Hull City midfielder George Boateng says the egos at Middlesbrough brought the team down after their long UEFA Cup run three years ago.

"For the first four years the Boro dressing room was very good," he said. "The problems did not start until the last year when we reached the UEFA final.

"We had good strikers like Mark Viduka, Yakubu and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and they were all scoring goals so one of them was always angry because they were not in the team. Whoever was left out felt that Steve McClaren did not have a good enough reason to drop them. It was similar in midfield. We had Jonathan Greening, Juninho, Geremi and Bolo Zenden and there was always somebody left out, so the general atmosphere in the dressing room went backwards.

"If I played well then I expected to keep my place and so did everybody else, but it was not possible for the manager to put all the players in the team at once because the squad was bigger.

"There were a lot of good players and the rotation system didn't really work."