Sampson was thrown under bus by bosses

DAN ASHWORTH was supremely confident about his entitlement to act as both witness and judge on the inquiry into Eniola Aluko’s complaints about England women’s manager Mark Sampson. ‘I’m a man of high values and morals, of professional integrity,’ the FA technical director told barrister Katharine Newton during her first investigation into the Aluko case, revealed by Sportsmail today. ‘My integrity, values, professional standing would mean I can separate my personal views from my professional role.’ The words of Ashworth (below) sum up that self-assurance that seems to take over people when they rise to high office at the FA. However, you can almost feel Aluko’s burning indignation rising from the pages of Newton’s report at the sense that she is being ignored. The FA’s apparent indifference perhaps explains why exchanges between Aluko and Sampson which seemingly had no significance at the time would form part of a dossier of grievances by November last year. The escalating charge sheet fed the notion that the manager was a bullying aggressor and the striker a victim, though the first Newton report challenges and deconstructs that narrative. The picture of Sampson is nuanced and — it must be said — positive. The FA clearly had all the witnesses they needed to provide a rebuttal to Aluko’s complaints, if their governance had been up to the job. Instead, he became the fall guy — sacked in September after an increasingly besieged FA conveniently discovered a four-year-old report into ‘inappropriate relationships’ Sampson had with players while in charge at Bristol Academy. A safeguarding report at the time concluded he was not a risk. His six-month relationship with a player who had not appeared in the first team was consensual. But FA chief executive Martin Glenn found this was not in keeping with his organisation’s new standards. It is in the small details of Newton’s report that you find the modernity Sampson brought to an England team ranked 13th in the world when he took over. He was a 31-year-old with only three years’ management, and the closest to criticism of Sampson in Newton’s first inquiry is a perceived lack of transparency about who will be selected and dropped. Aluko’s response to non-selection was nowhere near so sanguine. Everything changed when Sampson left her out of the team after the 2015 World Cup. She kicked back very hard. But the failure to address each of the eight original complaints saw the grievances multiply. A month after Aluko was told there was no case for Sampson to answer, the number had risen to 20. It went virtually unnoticed that England last week were named as No 1 in UEFA’s new rankings for the first time. Several of Sampson’s players indicated this was due in no small part to the ex-manager’s work. The FA said nothing of the sort, of course. Ashworth also told Newton that, in 20 years’ experience of professional football, he’d found few environments better than Sampson’s. But like so much else, the self-assured FA chose to keep that detail unpublished, leaving Sampson to disappear under a bus.