MIDDLESBROUGH fans have been warned not to expect the best of £12 million man Afonso Alves until next season. Gareth Southgate is confident Alves (main picture) can make his mark in English football soon enough to help his new team-mates reach Wembley in this season’s FA Cup. But it will be at least six months before the Boro boss expects his boy from Brazil to send Premier League defenders truly nuts. More immediately, Southgate last night risked the wrath of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink by insisting he has “no regrets” about showing the Dutch striker – bidding to dump Boro out of the cup with Cardiff today – the door at the Riverside. Alves goes into the quarter-final clash with the Bluebirds without a goal in five appearances – two of them starts – for Boro since his long-awaited arrival from Heerenveen. But Southgate (below left) insisted: “We haven’t brought him in as a solution to everything and an immediate remedy. We have to give him time to settle in, but we know he will score goals and have an impact. “The difference between ourselves and Arsenal or somebody when you bring a player like that in is that people assume he’s going to make an immediate impact. “Arsenal could afford him to have a longer settling in period. It took Bergkamp and Henry six months to a year to settle. “There’s no pressure on Afonso from us, and we’ve already seen flashes of what he can do. We just have to create more chances than we did for him in the last couple of games. “He now knows that if Stewart Downing gets the ball, he can get in the box and on the end of a cross. We also have to learn the areas where he is most comfortable and effective receiving the ball. “But I don’t think we’ll see the best of him this season.” Hasselbaink had few problems ever finding the net during two years at Boro, not least in a purple patch late in the 2005/06 season which helped the Teessiders reach the UEFA Cup final. But Southgate, who succeeded Steve McClaren as Boro boss just weeks later, is convinced he was right to resist offering Hasselbaink a new contract that summer. “You can’t have regrets. Last year we had Yakubu and Mark Viduka, who scored 38 goals or something between them. “The situation was that Jimmy’s contract was up and the other two were under contract and I didn’t want a situation where I was trying to rotate the three of them and appease people. “I had to take that decision for the long term of the club and Jimmy’s salary was a consideration as well. “You can’t look back with regret – you have to keep moving forward as a club and a team. “I felt we had to go the route of change. We wanted to recruit younger players.” | 
