And Then There Were None

Dean Ashton announced his retirement from professional football today at the age of 26. This had been on the cards for almost five months now and honestly, the only surprise about this announcement is that it has come as such a surprise to so many people.

My first memories of Dean Ashton go back to the 2003-04 season when he was still at Crewe and, though highly rated by everyone, was thought of as no more than another stellar product of Dario Gradi's dynastic production line of cultured footballers who had a shot at a decent professional career once he became too big for Crewe to hold on to.

Right on cue, while I was in mourning over the dramas unfolding at Elland Road, Ashton moved on, fairly unnoticed, to Norwich City and it is here that his flames of his promise (an unfortunate one-word tag that would haunt him as he moved up the footballing ladder over the next three-and-a-half seasons) were actively fanned. This was helped in no small part by the sad fact that the Darren Huckerby's of this world were never going to be long-term goalscoring solutions for the Canaries, as they revved up for an assault on the top-end of the Championship. The fact that Ashton's core strengths were so far removed from the archetypal 'hard-running, working the channels, hustling the back four, more useful playing alone up front away rather than leading the line at home' strikers that populated Norwich's benches and reserves only made his potential path to superstardom more straightforward.

However, in another bit of punditspeak that would chequer his short career, a lot of people didn't understand why Ashton's goalscoring record wasn't that great--indeed, he averaged rather less than a goal every two-and-a-half games throughout his senior career--and said that he needed to score more goals in order to really hit the spotlight as a header-winning, link-up playing front man. There was a blatant double standard in that particular criticism--the same people were fawning over Peter Crouch and, more inexplicably, Emile Heskey, neither of whom fulfilled this strike rate requirement. Cast your mind back to Heskey's famous season at Liverpool where he scored twice in thirty-four appearances and led the line for England no less than six times the same season. Even leaving that aside, Ashton's game was never about being that big frontman whose mere presence on the field would instantly convert the back six into a giant slingshot to lump the ball forwards aerially. I always felt he was one of those excellent footballers who would fit any system and the quality of his overall play was good enough to play him practically anywhere (an opinion a lot of people held of Alan Shearer, another player Ashton was often unfavourably compared with).

Towards the back end of his spell at Norwich, when it was almost certain that West Ham were coming in for him, I remember a weekend of football where he'd created an opportunity out of nothing and scored a ridiculous twenty-five yard goal against Middlesborough at the Riverside and how there was unanimous raving, with everyone who watched that game, curiously, highlighting different strengths about Ashton's game. It was a bit of a shock to me because I hadn't heard such consistently varied opinions about a striker's strengths since the time Sir Alex Ferguson had plucked Dion Dublin out of obscurity. Dublin's Old Trafford career had been finished by a horrific leg fracture against Crystal Palace on the second day of September that season (something that eventually prompted Ferguson to unsuccessfully try for David Hirst, Mick Harford and, famously, for Eric Cantona, who, people forget, he secured for exactly the same money that he paid for Dublin) and from that day on, I constantly feared for something similar happening to Ashton.

Sure enough, his 2006-07 season was finished by the same ankle that has now caused his retirement and, by the time 2007-08 (Ashton's only relatively injury-free season after leaving Gradi and Crewe) was coming around, you had to feel for Alan Curbishley who, with anywhere between nine and thirteen first-teamers perpetually injured, was really running out of options, though the same lack of options would prompt the signing of Newcastle captain Scott Parker and, gee, hasn't that turned out well!

Ashton began the process of repaying seven-and-a-quarter million pounds very faithfully in the league in 2007-08, the inevitable England debut (tragically, also to be his last appearance for England) followed and the feeling that he would make up for lost time was irresistible to most observers, who finally realised that season that Ashton was every bit as good as the hype.

Sadly, that ankle of his was literally being held together by a thread and when Shaun Wright-Phillips mistimed a tackle in England training, Ashton fell in a heap and never, in reality, got back up again. And the tragedy of Dean Ashton is not that a promising career has been cut short or that he will not enter the pantheon of legendary English centre-forwards by becoming the next Alan Shearer or even that he has nothing to do in the immediate future apart from trying to find a bit-part job within or outside football. The tragedy is that he is fine. It's just that if he wants to continue doing what he loves, he's going to risk not being able to walk unassisted when he eventually retires. The same could have happened to Shearer, if that tackle from behind in the preseason game at Goodison Park in July 1997 had been even a second later. But it didn't. And Wright-Phillips' tackle on Ashton did. On such ironies do footballers' careers depend.

Here's wishing Dean Ashton all the best. I can't think of any English footballer in recent times who deserves it more.