Southampton’s brazen defence of Spygate is simply astonishing
Sorry. Five letters. It’s not complicated. To mean it is another matter. Southampton have failed emphatically to read the room – the owner, the coach, the senior staff. Everybody, it seems, bar the kid caught doing the deed.
According to the English Football League investigation into Southampton’s spying operations against Middlesbrough, Ipswich Town and Oxford United, the analyst intern caught in the act is the only one who felt remotely uncomfortable about the practice.
Owner Dragan Solak, the dude ultimately responsible for all club matters, berated the kid for not protesting enough yet is determined to keep the bloke who sent him to the front line, head coach Tonda Eckert, in his post.
Across the piece the messaging is dire. Eckert’s mea culpa to camera begging for understanding and forgiveness was as authentic as an episode of The Real Housewives of Cheshire.
Delivered from the heart, apparently, and unscripted. That’s not how it looked, unless the teleprompter was playing up.
For context, he offered his experience in Italy and Germany, where this stuff is routine.
What have the cultural practices there to do with the regulations here? Irrelevant. If Eckert was unaware of the rules, why was the intern uncomfortable? And if we accept his ignorance, that does not mean the rest of the coaching staff were as clueless as he.
The whole episode is a lesson in how not to behave. Where are the grown-ups on the south coast? Has nobody heard of optics, or even ethics? The maddest aspect of this tawdry chapter is how little material gain there might have been.
It is not as if reels of EFL teams are collector’s items. More than half of matches across all competitions, that amounts to 1,000-plus games, are televised. Available to Eckert and his team were 20 recorded matches of every single team.
Pretty much everybody knows how Ipswich set up anyway, how Oxford play, how Boro are big on tiki-taka. Pointing a camera through a hedge is unlikely to reveal anything not already absorbed unless, of course, Kylian Mbappé was spotted tearing down the wing.
Solak feels hard done by, arguing that the sanctions – slung out of the Championship play-off final and levied a four-point deduction next season – are disproportionate.
He cites missing out on the £200m Premier League bounty as punishment enough.
Again, that is irrelevant since you can’t miss what you never had. Southampton were not guaranteed a happy ending at Wembley any more than Middlesbrough were.
Instead of threatening to appeal any further sanctions that might result from the separate FA investigation and backing the guilty coach, Solak would have been better showing some humility, accepting guilt, firing Eckert and moving on.
He chose not to because of the exceptional job Eckert did in mopping up the mess left by Will Still, climbing skyward from 18th in the league. By keeping Eckert, Solak believes he is giving Southampton the best chance of succeeding next term. And that’s all that matters to him.
To hell with the consequences or the stain attached. To hell with accepting responsibility. To hell with being sorry. That’s for mugs with morals.
