“THEN BARRY FRY SAID...”

Posh prepared Paul Ashworth for plenty – but Kazakhstan and kidnappings?

Youth-team coach at Peterborough, held to ransom in Nigeria and chief executive of the biggest club in Kazakhstan... life is never boring for Paul Ashworth (above), who was once called the Latvian Mourinho – and he isn’t even Latvian.

While Dan Ashworth was formerly FA director of elite development and is now technical director at Brighton, his older brother’s career has been less conventional.

Paul must have known that he wasn’t in for a normal career when his first taste of coaching was under Barry Fry. “If you went out with him, he could entertain you for hours,” Ashworth tells FFT. “Him picking my team when I was head coach didn’t go down well, though.”

To escape Fry (below), Ashworth took advice from former Bristol City manager Gary Johnson and headed for Latvia, initially with Ventspils.

He even earned a comparison with Jose Mourinho. “I was only 31 and my captain was 33, but I was received really well,” he says. “The Mourinho thing was one article, but it stuck. Unfortunately, it was less about my ability; more the fact that I didn’t have much of a playing career – like Jose.”

Ashworth went to Russia as Rostov’s sporting director, then became the league’s first ever English manager. A tiff with the club president meant he lasted two games.

Yet his life was about to get even crazier. After a spell leading Nigeria’s biggest footballing academy, he took over at Nigerian Premier League outfit Sunshine Stars. “I ended up being general manager in charge of 265 people – they worked me like a horse,” Ashworth tells FFT. “We’d drive for 12 hours to away matches, with no air conditioning. Everywhere we went, we had guards with AK47S. It’s a dangerous place – I was lucky that nothing ever happened to me in four and a half years. Well, apart from being held to ransom on the pitch.” Sorry, what?

“We were training. The government-funded workers in the stadium protested that they hadn’t been paid, shut the ground and threatened us with baseball bats, insisting we couldn’t leave the pitch until they were paid. The mayor sorted it, eventually. The next day we saw them and laughed it all off. I said, ‘It’s my turn to kidnap you!’” Then it was off to European football’s final frontier, as the chief executive of Astana in Kazakhstan. “When it’s windy, you feel like you’re going to die,” Ashworth says of the piercing winter temperatures. “It’s the best city I’ve lived in, though. Dan came to see me out here and loved it. “He reckons he fancies a stint abroad, but whether he would come somewhere like this is another question.” Quite. Pete Hall