Exactly my thoughts, too. Up the Boro!I’m not too bothered about playing in the Championship next season - I am bothered that a team prepared to cheat and breach rules may gain promotion because of their actions
@martin-bellamy “I am bothered that a team prepared to cheat and breach rules may gain promotion because of their actions.”
And in doing so opens the door to similar underhand shenanigans by others in the future. 😎
Hull have postponed selling tickets for Wembley as planned today as they say they are currently not able to do so - perhaps a sign Southampton may well be facing expulsion…
@pedro The facts are that Southampton breached the rules. We’ll never know whether by doing so, they gained an advantage in either of the two semi final legs, but there are also strong suspicions that this wasn’t their first breach.
If they’ve gained advantages in other games with the same spying tactic then we probably shouldn’t even have been playing them in the semi final legs, so it’s not a fact that we lost fair and square.
I’m not too bothered about playing in the Championship next season - I am bothered that a team prepared to cheat and breach rules may gain promotion because of their actions
That is very much my position on this. If there are rules that all members have signed up to, then those rules will only mean anything if they are not only signed up to but abided by. If there is no consequence for breaking rules, then why bother having rules in the first place? Clearly following the Leeds affair, it was considered something that everyone agreed needed to be prevented from happening again. Hence the "new" rule.
I would be more than happy if we were invited to take on Hull at Wembley, especially if a pattern of this cheating (because that is that it is) did indeed occur. Probably I would also be happy to take on Hull if it is only against Boro before Saturday's game that it happened. If it happened then the cheater cannot be seen to profit from that and any future clubs tempted to break the rule should be able to recognise there really is a cost to them if they do.
You have to feel sorry for Wrexham in all of this. Arguably they have been denied a top six finish because of Soton's unfair advantage during that stunning(?) 19 match unbeaten run. Perhaps even if Soton are kept in the Championship, Wrexham would have a good case to sue them in court for lost opportunity or whatever the legal term is....
It's hard to imagine that Southampton will be allowed to play in the final if found guilty of cheating - plus if there is evidence of further spying it puts into question their league finish too.
However, the play-off final is one of the biggest games in football with the EFL selling rights all over the world so hard to imagine them cancelling the final either.
So if the ruling awards the tie at the Riverside to Boro 3-0 then they we will progress to the final - and while it's true that you can't say what advantage Southampton got by spying on the training session - you could probably argue that if they didn't gain an advantage by doing so then why have they been spying at all?
Enough decisions have gone against Boro in recent weeks (that Ipswich penalty and the even the referee at Southampton missing a blatant handball and penalty for Boro too) for me to take it as a fair outcome. The tie was very close and if any information was able to stop one Boro goal at the Riverside then it cost us the tie.
Let's not forget if Boro do go to Wembley they still have to win a game of football to gain promotion and the same is true of Hull who still had to win a game to gain promotion. What it will do is deter any other team from risking cheating in the future and that is no bad thing.
Two points:
The steer given by the EFL to the "independent " panel that the case of the Canadian Ladies' Olympic football team might be considered as a precedent is ominous.
The two cases are completely different. The Canadians were deducted points which effectively downgraded them in relation to all of their competitors. But deducting points does not meet the circumstances here because the play-offs are mini Cup ties, knock-outs rather than points based. Deducting league points next season in a league in which the Boro may not be playing does nothing to compensate the club for its losses. There is no precedent, and any conclusion based on this assumption will be completely unfounded.
Secondly, there is a widespread assumption that we cannot know whether Southampton's fore-knowledge of our set up would have affected the result. In fact Boro, if they decide to do so (which they surely must), can provide a voluminous portfolio of cases in which Hellberg's set-ups have caught our opponents on the hop. Just off the top of my head I can think of the game at Hull in which an injury depleted squad meant Targett moving to centre-back, Bangura being brought in and Gilbert included in midfield. This caused Hull so much confusion that we were 4 goals up by half-time. Similarly, at Birmingham, Hellberg going to a back three meant that City failed to respond with the result that Targett strolled his way through an inviting space to put us two goals up by half-time. No doubt Hellberg could point to many other occasions when his tactical astuteness gave us a distinct advantage. So whilst it is true that we cannot definitively say whether the spying affected the result, the Boro can point to an impressively large number of cases when our set-ups took our opponents by surprise and produced very impressive results. And given that, even with the spying, the game could scarcely have been any closer, even the smallest advantage to us could easily have affected the result.
I trust that our ace lawyer will be making both points forcefully