Will Lankshear scored twice to become the first Championship player to hit double figures this season as Middlesbrough dazzled against Bolton Wanderers to go top of the Championship.<\/p>\n
Lankshear took his league tally to 11 in just 12 games as Kim Hellberg’s side turned on the style at the Toughsheet Community Stadium.<\/p>\n
Former Bolton winger Amario Cozier-Duberry added a goal and assist after Aidan Morris opened the scoring for the Teessiders and Lewis Brunt deflected Adilson Malanda’s header into his own net.<\/p>\n
Bolton goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu stopped Wanderers losing by even more and Theo Bair’s strike was of little consolation.<\/p>\n
The game turned on 26 seconds in the 13th minute when Ruben Rodrigues shot weakly at Middlesbrough goalkeeper Radek Vitek and the visitors raced upfield to open the scoring through Morris.<\/p>\n
Boro broke down the left and when they switched to the right, Cozier-Duberry, who helped Bolton win promotion from League One last season, centred for Morris to score from five yards out.<\/p>\n
Rodrigues did better with a 20-yard drive, saved by Vitek, before Bazunu did well to deny Cozier-Duberry and Lankshear.<\/p>\n
But there was no stemming the Boro tide and they sliced Bolton open on 31 minutes when Tommy Conway centred for Lankshear to tap home.<\/p>\n
Bolton could not live with Middlesbrough and they bagged a third eight minutes later when Sebastian Berhalter sent over a corner, which should not have been given because it came off Conway, for Adilson Malanda to connect with a header, which was deflected home by Brunt.<\/p>\n
Boro’s one weakness is their leaky defence and they shipped their 17th league goal of the campaign when Gaizka Larrazabal fed Bair and he pulled a goal back in the second minute of first-half stoppage time.<\/p>\n
Bazunu stood out for Bolton and the Republic of Ireland international made another fine stop to thwart Lankshear.<\/p>\n
Boro were just too good, despite Bolton’s second-half improvement, and Cozier-Duberry made it 4-1 on 73 minutes when he finished expertly into the roof of the net from his weaker right foot before Lankshear tapped in to finish off a rapid counter-attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will Lankshear scored twice to become the first Championship player to hit double figures this season as Middlesbrough…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-663867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}