sadoldgit

Love it.

Deep into stoppage time too. Awesome! No shots on target from Boro. 😂 Justice done!

“Fat” Sam Allardyce? (Too soon?)

The one on the left looks pretty silly too!

If 72 hours is such a big deal in the EFL’s world, surely Hull should have been given more time to prepare against a different opponent?

That is a fair point Mr. T, but it is true. I really don’t give a stuff about teams checking each other out. As has been said plenty of times on here, there are hours of videos of all of the teams, the full team is known an hour before the match, it is very clear after a few minutes how a team has been set up. Unless someone has come up with a unique cunning plan there isn’t a great deal that you can learn a few days before a game that you don’t know already. “Why do it,” I hear you say? Analyists are gonna analyse I guess. Eckert seems a bit obsessive with details. I’d expect other teams to be all over our stuff like a rash too. Whether that extended to spying who knows, but I have seen enough this season to tell me that playing 4 at the back, getting in a decent goalkeeper, getting Bree back and having two effective CFs has made the biggest difference to our performances this season no matter what Will Salt has managed to discover on his missions.

I hope that you called him a cheat?

We have taken an emotional hit but SR have taken a massive financial and reputational hit. I’m not surprised they are taking their time. Any response needs to be very carefully considered. I’d rather they took their time to come to the right way forward than to rush a response and add to the shit show we already have.

I didn’t think that the club would be thrown out of the competition and look how that turned out! What if Spors is the SpyMaster and it was his agenda? Does Eckert take the rap or does the man who (possibly) instigated it? Even if he didn’t sanction it, as Eckert’s boss, does the buck stop with him? Widening the argument a bit, if it had been going on all season should Will Still have to face charges too?

If we had lost to Hull today I’m wondering just how many players would want to stay next season anyway? There must be some who fancy their chances of getting a bigger club rather than another year slogging away in the Championship. Ok, I have climbed down off the fence and joined the no camp, depending on what happens with the FA of course. It seems very harsh for banning someone for doing something 72 hours before a match that that it is absolutely fine to do 72 hours and five minutes before a match. He broke a law, yes, but it is a bloody stupid law and that needs to be taken into account.

It seems that the definition of bullying has changed. Tough love is now bullying. Asking someone to do their job better is bullying apparently. I don’t know if Eckert had actually properly bullied staff and if he has that is clearly unacceptable. When I was a kid there was a boy in my class who fancied himself as the school bully. He used to push people through hedges. On one occasion he asked me if I wanted a sweet and to hold out my hand. He then stabbed my palm with a freshly sharpened pencil. I still have the mark in my palm over 60 years later. Now that is what I call bullying. So, are we talking Full Metal Jacket mode here or just “Tonda, you can’t talk to staff like that these days. You need to think about their feelings?”

If Gibbo had sent someone to check us out in the same circumstances I wouldn’t have given a toss. As Eckert said, the game is all about what happens between 22 players on the pitch when it comes down to it. Middlesbrough had enough chances to go through comfortably but blew it. Again, if the situations were reversed I would be blaming us for our own ineptitude, not screaming for a bye to the final because of some half baked attempt at “spying.” As said earlier, it is all a bit hollow for Middlesbrough today. They haven’t made the final through merit, they are there through a courtroom. Hardly a great sporting achievement!

If the attitude within the club is that checking other teams out is no big deal this is hardly surprising. I’m more interested in what other teams do now. Are they all “at it” in some way or other? Also, if we were doing it when Will Still was here it just goes to show how ineffectual it was so begs the question, why do it?

Do you think he was doing it when coaching the U21s? Seems a bit over the top at that level, but who knows?

Isn’t it all about the intent? We know that we broke the rules even if there was no material gain. We were charged with breaking the rules. The importance of the game was not the issue, the intent was.