The Spygate Saga

[BarberSaint]

41 minutes ago, Lord Duckhunter said:

Neither does Parsons. The bit about the initial response is pretty damning. Stating the CEO had made urgent enquires which included Tonda and it “remains a mystery” how these answers were given incorrectly. Remains a mystery is basically a polite way of saying “fucking lied”. It went in to add because of that there was no mitigation on the Boro offence. 
 

They say they were “unimpressed “ with some witness’ claiming they didn’t know it was illegal, specifically mentioning Tonda. Again “unimpressed “ is a polite, “they’re bullshitting”. 
 

Whilst we may want to keep Tonda, they stated that FIFA thought the Leeds punishment too lenient. That’s a big Indicator that the FA will ban him imo…

 

 

 

It's not illegal. Nor is it unlawful. It's a breach of the rules of a competition. Small fry. 

[Weston Super Saint]

My take on this is our analysts are fucking useless.

Three times we spied and gained zero knowledge from any of them, useless twats.  Worse, we even said for definite that one person would be playing and didn't, not even in the final.

Sack the fucking lot of them.

[Lord Duckhunter]

1 minute ago, BarberSaint said:

 

 

It's not illegal. Nor is it unlawful. It's a breach of the rules of a competition. Small fry. 

Shit, we should have had  you on the legal team, we’d have pissed it. All charges dropped…

[sfc4prem]

Having that BBC article that summarises but offers nothing new, the original EFL report from earlier and our response, I'm of a mind that this is all so fucking silly.

How could we be so naive?

How could the EFL be pressured so easily in plain sight by a fellow member club?

Why are the media sensationalising the story to extremes?

At the end of the day, I want Tonda to stay. I hope the FA's response enables that possibility. 

 

[Midfield_General]

Weird, confused, mealy-mouthed statement. 

Sounds like it might be the end of Half Term Phil though, so that's something at least. 

[Saint NL]

Sounds like things would have been different if Parsons didn't own up to everything when he spoke to Gibbo at the first leg of the playoffs.

If he had said 'no comment' or 'we are doing a thorough internal investigation' then they'd have very little to go on.

[Football Special]

1 hour ago, Saint NL said:

Reddit not taking the news well 😂

I have never been on Reddit but clearly whoever the fuck those people are they wont be  anywhere near as knowledgeable as this place 

[Patrick Bateman]

1 minute ago, Football Special said:

I have never been on Reddit but clearly whoever the fuck those people are they wont be  anywhere near as knowledgeable as this place 

I have no idea what reddit is, but those people seem like wobbling willies. We fight on! 

[Window Cleaner]

12 minutes ago, BarberSaint said:

 

 

It's not illegal. Nor is it unlawful. It's a breach of the rules of a competition. Small fry. 

Doping isn't illégal in most countries, it's against the rules of sports and you get chucked out and suspended if you get caught.

The EFL makes the rules, clubs agree to them and if you transgress you get sanctioned.

[Football Special]

9 minutes ago, Patrick Bateman said:

I have no idea what reddit is, but those people seem like wobbling willies. We fight on! 

For me the best thing to come out of this whole saga is the club might be able to offload some of these wobbling Willies amongst the fanbase 

[Doctoroncall]

1 hour ago, obelisk said:

The punishment handed down looks even more draconian than it did previously if this is all they have. Why the hell didn't Saints fight it?

It seemed clear that the punishment was already set and there was nothing Saints could have done to mitigate it. 

[BotleySaint]

So, they are lining Parsons up to take the fall and trying to protect Tonda?

[Willo of Whiteley]

Southampton statement:

We recognise the situation BUT, BUT, BUT, BUT…

Shambolic PR.

No accountability.

No recognition.

No apology.

Guessing the club don’t want people to renew this season. 😂

[benjii]

Reading the appeal, a couple of things stand out.

I) The May 8th statement was disastrous. Which fuckwit signed off on that? Why so eager to send something without the facts? Just object in the strongest terms to the timeline and say we need longer to deal with it.

2) Sounds like we volunteered the Oxford and Ipswich evidence? Surely not. It's still unclear who exactly said what and what evidence was provided.

3) It seems pretty clear we weren't aggressive enough in the initial hearing, and just assumed expulsion wouldn't happen.

4) No mention anywhere of raising the impartiality of the panel members. Why  not?

 

[It's There]

19 minutes ago, benjii said:

Reading the appeal, a couple of things stand out.

I) The May 8th statement was disastrous. Which fuckwit signed off on that? Why so eager to send something without the facts? Just object in the strongest terms to the timeline and say we need longer to deal with it.

2) Sounds like we volunteered the Oxford and Ipswich evidence? Surely not. It's still unclear who exactly said what and what evidence was provided.

3) It seems pretty clear we weren't aggressive enough in the initial hearing, and just assumed expulsion wouldn't happen.

4) No mention anywhere of raising the impartiality of the panel members. Why  not?

 

Point 4. My guess is that information wasn’t volunteered, hence the saints comment in the statement!

