Middlesbrough boss Gordon Strachan insists he had to let Adam Johnson leave the club for Manchester City because the club were too reliant on him. Strachan used the £7million brought in from City, to bolster other areas of his squad.

"I would have liked him to have stayed, he was a great lad who had been brought up right, but we were a golfer with a great drive and nothing else," he said.

"And we had the yips."

Strachan also rubbished reports that he had introduced two-a-day training sessions: "Two training sessions a day was a fallacy," he explains.

"You'd be lucky if I did it twice. I have not had the bodies to train them two times a day.

"As for my training being hard, I could do this stuff myself seven years ago.

"A 45-year-old could do it. I know that for a fact because I did it.

"It wasn't hard. As a matter of fact, it has not been hard enough.

"The summer will be a good time to do a lot harder work. There is no time to do it here now.

"What I did have to do was watch and see who was fit, who needed work and who had let themselves go.

"I cannot tell you who they were. But it was not hard work at all. What the lads at Celtic would call hard work was completely different to what lads here call hard work.

"At Celtic they would claim it the norm. At Southampton and Coventry they would call it the norm. But as you ask, we would spend between 10 per cent and 15 per cent running. The rest is coaching and we do a lot of coaching.

"I have to be honest. It has not been easy. It was not an easy time to take over.

"There is no excuse for results. I'm not sitting here and saying give me time, that is nonsense and I'm not for that."