Daily Mail reporter Neil Ashton is a man with a mission when it comes to Southampton Football Club and he is once again up to his old tricks.
When former Chairman Nicola Cortese left Southampton Football Club, Neil Ashton at the Daily mail was amongst the first to leap to his defence, claiming that without Cortese Saints were about to go into self destruct mode and insinuating that Katharina Liebherr was only interested in selling the club.
The departure of Pochettino had Ashton salivating at the lips and it seemed that he had the copyright on the word meltdown as he gleefully predicted the departure of each and every one of the Saints first team squad.
Just what Ashton's agenda was anyone could guess, certainly he had been close to Cortese after being invited to see the club at close hand in the summer of 2013, but his loyalty seemed to know no bounds as it seemed to Saints fans at every turn their was a headline from Ashton telling them how the club was about to implode.
Saints fans havent heard too much of Ashton since the end of the transfer window, partly because even he couldn't suggest that Saints would be given dispensation to sell players outside of the window, but mainly because of f our great start to the season he was forced to shut up, but you just knew he wouldn't go away.
Now he is back and breaking the news that Daniel Levy and Spurs will be looking to bring in Saints head of player recruitment Paul Mitchell.
Hinting at insider knowledge that suggests that he is either being briefed by Pochettino or his ex employer, he tells the reader how much Pochettino trusts Mitchell's judgement and how Levy is now determined to revamp the structure at White Hart Lane that even the most fervent Spurs fan admits is over manned and ineffective.
Whether Mitchell would want to go is another matter, of course Spurs will offer him a lot of money but the disarray at Spurs is well known in football and other rumours suggest that the Spurs hierarchy are concerned about Levy's management at the club first and foremost.
That being the case Levy will be keen to tray and publicly be seen to be doing something drastic and for his part the under fire Pochettino will want to try and be seen as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Mitchell himself is undoubtedly an asset to Saints and one that they would not want to lose, he is a big part of Saints success and has been since joining in January 2012 however he is part of a big jigsaw rather than the only piece and from that point of view is replacable, but up until this summer our transfer dealings were patchy although in fairness this could be down to the meddling of our former Chairman and Mitchell will know that at Spurs Levy calls the shots with Spurs fans blaming him for wasting a great deal of money, at Saints Mitchell has a great chance at a club that is well along the road in its development, where at Spurs he will go to one in disarray, by the time he worked his notice at Saints he could find that the man who employed him and indeed his ex Saints colleague might have already have left the club.
So once again enter Neil Ashton to try and spin the rumours against Southampton Football Club, ironically Spurs fans are just as cynical of Ashton as we Saints supporters and they are taking anything written by him with a pinch of salt
During the summer Ashton managed to panic many Saints supporters, but the majority now see through what he was writing and question his agenda, so much so that many question his integrity as a journalist and see him as little more than a puppet for Cortese rightly or wrongly that is their perception, I would not dare to suggest that Ashton is receiving anything other than a pat on the back from his editor for his cutting edge journalism that brings Saints fans stories that they would not otherwise hear, however I bet that most football Chairman wish they had a man like Ashton who has shown such loyalty to someone not even in a job at the moment.