Lighthouse

Yeah they stuttered slightly when they lost the three wickets but it was still as comfortable as they could have hoped for. Manny will need patience. He looks a real prospect but those first three balls, well they don’t come much worse than that. What’s the latest on Turner’s injury, anyone?

I don’t think we’ll survive 15 overs the way this is going. Cartwright and Potgeiter are not Ellis and Brevis.

Obviously Somerset are one of the best teams in it but we look little better in this than we have in the CC. 7 wickets down for 41 to finish it off, never in a million years will we defend 158.

How have we been given a '20 year sentence'? We've been disqualified from a game we cheated in, we can still compete in next years Championship. What's happening here is a burglar has been caught stealing a million pounds in cash and some people are bizarrely trying to argue that he should get to keep the million pounds and pay a fine of £100k. Put it this way, if we were in this same scenario where Pompey had beaten us in the semi. I'm absolutely certain that everybody on this forum would definitely be saying, "oh don't kick Pompey out, that's way too harsh, let them play in the final."

Just so you know, if there are any Boro fans still reading this forum (or skates for that matter) they're probably laughing their tits off at this thread. The complaints about the panel were bad enough. Now we've got the football equivalent of a burglar being arrested and saying, "it's not fair! the shop next door warned them that they had a break in last week, so they put up cameras deliberately to try and catch me out. They haven't acted in good faith!" We cheated, we got caught, we got kicked out. Suck it up.

They aren't a jury and they don't have connections. We haven't demanded they get replaced because this is very clearly just a bunch of whining nonsense. There's nothing to see here; a footballer who played one game for Boro in 1994 and a lawyer who was once paid to represent them in a completely irrelevant case eight years ago. Lawyers don't have tribal loyalty to people they've represented in court. They don't have half and half scarves at home with Ian Huntley on one side and Harrold Shipman on the other. Our defence, "not picking up on it," is all in your head. We haven't complained because there's nothing to complain about.

A week ago people were laughing at the Boro forum being, "a desperate, delusional echo chamber." I think trying to claim you're the victim of corruption because a member of the panel played one game on loan at Boro 32 years ago, is getting pretty deep into the same territory. It would be like claiming Andrei Kanchelskis is obviously corrupt in our favour.

On the contrary, I use a lot of the posts on here as compost in my garden.

I rarely agree with Duck but he's the voice of reason here. Which half truth in particular do you take issue with?

I haven't forgotten anything. Competing in the playoff final is literally the prize for winning the semi final, you don't get to just go to the final because you want to. We forfeited the semi because we cheated, now we don't get to play in the final. It's really that simple.

Well you're the one doing it, claiming the punishment is extreme and a club killer. It's neither. We've essentially been deducted two points per game in which we've been proven to be cheating and forfeited a third one which fell outside the league/points system. That's not extreme. I've seen Roma given a 3-0 forfeit for a CL match in which one of their fans chucked a lighter at the ref and cracked his head open. That's basically what we've been given.

They got a points deduction and are now in League 1, as did Sheff Weds. You don't think that's maybe quite an important difference?

If you cheat, you don't get to keep your winnings. It's that simple.

You're only writing it like that to try and trivialise what we've done. He was illegally recording the training and tactics of a team we were playing for a place in the PL. They knew it was wrong, they knew we'd get in trouble and they did it anyway. The fact that the bloke was completely incompentent in doing it doesn't make it any more acceptable.

No, the EFL have punished the club. The FA will now look into who was involved individually and look to hand out sanctions accordingly. I don't think this is bad news for Saints as such as those individuals are likely to be sacked very soon anyway. I can't see the club being handed more of a punishment, given what's happened.