By Nick Mabey.
Long time Saints fan and columnist Nick Mabey gives a personal take on the fall out of the spygate saga.
Disbelief courses through me as I sit to write this. The shock waves caused by the ruling from the two independent panels against Southampton Football Club are still yet to be fully realised. There is more pain to come.
I still don’t really know how I’m meant to feel about spygate and yet I am compelled to write, and to add to the millions of words that have been uttered and splattered. Here’s my take and believe me when I say I’m not sure what I’m going to say.
Firstly, if you happen to be someone who doesn’t know what I’m writing about when I say the word ‘spygate’, I envy you. As a Saints fan, it’s a set of memories and feelings I don’t want and in the shock of the outcome I find myself desperately searching for something hopeful to cling to.
At this point I’d like to insert a giant context alert. I am fully aware this is about football. We live in a fragile, turbulent inequitable world with existential crises seemingly all around us. How self-indulgent is it of me to be occupying myself with such trivia in the face of all that? I plead guilty to the charge. Why does it matter so much?
My anger is at being hoodwinked. My anger is having my dreams crushed by such an unnecessary strategy of self-sabotage. My anger still hasn’t found its target yet. I’ve had a number of conversations based on the idea of blaming the English Football League (EFL) or Middlesbrough FC for this debacle. It would be much easier if I could be angry at them. How can I be angry with the club I love and have spent over fifty years in an intimate relationship with?
It reminds me of the dark days of administration and the long, slow torture of the seemingly inevitable journey toward liquidation of the club. But that was different. Fans knew who they blamed for the crisis. It welded the fan base together and to the idea that Southampton FC was something worth saving. I hope redemption waits for us once more, but it is difficult to see how and when right now. It feels too early to visualise sunny uplands.
I’m now concerned about hyperbole and melodrama. Are these words a chronic over-reaction to the circumstances my football club finds itself in? Have I become a victim of the massive wave of righteousness driving this case? It’s too early to tell. I’ve been sucked into the detail of this story too closely. I’ve laughed during at the farcical images of people stood behind a tree with an iPhone. I’ve bristled at the excessive whinging by Middlesbrough and enjoyed our fans’ on-line counter attacks. And now I’ve woken up to a dystopian landscape where my football club have become pariahs; the latest standard bearers for all that is corrupt in the game.
Fellow fans, and some pundits, have argued passionately that any action we took to spy on the training of other teams would not have had a significant effect on the outcome of matches. They point out, with some justification, that so much is known about the tactics of every team that there is nothing of real use to be gained from sending analysts to covertly find more to analyse. I respond by simply asking – “if all that is true, why did we do it?”.
Others talk about proportionality and the fact that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I’d have some sympathy with that argument if it was a one off. But my football club has confessed to effectively a strategy of cheating. We owned up to spying on Oxford in December, three weeks after Tonda Eckert was confirmed as our new permanent manger. (Sidebar – we lost that game in possibly our worst performance of the season). And we owned up to spying on Ipswich in April and Middlesbrough in May. It’s not a big stretch of the imagination to wonder if it was a systematic strategy, and a systemic cultural norm. That’s the problem.
The successes of Saints have been clear and joyously celebrated. A nineteen-game unbeaten league run, propelling Southampton from relegation prospects into the play-off places and a chance of Premier League treasures. A glorious run to the semi-final of the FA Cup. Three manager of the month awards. Most importantly, a complete transformation of the relationship between fans and club from toxicity to harmony, unity and joyous. I really want to believe this would have all happened anyway without any spying. I really want to believe that, and perhaps I will at some point in the future. But for now the cloud of suspicion is just too black. We have no credible defence to the accusation that this success was built on a foundation of cheating.
The owners have a daunting task to steer the club through this next chapter. It’s painful for me to even consider. The shopping list includes:
- Convince themselves and everyone else they are fit to run my club
- Root out the perpetrators of the spying strategy
- Win over the players who will have been tarred by this brush without presumably knowing and who will have seen their own dream of glory and financial reward dashed
- Restore the faith of fans with of the club
- Clean up the reputational stain the club now bears in the eyes of the wider sporting world
- Prepare for next season, where we start clear bottom with minus four points
We may have lost the play-off final and faced the prospect of losing players and balancing the books anyway. That’s a hard enough job without all this. As a fan I am going to be asked to renew my season ticket in the next few weeks. Between now and then I’m looking for leadership. Let’s see how that plays out.
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