Willo Flood could be out of football until after the new year after a nightmare start to the season.
The former Celt suffered a dislocated knee during the first half of the 3-1 defeat from Ipswich Town and was stretchered from the pitch.
Flood lasted just 11 minutes of the match in his first ‘Boro appearance since February.
“We’ll not see Willo for a long time because that’s a bad injury,” Gordon Strachan admitted. “The rest of us think we’ve had a bad day but he’s had a horrific day
“He’s well loved and a character in the dressing room so he’s been very unlucky, especially having just come back from another long-term injury.”
Despite being the biggest spenders in the division only 21,882 fans turned up for the first match of the season for the pre-season title favourites.
Middlesbrough were jeered off the park by some fans at the final whistle with Strachan keeping his frustrations to himself after the match.
The former Celtic boss told the Middlebrough website: “What I’ve got to say about that I’ll say in the dressing room behind closed doors. I’m not going to tell everyone about our weaknesses.
“We hope it will be better than that in the future and we’ve got to make it better than that. I was hoping the new players would gel straight away but they didn’t, so we have a lot of work to do.
“We didn’t have many players who played to their potential. We’ll have to look at why that happened, not just in terms of the players but the coaching staff as well. It was hugely disappointing.
“I feel sorry for the crowd who like me wanted to see us make a winning start. The fans turned up hoping to see something far better than that.”
Elsewhere, with the exceptions of Malky Mackay and Roy Keane, it was a disastrous start to the new season for Celts in the Football League.
Big Malky, despite having a signing budget similar to Walter Smith, got the season off to a great start with a 3-2 win away at Norwich to dampen the enthusiasm of Paul Lambert’s Championship new comers.
Watford are amongst the favourites for relegation but Mackay is confident that last season’s experience will help his young squad to stay out of trouble.
The centre-half is in the Norwich hall of fame but didn’t show his old side any mercy as they won comfortably at Carrow Road.
Mackay said: “I think the lads deserve a great deal of credit for playing like that in front of a big crowd against a club who are on the up.
“We have some young players in the squad, and I think they have grown as a group.
“The plan was to match Norwich’s midfield diamond and to exploit the gaps when we could. More often than not, we took the right option, which you don’t always get with young players, and we got our reward.”
Goalkeeping target David James picked up where he left off at the World Cup against Germany with a three goal defeat on his Bristol City debut with promoted Millwall doing the damage.
Jim O’Brien missed out through injury as his new club Brnsley lost 4-0 to Queens Park Rangers who top The Championship after one match.
In League One Simon Ferry and Paul Caddis were on the bench for Swindon’s 2-1 defeat at home from Brighton with Graham Carey on the bench for Huddesfield’s 3-0 win away to Notts County.
Down in League Two Chris Sutton’s Lincoln City lost out to an 86th minute winner at Rotherham.
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Bad, bad injury but as always, we wish Willo Well.