Middlesbrough were beaten 5-0 at home by West Brom last weekend and statistically, teams heavilly beaten normally do much better in their next game.
Said City boss Chris Coleman to the CT: "It won't be easy because they have just lost heavily and I know what Gareth is like and he won't swallow that too easily, and neither would I, so it will be a tough game for us.
"I imagine Saturday will be a closely fought game and it will be nice to see who is prepared to stand their corner for 90 minutes.
"I certainly hope we n't see a repeat of the mad 15 minutes that we had against Preston because you just can't have that. You can't do it.
"You rarely dominate in 90 minutes.
"It is even-stevens in our league and there are always times when the opposition have a purple patch and you just have to stand up to it, as a team, and we just didn't do that on Saturday.
"We lost our shape, we didn't have enough leaders, we lost goals and our heads dropped.
"So this will be an interesting game on Saturday. If we can get some sort of result it will keep us up there and the longer we can do that the better.
"We were top six after 10 games last year but after we beat Southampton 4-1 we were up and down and we have improved that a little bit in terms of consistency, although not as much as I would like.
"We have just got to keep on chipping away and we can do it by digging out big results like we did against Sheffield United and Bristol City.
"We have got to have that mentality rather than that 15 minutes at Preston, which can happen once in a blue moon."