The growing desperation that tends to afflict relegation-threatened teams at this stage of the season can lead them to produce their best. Only after the most sluggish of starts to yesterday’s crucial match at the Riverside did Bolton Wanderers seem to grasp the gravity of their predicament, but eventually they came to their senses with the kind of performance that is a prerequisite of survival.

The Lancashire side rode their luck in a one-sided opening quarter, just about recovered their composure before half-time, and then had the audacity to emerge from the interval like a team possessed. With a scrambled winner by Gavin McCann, they secured only their second away win of the season, and hauled themselves out of the drop zone, at least until Birmingham City’s meeting with Aston Villa this afternoon.

If the match was a microcosm of Bolton’s fitful campaign, the hope will be that their survival bid also ends in success. Not that their manager, Gary Megson, is likely to be carried away.

With three matches left — two of them away, against Spurs and Chelsea, and one at home to Sunderland — they are still only a point ahead of third- bottom Birmingham.

Megson was satisfied with a second straight victory, and another clean sheet, to say nothing of the fighting spirit that left three of his players needing stitches, but more of the same is essential. “We have given ourselves an opportunity that didn’t exist two weeks ago,” he said. “But that is all it is: an opportunity. If we stay on the same points we are now, we will not stay up.”

His counterpart, Gareth Southgate, felt that the difference between the sides had been their contrasting ability to exploit a purple patch. Middlesbrough’s came in a startling opening 10 minutes, when they could have been three or four up. Bolton goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi had barely pulled on his gloves when he was forced to tip over a flick by David Wheater at the front post. He had to do the same three minutes later, this time after Tuncay had performed a similar trick. Jeremie Aliadiere had been the supplier this time, and would repeat the service only moments later. When the former Arsenal player was released by Tuncay’s intelligent ball down the right, his low cutback set up Afonso Alves 15 yards out. Neglecting to execute the dummy that would have set up a team-mate, the Brazilian’s rising shot prompted another instinctive save.

Megson spent much of the first half urging his players to raise their game, a damning indictment of their approach to so vital a fixture. With Grzegorz Rasiak alone up front, replacing the suspended Kevin Davies, and El-Hadji Diouf confined to a place on the bench, Bolton had little to offer going forward. Their best effort of the first half came after a long throw was only half cleared, and Matt Taylor’s shot ricocheted off the goalkeeper’s legs. Then, when Kevin Nolan nodded back a deep cross to the far post, Tamir Cohen’s left-foot volley dipped over the top.

Bolton, at least, had steadied themselves after their alarming start, and gradually sought to build on that. Inexplicably, they were as lively in the early part of the second half as they had been lethargic in the first. When McCann’s short corner caught the Middlesbrough defence sleeping, Ivan Campo shot straight at the goalkeeper, who then had to tip a Taylor volley round his left-hand post.

By now, there was something of the warrior about Bolton, with Gary Cahill’s head patched up, and his blood-stained shirt turned inside out. Cohen had already been substituted after a head knock. A flick by Raziak, another who spilled blood, glanced off the top of the crossbar, and Nolan’s first-time shot forced Ross Turnbull, deputising for the injured Mark Schwarzer, to push wide.

By the time Luke Young was heading a looping effort off the line, and Taylor emerging from the subsequent scramble to strike a post, it was clear that a goal was coming, and a strange game being turned on its head. The breakthrough came when Turnbull’s parry of a Cahill header travelled only as far as McCann, who squeezed it through a forest of bodies and just inside the right-hand post.

The same player was fortunate not to give away a penalty when a Stewart Downing cross appeared to strike his arm, but Middlesbrough had done nothing to earn it. Southgate’s team are now only four points ahead of Bolton, and in line for the kind of fraught climax that should have been avoided.

“We are not naive enough to think that 36 points will be enough to keep us in this division,” said the manager. “We had the chance to wrap things up and didn’t take it. There is still a lot of work to be done. Having been here as long as I have, I should have known that three weeks of enjoyment was too much to ask for.”

Star man: Matt Taylor (Bolton)

Middlesbrough: Turnbull 7, Young 7, Wheater 6, Pogatetz 6, Taylor 5 (Rochemback 72min), Aliadiere 6, Boateng 6, Arca 6, Downing 5, Alves 6, Tuncay 6 (Johnson 64min)

Bolton: Al Habsi 7, Steinsson 6, A O’Brien 7, Cahill 8, Samuel 6, Nolan 7, Cohen 5 (Guthrie ht, 5), Campo 6, McCann 7, Taylor 8, Rasiak 5 (Diouf 57min 5)

Scorer: Bolton: McCann 61
Yellow card: Bolton: Steinsson, Campo
Referee: A Wiley
Attendance: 25,037