Marko Arnautovic at the double for Stoke to sink hapless Middlesbrough

Aitor Karanka said there would be no talk of relegation at Middlesbrough until they were in the bottom three. After this tepid defeat that is exactly where they are. He may need to start discussing it now.

“We’re a newly promoted team in the bottom three for the first time in March, which means we’re doing something well,” he said in a valiant attempt to put a positive spin on a desperate afternoon for Boro.

Marko Arnautovic scored both goals for Stoke, who were nowhere close to their best but they still easily beat a bloodless Boro side who have now gone 423 minutes without scoring a league goal and have not won in the league since the middle of December. Some travelling fans called for Karanka’s departure (shouted down by others), but he was adamant that he would stay. “I will leave when the chairman says,” he said.

For Stoke, this was the sort of performance that was required following the 4-0 defeat by Tottenham last Sunday, which led to the chairman, Peter Coates, to suggest the players were still on the beach after their mid-season break in Dubai.

“We usually bounce back,” said Mark Hughes, whose only disappointment was the relative closeness of the scoreline. “With a little bit more care in the final third, we could have won more comprehensively. But we’ll take 2-0.”

Stoke took the lead in the 29th minute when Glenn Whelan looped a pass into the area from deep, Arnautovic took it down with a David Silva-esque left-foot touch, inched expertly around the keeper and then forced the ball home with his right, splicing two defenders on the line as they desperately tried to block.

A second came just before the break, this one distressingly simple from Boro’s perspective. Whelan skimmed over a corner from the right, Peter Crouch nodded it back and Arnautovic simply hooked it home from inside the six-yard box. The player that came closest to denying the Austrian his second was his team-mate Ryan Shawcross, who was also trying to score, which summed up just how bad Boro’s defending was from the corner.

Boro’s fans, who were broadly supportive for much of the first half, implored their side to “attack, attack, attack” and offered a mixture of boos and frustrated howls of encouragement as the players trudged off at the break.

Gallows humour increasingly crept in as the game progressed with the bleak lament: “What’s it like to score a goal?” and the exclamatory: “We’ve had a shot!” when Adlène Guedioura fired over from the edge of the area. Support remains for the manager, but it seems to be eroding.

Karanka attempted to shake his team from their stupor by bringing on Cristhian Stuani for the anonymous Gastón Ramírez at half-time, a ploy that looked to have paid almost instant dividends when Ben Gibson found the net from a Grant Leadbitter free-kick, but Bernardo Espinosa had strayed carelessly ahead of him into an offside position. That was the closest the visitors came to scoring.

Stoke nearly added a third through Ramadan Sobhi, then Ibrahim Afellay also went close to increasing the lead. But in the end, two was plenty. “We’d love to dominate for 90 minutes, but maybe we haven’t quite got the capacity to do that yet,” said Hughes.

The win pushed Stoke up one place to ninth, but Crystal Palace’s win over West Bromwich Albion pushed Boro into the relegation zone.

“There are a lot of problems, not just one,” said Karanka. “If it was just one, I would have fixed it. It’s more than one, more than two, more than three.”

He could have kept talking on that track for a while. Unless he fixes those problems very quickly, Boro are only heading one way.