It’s been nice to have a week off in preparation for the first leg of the play-off semi-final at the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough. I’m sure everyone wanted a nice quiet week off anyway, where the only focus is on training and getting ready for the first game of this season defining semi-final.

That was how it was going until Thursday, when a story broke in the Daily Mail, that a Saints first team staffer had been caught filming a Middlesbrough training session. The parts of the story that were presented as fact were that he had been spotted, had deleted the footage and was ejected from the training ground… only it wasn’t the training ground, it was a vantage point from outside the training ground that was accessible to the public. Chinese whispers then of course took place and the implication was that the spy had been captured, that he was in a hotel, that he was in a car driving south and a load of other bollocks as every media outlet fought to put their own exclusive spin on it.

No fan has an inside track as to whether this is true or not, but it’s been enough to get Middlesbrough fans up in arms as you’d expect. Gives them something to be pissed about if they lose I guess. My first instinct as is always the case with these things is to look at the source. Lads, it’s the Daily Mail, possibly the most untrustworthy of any mainstream source when it comes to football stories, especially the sensationalist kind of stories.

I see one of three scenarios.

There may well be some truth in it and if there is, then we are fucking stupid for going down this road. If we have been involved, then we deserve to be punished and the precedent with Leeds, who did this a couple of years ago was a £200,000 fine. We would deserve it because we would have been fucking stupid and I question how much you are going to learn that you couldn’t learn from watching Middlesbrough’s last 10 games. They’ve won two out of their last eleven and we are unbeaten in twenty. Why the need for underhand tactics? On the other hand – even if it’s true, the offender was in a place open to the public. It’s not as if he broke in anywhere or even climbed a tree or hid in a bush.

Scenario 2 is that the Daily Mail journalist in question wanted to make a name for himself and has made the whole fucking thing up or at the very least, exaggerated it massively. That wouldn’t exactly be a shock. If they have identified the Saints staffer, why not name him? How does anyone know that he deleted the footage? It’s not as if they watched him do it. If the Daily Mail has just been making up complete shit or fabricating, then it’s just the Daily Mail doing Daily Mail things and there will be no consequence to them and the world will keep turning, with their grubby shitrag turning with it. Wikipedia actually bans the Daily Mail as a source. Since 2017 it’s been deemed as an ‘unreliable’ source, with a ‘reputation for poor fact checking and sensationalism’.

Scenario 3 is that someone thought it was a good idea and would get Boro fans riled up to give them some sort of extra atmosphere on Saturday. That will happen now whether it’s true or not and they’ll get it back at St Mary’s in the return.

I don’t want to believe that we’re guilty but I equally don’t want to believe that anyone would just make shit up. It is going to be the story of the game however, regardless of the result. This story broke after Tonda had done his press conference so there have been no words from the club about this whole thing. Apparently the EFL have contacted us for comment and that’s about as far as it goes. Hopefully it’s a complete non-story.

And now, the football.

Saints are going to this game with the return of Flynn Downes after suspension and he will certainly start today and will make a massive difference to the centre of our midfield, which has been a bit too easy to play through in the last few games in his absence. There are still question marks over the involvement of Jack Stephens and Kuryu Matsuki, but there is certainly adequate cover for both in the shape of Nathan Wood and Tom Fellows. A lot of the focus today will be on Finn Azaz, seeing that he left Middlesbrough at the start of the season to join us, which they were not particularly happy about and have been giving him shit about ever since, especially in the game that we played at the Riverside when unfortunately for Finn, we got smashed 4-0 and deservedly so. Finn didn’t exactly do himself any favours by not accepting the defeat in a very gracious manner as he stormed off the pitch at the end. Finn has a point approve in this game because in both games against Middlesbrough so far this season, he has not been too clever when the muck and bullets have been flying and he’s had no time on the ball. I expect him to do better in the game today though it was always going to be the kind of game where tackles would be flying in from the first minute.

With it being a two legged affair of course, The aim is to get out of here and back to St Mary’s either level or in front and finish the job at home. I feel the Saints have got to be favourites to handle the pressure of this particular game. As the pressure has mounted on Middlesbrough as the season drew to a close, they have not done the business with just two wins out of eleven and those two wins coming against Sheffield Wednesday and Watford, a team that finished this season not exactly 0 points and a team who basically didn’t give a shit over the last month for the season. Middlesbrough have struggled since the injury to Hayden Hackney occurred and though he is supposed to be close, there is no way he’s going to play a full part in these two games. I feel that we have the confidence, the form and the players to achieve the objective in this particular tie.

When we got stuffed up here at the Riverside last time around, the stand-out players were Morgan Whittaker up front who helped himself to two goals and making his debut that Day was Adilson Melanda, who has proved to be a very good acquisition over the second half of the season. Another couple of notable players in the Boro squad are our former fullback Matt Targett, who was had a decent season on loan from Newcastle, and Luke Ayling, formally of Leeds who now anchors the Middlesbrough defence. He was in the news a couple of weeks ago when Ipswich were awarded a very dodgy penalty for a dive against them, saying that it was a disgrace and all that stuff. Anyone who’s followed Luke Ayling’s career will know just how hypocritical that outburst was, bearing in mind he’s a guy who is famous for flopping to the ground under minimal contact. Yes, it was an incredibly soft penalty that was awarded but have some self-awareness at least. One thing we could target today is the goalkeeper Sol Brynn, who always looks very flaky whenever I’ve seen him play.