hypochondriac

Yep. I hope we take the full 14 days. Would be really funny if it wasn't resolved the to.e the final rolls around if we make it.

Oh he will be back. He always is.

Yeah I mostly agree with that. I reckon Mahmood would be the most effective out of all of them (and a minority woman so lots of people would like that) but no chance the PLP elect her. I'm just hoping whatever the new leader does, we can move away from the managerialism and obsession with international law. I'm also hoping that whoever it is manages to junk the assisted suicide Bill.

Although I can see that Burnham on the face of it has a much wider appeal than the other two, his actual policies sound like the opposite of what we need. Loosening the financial rules and ignoring the bond markets in order to go on a spending spree with more money that we don't have is a recipe for disaster.

Depends how you measure worst. I'd say his ability to communicate, charisma and his ability to actually be a politician he's up there.

Although Starmer has been an awful PM and has done very little right, I am inclined to agree with @whelk that some of the silliness from the media over the past few days has been ridiculous. Rather like all this stuff with our spying, is it really necessary to have an hour by hour update on which moment the Prime Minister is resigning and counting each individual MP telling hin to go? All a bit unseemly from a media desperate for clicks and turning the management of our country into a TV drama series.

I heard we are already making the necessary arrangements

Imagine if we win tomorrow and Boro keep on training for ten days. Not only will we have robbed them of promotion but we'll rob them of a chunk of their summer holidays too! Mugs.

So many articles out now. So obvious they all emanate from the North and we have said nothing. Quite pathetic really.

Breaking news. The independent board were due to give us a slap on the wrist as early as today but someone has sent them the Boro fan petition and it looks like we could be in deep trouble.

We can all play that game and issue a load of fanciful things. Saints have made two demands to the EFL: 1) they let us off with a big fine and a public ticking off. 2) they let us drink discounted pints in our seats next season.

Boro making demands to the EFL now apparently. Again, it's wrongdoing that we have done and that will be determined by the independent body. Middlesbrough can make all the demands they like.

To any Boro fans reading this - just beat us on the field of play tomorrow and then we can shake your hands and have no complaints. Equally if you lose don't go on a big whiny sulk and demand you replace us in the final.

I'd love to know how long he was there for before being discovered? Could have been five minutes for all we know.

Look like a bit of reality might have started to penetrate slightly: "Hate to say it chaps... But I think we're in a bit of a bubble here. The general consensus I can gather from other fan forums, social media, talksport etc is that they're more on Southampton's side than ours. As in they're more like 'Bit naughty you got caught! Small fine it is' rather than thinking this is some massive cheating scandal. Only my observation and gut feel... But anyone thinking they'll be kicked out the play offs is away with the fairies. It's probably going to fire their players/fans up if anything."

You've got one calling for police raids of our board room and forensic investigations of all electronic devices. Absolutely barmy.

I thought Karl Turner seemed like a decent bloke and then they booted him out!

Christ is Blue Labour racist now as well? I can't keep up!

I think we may learn a lot about how confected or otherwise this is if we ever get any cctv footage or a picture of this professional recording equipment. If this does turn out to be a spotty student loitering in a bush with an iphone then we can safely assume that Boro have been playing the media to confect a lot of this and make it appear worse than it is. If however they manage to find the shots of the boom mic, 4K camera and a photo of all the coaching stuff in the command centre during the livestream with Tonda tweaking his tactics board in real time in response to Hellberg's instructions then some of that reporting might have some validity.

It could be like one of those MI5 missions where the agent is working for the big bosses but if anything goes wrong he's on his own, they deny all involvement and the mobile spontaneously combusts.

Win 4-0 then push for the punishment to be a retrospective 3-0 loss in the first leg...

I'd be annoyed about it but I'd be asking the club to use it as fuel to motivate the players to win on the pitch. The fact that many of their fans are so desperate to get us kicked out makes it seem like they don't believe they can beat us on Tuesday.

I can imagine that the same people twisting themselves in knots trying to slightly downplay the cheating would be the ones frothing at the mouth calling for Middlesborough to be expelled from the league if the shoe was on the other foot.

Right but this is a thread about SFC spying on the Middlesborough training ground. If you want to start a thread in the lounge about Steve Gibson and suggestions for how to improve his security at his training ground to prevent rogue actors from spying then go ahead. It's not relevant to this discussion.

And it's not like we took a picture because we liked the look of it. We took surveillance footage to then attempt to use that footage to gain an advantage that we shouldn't have. In other words cheating.