When the outcome of a football match is potentially worth more than £100m, a bit of alleged skulduggery should hardly be surprising.
I’m referring to events at the Middlesbrough training ground on Thursday morning, when Kim Hellberg was preparing his squad for the first leg of the Championship semi-final play-off against Southampton.
ICYMI, an interested party was reportedly observing the session from the edge of an adjacent golf course.
This is when I started to laugh at what apparently happened.
A hedge separates the course from the training facilities but, rather than try to hide in the bushes, the not-so-secret agent stood at the top of a hillock with a mobile phone, recording footage. Which made me think of a word that rhymes with hillock (and it’s not Willock).
When he aroused suspicion and was approached, the less-than-secret agent deleted his material, hurried back to the golf club, changed his clothes and disappeared.
The farcical episode prompted Middlesbrough to contact the English Football League, which on Friday announced in a po-faced statement that the Saints had been charged with a breach of regulations. The matter was being referred to an independent disciplinary commission.
Many reports have referred to a 2019 case in which Leeds United were fined £200,000 for spying on a Derby County training session when Marco Bielsa was in charge at Elland Road.
For me, the alleged subterfuge triggered memories of a classic British comedy film from the 1950s, featuring a young George Cole long before his television success with Minder.
The film was The Belles Of St Trinian’s and it was occasionally shown on Sunday afternoons in the Seventies, as were the other three in the series. They were loosely based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle, who had endured horrors in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He survived to become a distinguished artist with a formidable portfolio of work.
In the film, which starred Alastair Sim in the dual roles of the headmistress and her dodgy brother, Cole is Flash Harry Edwards, a shady character who helps the belles with various activities, such as selling their illegally distilled gin and placing bets on horse races.
The script centres on the fate of a big-race favourite and a massive gamble placed on the thoroughbred. In scene after scene, Flash Harry emerges from the bushes to propel the plot towards its inevitable happy conclusion.
When he falls into cahoots with the headmistress, she urges caution: “Try not to be too conspicuous.”
To which Harry the spiv replies: “Conspicuous? Me? Lady, I’m the invisible man.”
If only the pillock on the hillock had followed such advice . . .
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