trousers

It would seem that way.... who was at the helm at Saints back in the day when it seemed he was privy to everything that went on at the club and was almost a 'media champion' for the club? Someone's obviously rubbed him up the wrong way since (and not just because of this 'Spygate' malarkey)

I'm a tad surprised Dragan wasn't already over here to oversee the hearings TBH. I guess the answer to that is: "There was was nothing he could do until it reached a conclusion" which is fair enough I suppose.

Yep, good point. Did they actually launch an investigation into him and they let him off without a ban, or was there no FA investigation / sanctions at all...?

Good post and totally agree with the bit in bold regarding the players being the key here (assuming the FA don't ban him anyway of course)

This really isn't the place for flexible and balanced thinking!

To comply with the dictionary defintion of a 'cheat' (which is probably a good place to start....) you have to knowingly "break rules to gain an unfair advantage"... do we have categorical evidence (yet) that Tonda 'knowingly' broke the rules? (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not trying to defend what he did... I'm just inclined to wait for it to be confirmed from him and/or the club that he did it knowingly, rather than ignorantly... until then we can't be 100% sure.... actually, even then we can't be 100% certain as there's always a chance he/they might be economical with the truth...) p.s. apologies for the "mental gymnastics" again, m'lud

Yeah, this was one of the hypotheticals I pondered upon yesterday in the main expulsion thread... so, effectively, if we had benefited more from 'Spygate' and finished in the top two, we'd have been punished much less... go figure....

Fair enough... bin that particular theory then!

And it could be argued that Hull are there through their previous financial irregularities...?

Thinking about it, do the earliest known start date of these "spying" incidents tie in with the arrival of Garner....? Not that I'm insinuating anything, of course....

Yep, and this would be one of my concerns about Tonda staying on... Every f***ing press conference would be: "So Tonda, did you cheat against <insert club we're playing> last season? "

Some might say the fact that it was amateurish actually backs up the theory that Tonda was oblivious to the rules. In other words, surely, if he knew he was breaking the rules he'd have made sure we did it much better than we did...?

Yep... Nail... Head... Etc... 👍🏻

A ticketing computer system doesn't care about the numbers... It should effectively be just one or two presses of a button regardless...there's a good reason why companies make out refunds take longer than they need to...

Most probably, but as I say, there's a difference between going incognito (simply because you don't want the other club to know that you're there) and knowingly breaking the '72 hour' rule. It's conceivable that you could still want to do the former without knowing the latter... Possibly / Maybe / Who knows?

We've even got Australian clubs taking the piss now... 😂

Yeah, interesting line of thought.... I wonder if any FA ban would be confined to first team activities, rather than across the board? Swap him and Lallana over, with Tonda pulling the strings in the background...ah... Actually, scratch that... probably flouting the rules again there! 😉

Nice Christmas party for them this year then

Because he didn't want the opposition to know we were there? Not being aware of the '72 hour' rule and not wanting the opposition to know you're observation them aren't mutually exclusive positions...

Fair point... Aligns with these thoughts from Jason Cundy at Talksport (yeah, I know....) https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DforbwX25/

Can't do that mate, it's against the rules....

In the meantime, who gets to pocket the interest payments on the c.£2.5m revenue from our ticket sales...?

Who gets to pocket the interest payments on the c.£2.5m revenue from our ticket sales...?