The old adage lets not get facts get in the way of the truth, is perhaps very apt in Spygate, the Teesside media started it off and then it seemed to whole country joined in, blowing up what is quite an innocuous rule breach in the grand scheme of things, into the most serious offence ever !

Up to fairy recently you could go and watch professional football teams train, I remember back in 2000 going to Staplewood one morning to watch Saints, I joined a small collection of retirees who seemed to do this quite regularly, there was not a lot to be learned and the only day you couldn't go and watch was Friday morning.

At one stage a training game was stopped and one of the coaches stopped and asked a member of the crowd whether he thought a foul had been committed and I had an in depth conversation with then manager Glenn Hoddle on the walk back from the training pitch.

Then things started to get a bit more serious, football clubs got paranoid that the opposition might get a whiff of a new throw in tactic or the part of the shin they were going to wear their shin pads on for the following game and so Staplewood went into lockdown and so did plenty of other Premier League training grounds, or as they were now being rebranded, complexes, academy's or in Bournemouth's case Performance Centres.

Outside of the Premier League, most other clubs continue to train in fairly open facilities, some use facilities they don't own such as the local university etc.

Middlesbrough themselves do not train in an enclosed facility, their training complex is within a bigger site that also contains a luxury hotel and a golf course and club house.

As long as you book a round of golf or night in the hotel, you can get on to the site and walk down roads that give you a view of the Middlesbrough FC training pitches and I mean a view, not a close view just a view.

When Spygate broke the allegations that came out, now bear no resemblance to the actual facts of the matter, an employee of Southampton FC had been caught hiding in the bushes with highly technical recording equipment filming Boro's first team training.

The image being projected was of a covert operation where the culprit was hid in bushes just yards from the training pitches.

The actual facts are far from that image the Teesside media wished to project.

Firstly the man was not an employee of Southampton football club, he had been involved with the club at one point, but he was actually a student studying a degree in Sports Analysis, he had spent time at Saints as an intern as part of a placement from his course, but he had also spent time at Derby County and other sporting institutions and since March has been at Aston Villa.

So fact number one is that he was not an employee of Southampton Football Club.

Fact number two is that he was not in the bushes with sophisticated technical equipment, he did not trespass on the property, he did not hide his identity, he had booked into the hotel and by all accounts after the incident bought a cup of coffee using his personal debit card.

His actual position was that he was stood on an open road, next to a gate that said, Private Property do not enter. He did not enter, instead he stood by a tree next to the gate.

He was around 200 metres from the actual training pitches themselves with an i phone in hand and more to the point he was in clear sight from the Middlesbrough FC club house for want of a better word.

They soon spotted him and came over to find out what he was doing.

The answer was not a lot and I would suspect that this was far from the first time that they had had to challenge someone here.

But now it is blurred, initially the Teesside media claimed that his identity had been seen and that footage he had taken had been deleted, now they claim he ran for it back to the hotel or Golf clubhouse and tried to disguise himself by changing clothes in a toilet.

There are also claims by Boro that he then ran across the gold course to make his escape, this also sounds a bit strange, did he leave his personal belongings in his room, or perhaps in his car if he had on, which presumably is still in the car park.

The next question is just what he was trying to achieve, perhaps the only thing would have been that they intended to stop Cyle Larin by continually pulling his shirt at every opportunity.

If he was genuinely on a mission from Southampton FC, surely there are far better ways to view a training session than from 200 metres away with an i phone.

What would be the odds of watching the session for say 2 hours and not being seen, what would be the chances that in the short time you were stood there, you would actually capture any information that would be of use.

Middlesbrough might be a lot more open than most training grounds, but they do have CCTV & security, if you were genuinely on a covert operation, you would not do it this way.

I don't know the exact lay out of the complex, but surely if we were looking to film a training session, then we would have sneaked on the ground from a quiet area of the woods etc surrounding the complex and hidden in the woods or bushes a bit nearer the training pitches.

But lets be honest training complex's have security staff and cctv, it would still be very difficult to get away with.

A couple of days before this broke I watched the video below on You Tube taken by a drone at Staplewood, very interesting and by a Saints supporter wanting to show off the size and scale of the training ground.

The point here is that if Saints wanted to find out what Middlesbrough was doing, then it would have been easy enough for them to have used a drone themselves, if we are serial training session watchers, then surely we would have been doing this for ages and on this occasion.

A drone would be far more sophisticated than an I phone and would get a better view of proceedings that could then be enhanced and studied.

More to the point it could have been launched remotely from the training ground itself, it would have been hard to find who and where it was launched from.

All of this is a little strange but as I say lets not let facts get in the way of the truth.

Will Salt is the former Intern named as the spy, so why would be be watching the training session, that is actually an easy answer it is all part of his studies, he has been on placements, but there is more to just the course itself, there is homework to do.

So he has a reasonable excuse for wanting to take a look at a training session and I would imagine that most football fans if they were staying at the hotel would have wandered the short distance to have a look at the team training, they would take a picture on their phone to show their mates, probably a couple for no other reason than because that is what football fans do, let alone those studying for a degree in Sports Analysis.

The only real question here is why when he is an intern at Aston Villa at present he was up in the North East, but there may be a good reason for that other than football.

But the main question is just what Saints could gain from this, had they heard word that Kim Hellberg was on the brink of a breakthrough in team tactics, a tactic never seen or thought up before, that he was about to turn the footballing world upside down by revealing this against Southampton on Saturday and in doing so propel himself up the rankings of World Football coaches from the lower reaches to the top 3 ?

I think we all know the answer to that one, there are only so many ways you can line up your side to take a free kick or a corner and once you have done it once in the match, then the opposition know what you are doing.

The actual truth is, that despite what a plethora of ex professionals are lining up to tell you in the media, there is little to be gained than what is already known.

The outcry here is totally out of proportion to the facts of the matter, if they had found an SAS squad in the woods with sophisticated monitoring equipment, then perhaps they might have had a case, but they didn't !

It was a former Southampton intern with an i phone hardly hiding himself from CCTV or security, it is something out of nothing with the flames fanned by Hellberg himself a man who took over the job with the team in second place and gained only 19 points in the last 15 games of the season to finish 5th.

That suggests his job is in jeopardy, lose to Southampton in the play offs and it didn't take a genius to put two and two together and in this day and age suggest that there is a good chance he won't be manager at the start of next season.

So he was a desperate man and he went to desperate measures, do everything to try and mess with our own preparations, put doubt into our minds.

From a Southampton FC perspective, we have done the right thing, we haven't made brash claims, we haven't tried to distort the evidence or influence it, we have kept our own counsel, perhaps in the confidence that the truth will eventually emerge and that has already seemed to be the case, the facts of the matter are now seemingly far far different than Middlesbrough originally briefed the Teesside media and there is no excuse for that.
Then to the offence itself, the precedent was set back when Bielsa was manager of Leeds and they were caught spying on a training session, yes that was under a different ruling, but that was only changed because the EFL wanted a specific rule for the offence.

The nature of the offence remains the same and if Leeds were fined £200,000, then if Southampton were to be found guilty, then the punishment should be in proportion to the crime and the precedent is that £200k that Leeds were fined.

A lot of hot air on Teesside is demanding Saints to be kicked out of the competition etc etc, but I don't think that is in proportion to the crime.

Middlesbrough will say that it was an important play off game, but that is not relevant, if you were given a red card in an end of season game between two mid table clubs with nothing to play for, then you might get a 3 game ban, if you committed the same offence in a top of the table clash, you would receive exactly the same.

The question asked is going to be what could be gained and was gained from the offence if found guilty and that is fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things.

All Photos Via Reuters