When the television cameras zoomed in for a closeup it became clear Hayden Hackney was crying.
Middlesbrough’s best player had just watched his teammates lose the second leg of the Championship playoff semi-final 2-1 in extra time at Southampton. As he left his seat behind the away dugout and wandered across the pitch, the Redcar-born midfield playmaker looked utterly heartbroken.
Little did Hackney know that the images captured by another camera lens a few days earlier would ultimately ensure that late on Friday afternoon he and the rest of Kim Hellberg’s squad were pictured enjoying a guided tour of Wembley before Saturday’s final against Hull.
On Saturday the Championship’s player of the season is expected to make his first appearance since sustaining a calf injury in March. “Hayden’s ready for Wembley,” said Hellberg on Thursday. “It’s still a question of how ready but he’s part of our attempt to solve the puzzle set by Hull.”
Tonda Eckert, Southampton’s manager, was so worried about Boro’s midfield mastermind making a comeback in the first leg of the semi-final at the Riverside that he dispatched an intern analyst to film one of Hellberg’s pre-match training sessions on his phone. The mission’s main aim was to assess Hackney’s availability.
Unfortunately for the intern William Salt, a freelance photographer on assignment with Boro happened to train his lens on the precise spot between a tree and a bush where Salt – later revealed to have been placed under immense pressure to breach English Football League regulations – had forlornly attempted to conceal himself. Shortly afterwards Middlesbrough submitted a formal complaint to the EFL and “spygate” began gaining rapid traction in the national news agenda.
Early on Tuesday evening a disciplinary commission expelled Southampton from the playoffs and docked them four points for next season. A little over 24 hours later, the south-coast club’s appeal was dismissed.
The verdict has divided opinion but Boro have reason to be grateful to a football obsessive born just up the road in Consett, County Durham for, albeit unwillingly, establishing the precedent that would eventually help Hellberg secure his first trip to Wembley.
In 2024, Bev Priestman, then the highly regarded coach of Canada women, was found to have choreographed a spying operation against New Zealand at the Paris Olympics. Canada were docked six Olympic points and she and two of her staff banned from football for a year by Fifa. Two years, later the EFL disciplinary panel’s judgment was heavily informed by the so called “Canada case”.
As Eckert contemplates a career in apparent tatters, the 33-year-old German can take at least some heart from Priestman’s impressive comeback at New Zealand’s A-League women’s side Wellington Phoenix.
Eckert faces not only the sack at Southampton but a Football Association inquiry into his supervision of espionage against not merely Boro but Oxford and Ipswich, too. A ban may follow.
Such self-destruction has left Hellberg and his Hull counterpart, Sergej Jakirovic, tantalisingly close to fulfilling once unlikely dreams. While Boro’s Swedish manager was a surprise appointment when he swapped Stockholm’s Hammarby for Teesside after Rob Edwards’s defection to Wolves last November, Jakirovic has said that, back in August, finishing “somewhere between 10th and 15th” represented the summit of his ambitions.
It may sound a modest aim but when the former Bosnia defender arrived from Turkey – where his work in charge of Kayserispor caught the eye of Hull’s Istanbul-based owner, Acun Ilicali – he took over a club that avoided relegation to League One on goal difference on the final day of last season.
Moreover, an EFL transfer embargo restricted Jakirovic to recruiting free agents, most notably the striker Oli McBurnie, and loan signings. Hull’s sixth-placed league finish and defeat of Millwall in the playoff semi-final emphasises that Hellberg would be unwise to underestimate the tactical talent of a Mostar-born Jürgen Klopp admirer and gegenpressing disciple.
While Jakirovic has bought 70 Wembley tickets for family and friends from Croatia, Ilicali has spent recent days consulting lawyers who believe Southampton’s expulsion dictates Hull should be awarded automatic promotion and a playoff final, worth at least £205m in additional Premier League revenue to the winner, cancelled. Small wonder Hellberg has struggled with insomnia.
“The head is tired,” admitted the 38-year-old as he discussed a “weird and crazy” fortnight. “There’s been a lot of emotion. I haven’t been able to sleep.”
Hellberg’s initial idea was that Boro would fill the hiatus between the semi-final and the disciplinary commission with work on the practice pitches. “We tried to keep the players here but it’s been impossible to train properly,” he said. “On Tuesday about half the squad did some passing drills and on Wednesday we did some light jogging. We’re preparing hard now but it’s been very difficult.”
Last weekend Hellberg and his family escaped to Stockholm, where the manager watched Hammarby win. “I shouted at the referee from the stands, I spent time with my son, I drank more than one beer,” he reported. “It was nice.”
Fast forward to Wednesday evening and Hellberg was out to dinner at Rockliffe Hall, the luxury hotel adjacent to Boro’s training ground, when the message that he was definitely Wembley bound came through. “It was a very nice meal,” he said, smiling.
Within minutes his players’ WhatsApp group chat “exploded” into life. “It still doesn’t feel quite real,” said the defender Luke Ayling. “Mentally, it’s been hard to stay switched on when you’re not expecting the outcome we had. But now we’re buzzing to get this club back into the Premier League.”
If it is a case of mission accomplished on Saturday night Boro fans should raise a glass to a sharp-eyed photographer and a precedent-setting coach from Consett.
