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Still no response from the club. Very disappointed.

Not sure anyone would be delighted if they opened the door and he was there mumbling and muttering in his monotone voice.

Hah.. I think it's plausible (as others have said) that we've paid an analyst to do some work for us, and they're remote and we haven't asked how they do it 🤷. But fundamentally we still don't know for certain who is allegedly involved. And it would still be a 1 off that delivered us no shooting advantage (evidently). So hard for the efl to justify too much of a punishment. If the club have routinely had someone going to every single team's training grounds all season then I think we are in a whole different ball game and will land a significant punishment. I would be more worried about that than any blow back from the Boro game - they dominated us for 45min and can only have themselves to blame for not winning, we very clearly had no advantage due to any alleged spying 🤷

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.

We have no facts yet, and I'm not sure there will be many. Perhaps we should send a couple of players to kickabout outside their hotel then accuse them of looking out of the window at us.... #storminteacupgate

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...

If it's William Salt (if - his name has only been leaked by unnamed Boro sources), then I think it's very unlikely we have commissioned him (intern / graduate) to go traipsing all over the country by himself to do covert surveillance. Imagine he has an accident driving for work and the club needs to explain why he's driving to/from Coventry's training ground 2 days before a game for example. When it broke, I don't think the club knew what had happend (possibly still don't), and so they just tried to ignore it and focus on the footy. Which is the correct approach. And thinking about it more recently, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if tonda was told not to go for it too much in the first leg as well - as it would only have added fuel to the story if we went up there and comfortably beat them. Rock and a hard place really... Could explain why he was delighted with how the game went... All according to plan? Take away any threat from Gibson about us having a sporting advantage?

Yep, feels like their fans and media see their best opportunity of getting through is us getting expelled from playoffs post match rather than beating us at St Mary's! Although logically it shouldn't matter, I think it would help us particularly in the crazy media circus if we could smash them by as many as possible as the narrative would switch slightly to "well, they would have won anyway!"

Seeing as they can shorten the regulated 14 days to respond, we can just shorten the regulated 72 hours to 24 hours before a game. Job done.

Its entirely feasible that in 2026 we could have an analyst based and working remotely in the north.

Boro stewards were helping fans with flares outside the ground , not trying to stop them, inside the ground fair enough but outside wont be an issue, I remember at Goodison last year it was encouraged by the club pre match for their grand farewell

That only covers one of the charges... We'd still be in breach of the other charge (i.e. "acting in good faith")...

Spies Like Us - Paul McCartney Hey, hey, what do you say? Someone took your plans away So what's all the fuss? There ain't nobody that spies like us

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.

Allow me to be the first that I really couldn't give a monkey's if the boot was on the other foot.

Nobody is getting nicked for using a smoke bomb outside the ground. They might if doing it inside though.

We've been kicked out of the EFL pyramid, we'll be playing in the Premier League next season. The Hampshire Premier League...

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.

Fair enough spiel, but I didn’t hear about any arrests or bans for Boro fans letting off flares before the game on Saturday. Of course the authorities are less likely to ignore anything we do wrong moving forward after this latest drama

Ok you're saying its relevant and I am telling you it is irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.

Good job I didn't then.