Kim Hellberg urges Middlesbrough to take automatic promotion push to the wire

Kim Hellberg has challenged Middlesbrough to take the race for automatic promotion to the Premier League down to the wire.

Boro are all but assured of a place in the Sky Bet Championship play-offs after ending a seven-game run without a win with Wednesday night’s 1-0 victory over Sheffield Wednesday at the Riverside Stadium.

The Teessiders are six points better off than seventh-placed Hull with two games to play, but also just three adrift of Ipswich in second and Millwall – although the Tractor Boys have a game in hand – with the battle to go up automatically behind champions Coventry promising to be intense.

Asked if their advantage over the Tigers eased some of the pressure, Hellberg said: “Absolutely. To get to the play-offs is a massive thing.

“You always want to be first or second but to get to the play-offs means you have a 25 per cent chance of ending up in the Premier League in the play-offs and that opportunity doesn’t come often, which means that it’s a massive thing for the club and for me and for the players to already know that we are in that one.

“Then like you said, there are still possibilities. We’ll go out here on Saturday against Watford to win and try to take it to the last day of the season, where we know that everything can happen.”

Boro dominated much of the game but had only Morgan Whittaker’s 11th-minute goal, the product of an horrendous error by Wednesday defender Gabriel Otegbayo, to show for their efforts the when Owls launched a late, if ultimately vain quest for an equaliser.

Hellberg admitted Boro had not hit the heights but was not unduly concerned on a night when the result was all that mattered.

He said: “For us, it was just important to win. Again, it was not pretty, especially not the last 10 minutes, but it was important to win and I’m very, very happy for that.”

For opposite number Henrik Pedersen, there were significant positives even as his side’s three-game unbeaten run came to an end.

Pedersen said: “A strong, strong performance against a really, really good team. We started the game really, really well with big belief, with big confidence. We were well organised.

“Especially on the ball, we were strong until Gabby made a little mistake on the ball. It’s a part of this. We want to play with courage, we want to play with belief and here, it was a little bit to much.

“Then from 60 minutes and the rest of the game, I think we were a stronger team than them.”