Tonda Eckert's apology and owner's backing are more grim chapters in Spygate - he has to go

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From a chair in what looks like a golf clubhouse, Dragan Solak delivers a three-minute monologue that must go down as one of the most ill-considered from an owner in recent times. I have watched it so you don’t have to.

In his address , Solak talks about ‘responsibility’ and ‘credibility’. He then destroys Southampton’s credibility by lauding the manager who oversaw a programme of cheating that cost Solak’s club the chance of a place in the Premier League.

When he speaks about Tonda Eckert, he associates him with words such as ‘remarkable’ and ‘success’, and says he believes Eckert ‘is the man to take us forward’. It almost defies belief.

Solak also refers to ‘closing chapters’. How can you possibly close chapters when the person at the head of the whole sorry Spygate scandal is still there?

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Yes, in life, everyone deserves second chances. Everyone makes mistakes. But Eckert’s second chance simply must come at somewhere other than Southampton. For the good of all parties.

Eckert himself has issued an apology that goes on forever. Remarkably, he tries to explain his actions by saying they are the norm in other countries.

“We … wanted to find out if Middlesbrough would play with Hayden Hackney and if he would be back for the game,” Eckert said. “We had decided on Monday to send somebody to observe a training session and find out if he would be available for the game or not.”

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In what world can a football manager think that is a perfectly acceptable thing to do? Eckert talks about giving ‘honesty’ and ‘clarity’ - two things that were completely absent from the whole affair.

He talks about the practice of looking at opponents’ training sessions being commonplace in Italy. Well, they have been known to bribe referees in Italy - that does not make it is acceptable to give bungs to officials in English football.

“There are different rules in England,” said Eckert in his statement of apology. “There are different rules from the EFL. And I should have known them.”

Is Eckert seriously asking everyone to believe he thought surreptitiously filming an opponent’s training session from behind a tree was within the rules? And if, incredibly, he did not know the rules, everyone else at the club did. But really, to be asked to seriously consider the possibility that Eckert thought his staff were doing no wrong is utterly risible.

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Again, everyone deserves a second chance. And as grim - oh, and amateurish - as these offences were, they were not heinous enough to deal Eckert’s managerial career a fatal blow.

But he should have sat down with the club’s owner and the pair should have realised that the way ‘to put the whole situation behind us’ - as Solak says in his speech - is for the man ultimately responsible for the scandal to leave the club. And when the Football Association completes its investigation and gives its punishment to Eckert - which it will surely do - that shoud still be the case.