Normally there wouldn’t be much to write about between the season ending and the transfer window opening but this is no ordinary year.

Friday 22nd May – Sunday 31st May – Tumbleweeds

And so the play-off final happened between Hull and Middlesbrough. The game itself was absolutely murder to watch, with zero quality from either side and the winning goal was courtesy of a goalkeeper mistake. Mercifully, it was Hull and Ollie McBurnie who scored it. There was a deep satisfaction with Middlesbrough not winning of course, as they passed the ball about nice and then visibly shat the bed when it was time to play a final ball or have a shot. They did however, have a day out, break some windows on the Hull bus and left Trafalgar Square looking like the aftermath of an average night out in Middlesbrough town centre.

Meanwhile, ten days went by with not a dickie bird from our club. Social media silence was only broken to report the sad death of Victor Udoh who was in our Academy for six months a year or so ago. Other than that, tumbleweeds.

Rumours emanating out of Staplewood, whispered that the senior management were all on holiday but if that was true, they were all back by June 1st.

Monday 1st June – Broken Silence Day

New month and two new things happened. The first was more details of the case against us coming out from the EFL, mainly WhatsApp messages between the worst spy ever and various people at the club. As you would expect, none of this painted us in a particularly good light. Then, finally, a statement from the club.

I don’t really know what I was expecting but it wasn’t that. In summary, it didn’t say anything new and what it did say could all have been said on May 20th. Ten days to say absolutely nothing new was somewhat frustrating. There was the usual waffle about acceptance and taking responsibility, which no one has done yet. The one absolute bomb in there was taking a dig at the independent committee for having two people on it with Middlesbrough ties in their history, which again was something that was known at the time and no one objected at the time. You do have to ask yourself however, how would the Middlesbrough mob have been about it, if we got let off and two of the panel had Saints connections. They would have just accepted it, I’m sure they would.

However, dismal as the statement may seem, it may be that it is part of a cunning plan devised by our newly hired firm of lawyers from the Ministry of Cunning, who the club have cunningly engaged who previously worked with Manchester City on their 115 defence. Maybe, just maybe, this is the first strike at trying to establish that we were hard done by in some way, so we can fight any further punishment perhaps. I really don’t see it as a cunning plan because it would imply previously unseen levels of planning. I doubt we are paying them as much as Manchester City did so we probably got their intern on the case, Mr. Baldrick.

Personally, I don’t really understand why we’re still taking swipes at the process. I’m tired of that shit and in my opinion, the club should be putting every single effort into getting ready for next season. Who is the manager going to be, what players are staying, what are the season ticket prices going to be, even what’s the new kit going to be out? Any of that would’ve been an improvement and been more positively received by Saints fans.

That brings me on to ‘our enemies’. Our enemies are fans of other clubs, intent on grinding us into the dust. I don’t really care about them but the reaction to this statement was unsurprisingly, another indicator of the pile-on that we’re going to have to put up with next season, especially if we keep Tonda Eckert, assuming he doesn’t get banned by the FA. What will tomorrow bring?

Tuesday, the 2nd of June – The Fightback begins

Another day another statement, this time from Dragan Solak, who gave an interview with a BBC in which he basically said that he forgave Tonda and wanted him as manager for next season. Mic drop. A bigger “fuck you” to the baying mob is harder to imagine and whilst personally I am completely staggered this a man can support someone who cost us a shot at a £200 million boost for his business, I can see that he’s being pragmatic and feels that Tonda can get us promoted and he probably rightly, doesn’t trust Sport Republic with another manager search. There was a genuine sounding heartfelt apology to the fans about everything that had gone on but on the negative side, there was almost blame put on the junior staff doing the spying, for not complaining vociferously enough. Not a good look. Regardless of your opinion on Tonda and whether he should stay or go or not, it was nice to see some leadership being shown and a man sticking up for the club.

Whilst we were all digesting the Solak video, along came the big one, the interview with Tonda Eckert. For all the will in the world, this looked like a hostage appeal video. “My captors are treating me very well and here are their list of demands”. Tonda attempted to explain why the spying had happened, citing the accepted practice in Germany and in Italy. Like Dragan, he didn’t really address the treatment of the junior member of staff and seemed to want to go out of his way to show how much we didn’t benefit, paying particular attention to the Oxford game, which was rather a big hole in his argument because if it didn’t work, why did we do it in two subsequent games near the end of the season. By the end of it, I kind of felt that he had tried at least to explain that he was sorry but we still didn’t have any real answers and it was certainly not going to satisfy the baying mob from elsewhere.

At this point, the baying mob is all national media figures and fans of other clubs – they are our enemies. We are in a time of siege mentality, so as explained earlier, we should really not give a single shite about them. Of course they were out in force as soon as the videos dropped. Middlesbrough fans were all over it and so, bizarrely, were fans of Coventry, being even more vociferous than Ipswich and Oxford and even Pompey fans. Weirdos.

There was a bizarre statement out of the media in the North East saying that Middlesbrough were officially “pulling up the drawbridge“ on Spygate. What on earth does that mean? What could they possibly want? Apart from a public flogging? They got everything they wanted – we got banned, they played the final, they then of course had to win a football match which was of course beyond them because Kim Hellberg and his boys could only win two games out of the last thirteen, with the two wins coming against the very worst teams in the division. Pull up a drawbridge on that, you muppets.

