It is almost a rite of passage that demarks
virtually every season. Some people don’t feel that the campaign has truly
started until it happens, others can’t settle into their football until it is confirmed, most just think that it is
as annoyingly inevitable as it is avoidable and would be considerably more excusable if it was achieved in furthering the
cause of the team rather than just as a result of anti-officialdom invective that never gets anyone anywhere. But it always happens and, true to form, Frank Ashworth’s latest suspension was confirmed in a letter
from the Northern Senior League during the course of the last week.
Now, call us paranoid conspiracy
theorists but the fact that this latest spell on the sidelines coincides exactly with the date on which one of Star FC’s
most celebrated twenty-somethings moves effortlessly into his mid thirties seems, to us here at ASIB on the WEB, to smack
of forward planning. Those of us old enough to remember (which narrows down the
field quite a bit, it has to be admitted) can recall that it was quite common, in the late sixties and into the seventies,
for even major celebrities within the professional game to just “happen” to accumulate enough bookings by the
middle of December to ensure that they were suspended over Christmas. This was
quite handy and meant that they could indulge themselves fully rather than remain peripheral and abstemious during the gorging
season.
So you can see why we would
be suspicious of the motives of Mr Ashworth, a serial pub goer and someone who has gone on record with his beliefs that Saturday’s
were invented for spending all day in the boozer, when we learnt that the very day of his one match ban would be February
9th, his birthday! When questioned specifically about this issue,
Frank smiled broadly, made a half hearted attempt to get himself a game for the Reserves and then claimed that he was nowhere
near clever enough to be able to do such a thing on purpose.
And it was at this point
that we felt compelled to agree with him
