How more Spygate makes Marcelo Bielsa even more right
I suspect Kim Hellberg's emotional response to feeling cheated by Tonda Eckert is the same reaction many coaches have felt, over the years, but when seeing their best ideas reduced to dust by the sheer weight of work Bielsa puts up against them.
Spying. It's such an emotive yet amusing word, thanks to some combination of James Bond, Austin Powers and residual memories of trying to make the Cold War seem like a fun time. It's why, back when Frank Lampard, Peter Shilton and Derbyshire Police dragged Marcelo Bielsa out on stage for what we can now call Spygate One I tried to reframe his crimes as 'illicit scouting'.
That Southampton analyst who went to Middlesbrough last week was no spy. He used a personal credit card in a hotel owned by Middlesbrough FC's owner, for one thing, and allowed himself to be photographed while filming their training session for another. This is not some master of espionage. A Southampton insider has apparently confessed this isn't the first undercover mission the club has been on since Tonda Eckert took over as manager. But done this badly, how is this the first time they've been caught?
But they shouldn't have been doing it and now it's merely — merely! splutters someone at the Football League — a question of how the EFL will punish Southampton FC for it. But as Super Leeds United fans it's important we acknowledge this objective truth while our former manager's name is fluttering around this controversy: illicit scouting was fine when Marcelo Bielsa did it, maybe even good, and the two cases are completely different. So there.
It really is dispassionately different now. Marcelo Bielsa is the kind of person you have to invent rules about, and that's what the EFL did when one of his staff was caught watching Derby County in training. It was January 2019, by the way, before a league match at Elland Road, not before the play-offs as keeps being lazily repeated this week. In the absence of specific regulations against their actions, Leeds were fined £200,000 for failing to act 'with the utmost good faith' towards other clubs, and the EFL's then chief executive Shaun Harvey ushered in a specific new rule about leaving other people's training grounds alone in the 72 hours before a game.
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