Another significant statement was forthcoming in the slipstream of Solak and Eckert and that was P&O Cruises reaffirming their sponsorship commitment to the club. Again, it shows that some serious work must have gone in to managing this relationship and for the clubs main sponsor to sign up, again sends a very good message and allays fears that all commercial partners would not fancy being associated with a damaged brand.

Thursday, 4th of June – Letting it all Soak In

One sentence in the Dragan Solak video that stood out was that we were going to have a team to be proud of and a team that would be very exciting. It could’ve just been empty words and the kind of platitude thing that’s easy to say. We all know that actions speak louder than words. On Thursday night night came the first action, with the story coming out in the local press that a potential deal for Daniel Peretz was at an advanced stage.

Friday, 5th of June – What a Day

9am and bang, Daniel Peretz was a permanent signing from Bayern Munich for €8 million. Long interview, proud of the club, wants to go again prove that we could do it again. What a fucking amazing start of the day and what a statement of intent. It seemed to answer the question of whether players would not want to come back and play for the club next season because of everything that had gone on and it would’ve been very easy for Daniel, as a loan player, to just finish his loan and walk away – but he wants to be here. I’m sure he has been offered a bloody good contract and money always talks, but he wants to be here and what a signing that is.

It is an undeniable truth that this business has been done early to try and turn the tide, before the season ticket renewals drop, but I didn’t have time to think about that much before Cyle Larin was signing on the dotted line and joining permanently from RCD Mallorca for €3 million . Another bit of amazing business and another one who could have easily walked away. We are clearly cracking on and I’m loving how much piss this will be boiling elsewhere. We are usually a team that specialises in the ‘deal sheet’ at 3am when the transfer window has closed, yet here we are making two superb signings before the window is even open.

It’s amazing how different things look now. Within the space of a couple of days, we have basically stuck two fingers up at everybody and taken back control as best we can, decided that we are going to keep the manager and we have demonstrated that rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Saturday 6th June – The Dragan Roars Again

The good news kept coming, with Ryan Manning announcing that he wanted to sign a new contract and then Dragan Solak doing more interviews in which he said, amongst other things, that James Bree had been made a new contract offer that he thought the full-back was likely to sign. There was one negative in that because of the expulsion from the Playoff Final, we had run out of time to extend Ross Stewart’s contract. Apparently this had to be done withing five days of the last game and the expulsion meant we missed it. Legally, that’s a bit of a minefield but I can definitely see both sides of this. Saints were clearly leaving it until we knew what division we were in – not necessarily because of anyone thinking Ross was good enough or not, but because it’s always left to the last minute (Bree for example) and if you go up then the budgets are different. From Ross’ viewpoint, he’s 29, had all these injuries and knows that this is his last decent contract of any length, so he wants the best deal possible. It’s a bit of a risk for him to go into the World Cup with his injury record and just a few weeks left on his contract. I hope for his sake that Scotland look after him.

Dragan also addressed the initial ‘misleading response’ to the charge, explaining that we had just eleven hours to gather facts before the initial hearing, whilst everyone was travelling to Middlesbrough for the first leg. He is of the opinion that we were harshly dealt with for that rushed response. Not sure about that as they went out of their way to say it was a simple sporting sanction but Dragan obviously has a gripe with the process It makes no difference at the end of the day but it throws a bit more shade at the EFL.. Personally I’d love to know why both legs were allowed to be played when it appears that expulsion was always the likely outcome from the moment the charge dropped, but I’m not losing sleep over it because we’ll probably never know.

Monday 8th of June – The Transfer Window Still Hasn’t Opened

Saints media teams way of announcing new signings this year is doing a skit with a telephone ringing and it rang for a third time and it was another loan player joining permanently, though it was one that barely flickered. Third choice keepers don’t often proceed a rush to buy season tickets with most of us. Anyhow, George Long signed from Norwich or an undisclosed, very small fee. He was third choice last season until Alex McCarthy got injured and from that moment on he sat on the bench. The reshaping of the goalkeeping unit is an interesting one because there are still question marks over Aaron Ramsdale and Gavin Bazunu. With Ramsdale, it’s a case of where will he go and I guess there’s a scenario where we may keep Bazunu as our second choice but somehow I doubt it.

The reaction from the wider Championship world to our activity has been one of resignation and “oh shit….. Saints are not going to crumble to dust and are not going to end up in League one after all”. The mood has changed here as well as there’s no doubt we are not going to be miserable all season because we are not going to be struggling near the bottom of the division. We are going to be watching a team in the Championship, the best league in the world and we are likely to be decent again, despite all the hysteria.

The line has been drawn and we are not defending anymore, we are attacking. The signings of Peretz and Larin, the P&O statement and Dragan’s positivity have at least got things heading in the right direction. Personally, I still feel that Tonda Eckert should have gone but I respect Dragan’s decision to persevere and take what’s coming. I only hope that in addition to getting the team playing, Tonda can develop a thick skin in preparation for the questions that are going to be coming his way in every pre and post-match press conference. He can’t walk out of all of them. The FA can still throw a spanner in the works of course – maybe they will and maybe they won’t but the growing belief seems to be that we’ve had our punishment, it was severe and now it’s time to move on.

Up the Fucking Saints.