[Livewire]

As others have said, the initial statement was a catastrophe and basically meant that the panel said we were initially uncooperative and lied. The facts in it were wrong. How could this have happened? It meant we were on the back foot from the start and that the fact-gathering at the club went badly awry. Shocker. 

Another thing: I hope we all accept that the spying was wrong and should not have been done (we can argue about the sanction, but the spying itself is wrong). So: who was at the top of the tree authorising it? Tonda? The more I think about it, it makes less and less sense. This was a 33-year old novice manager with no pedigree. He comes in for another wunderkind in the middle of a ho-hum season and instantly starts terrorising poor junior analysts to do things that everyone must know are wrong. And he is allowed to do this? No one raises an objection? This is not a Guardiola or Ancelotti who did this, someone whose word is the law. It's someone no one has heard of before November. How can he have so much sway so quickly? The club's initial disastrous response plus this makes me think that the answer is that the policy was approved from higher up than Tonda - not to mention for example approving Salt's expenses in going up to Middlesbrough. Who did this? I know everyone wants to forget this, but we have to reckon with it properly before we can move on. 

[Livewire]

Just now, It's There said:

Point 4. My guess is that information wasn’t volunteered, hence the saints comment in the statement!

The information could have been found out. When you are in an arbitration, the first thing you do is some research on the arbitrators. Who are they? What is their background? You can then object if they are biased or appear to be. And Winnie's background is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Winnie Did no one read this? Winnie should have been nowhere near that panel, and we should have applied to remove him pronto. The outcome may have been the same, but we would at least have demonstrated some mental agility about ourselves. 

[Sheaf Saint]

1 hour ago, Cuddles said:

It's an EFL specific rule though, so whether the FA would further punish us is debatable.

It's not the club that the FA would punish, it's the individual. 

[SaintsLoyal]

2 hours ago, Football Special said:

For me the best thing to come out of this whole saga is the club might be able to offload some of these wobbling Willies amongst the fanbase 

You mean people with morals ?  its those that havent we should be getting rid of.

[SaintsLoyal]

 

Operations manager... who made travel plans  ?   LIke a said when this was happening , someone knew about expenses and how did this not get picked up by other management.

[Weston Super Saint]

1 hour ago, benjii said:

Reading the appeal, a couple of things stand out.

I) The May 8th statement was disastrous. Which fuckwit signed off on that? Why so eager to send something without the facts? Just object in the strongest terms to the timeline and say we need longer to deal with it.

2) Sounds like we volunteered the Oxford and Ipswich evidence? Surely not. It's still unclear who exactly said what and what evidence was provided.

3) It seems pretty clear we weren't aggressive enough in the initial hearing, and just assumed expulsion wouldn't happen.

4) No mention anywhere of raising the impartiality of the panel members. Why  not?

 

2. We "volunteered" Oxford and Ipswich because we were under notice that the EFL were opening further investigations. To be fair, it was the most sensible thing to do at the time rather than pretend it didn't happen and then get caught out later.

Maybe we learnt from 1.???

[MB]

Interestingly the analyst concluded Hackney WOULD play, he didn’t, and neither did he feature in the 2nd leg either

adds further fuel to fire that the whole thing was just a total set up from the start 

Edited 1 hour ago by MB

[trousers]

13 minutes ago, MB said:

Interestingly the analyst concluded Hackney WOULD play, he didn’t, and neither did he feature in the 2nd leg either

adds further fuel to fire that the whole thing was just a total set up from the start 

Yep... I'm yet to be convinced the whole thing wasn't a trap that we fell into hook, line and sinker...

Especially if that's true about our 'spy' coming away with the impression that Hackney was likely to play... Middlesbrough spoofing a training session due to a tip off that someone from was going to be there...? Far fetched? Maybe... An impossibility? Maybe not...

Edited 1 hour ago by trousers

[rallyboy]

It wasn't spying, it was observing outside the permitted timeframe - but Gibson and his little puppet boy media circus decided that Spygate sounded more sexy and would sell better to the nationals.

Had we beaten Hull, and let's be honest here, we fucking would have done, this equates to double the biggest financial penalty EVER imposed in the history of world sport, making it by far the worst case of cheating ever committed - in monetary terms twenty times worse than Lance Armstrong, two hundred times worse than Liverpool setting up an IT dept to hack into Man City's confidential scouting data, at least double the losses Juventus suffered from match-fixing. 

One bloke behind a tree, yes, we cheated, but no more than happens in EVERY fucking match in every country in the world every day. Football is riddled with cheating - this is not the crime of the century.

Enough.

 

[Saint NL]

Not sure this will be readable, but Ian Wright is comparing Spygate to a goalkeeper having penalty shootout notes on his water bottle.

 

[trousers]

15 minutes ago, Saint NL said:

Not sure this will be readable, but Ian Wright is comparing Spygate to a goalkeeper having penalty shootout notes on his water bottle.

 

Tut tut Wrighty... You should know by now (by order of the Saintsweb intelligentsia) that you're not allowed to compare one type of 'cheating' with another....