Leadbitter and Adam Clayton sitting deep, even in home matches? Might it be worth a tweak in order to accommodate a Gaston Ramirez, who was an unused substitute after moving from Southampton, or an Adam Forshaw, who has had precious few chances to impress this season?

Either way, it’s hard to see how Kike Sola is going to be the best bet in the pivotal ‘number ten’ role, unless he improves markedly from his weekend display. Signed on loan from Athletic Bilbao in the middle of last month, the Spaniard was so far off the pace he was hauled off at half-time, having barely even touched the ball in the first half.

Karanka defended his compatriot – “Kike was completely lost because five or six players around him did nothing” – but with so many creative options at his disposal, it still felt strange that the Boro boss placed so much attacking emphasis on a player with no previous experience of the English game.

All of a sudden, from a position of relative comfort a month or so ago, Boro find themselves in a state of considerable flux, with the gap to the play-off positions having been reduced to a point, albeit with games in hand. An influx of January signings can undoubtedly provide a fillip, but there is also a risk that too much disruption raises questions and issues that had not been of concern before.

“The players we had originally have got us into this position, so if you asked those players, we’d probably say that we didn’t need people coming in,” admitted Ben Gibson. “But it’s always great to have a boost, and having new faces around the place does that.

“The new lads are great, they’re nice people and talented footballers. That automatically gives the place a lift. It will take time for them to settle in properly, but we demand things of each other on and off the pitch. They’ve got to settle in fast because we are so demanding and we need points.”

That settling in process will continue at MK Dons tomorrow, and Boro will be hoping for a much-improved display against opponents who have won just one of their last six league matches.

Blackburn are now without a win in eight Championship outings, but they just about deserved to take all three points on Saturday as the intensity of their efforts stood in marked contrast to Boro’s laboured performance for the majority of the game.

Nugent’s 79th-minute equaliser, a close-range header after Emilio Nsue swung over an inviting cross from the right, was Boro’s first effort on target, a fact that underlines how poor their attacking had been to that point.

Blackburn should have taken the lead when Tony Watt prodded a first-half effort past the post, and threatened again when Darragh Lenihan’s second-half strike deflected narrowly wide off Ben Gibson.

The visitors made the breakthrough with 18 minutes left, with Sunderland loanee Jordi Gomez drilling home from the edge of the area after Lenihan touched the ball into his path.

Boro improved after Rhodes’ introduction, with the striker drilling in a long-range shot that was gathered by former Teessider Jason Steele, but Blackburn might still have claimed all three points had Hope Akpan not skewed an ugly shot off target in the final minute.

“We didn’t get carried away when we were winning the games, so we’re not going to get carried away even though we haven’t picked up the points we would have liked lately,” said Gibson. “We’re not looking at the league table, all that matters is what we do.

“People were getting carried away saying we were nine points clear or whatever, but the reality is that you’ve seen teams fall away with much bigger leads than that. There’s no point looking at the table now. If we do our job in the way we know we can, then we’ll get out of this league.”