Last updated at 11:08, Saturday, 06 March 2010

It’s notable that Warren Aspinall chose to end it all on a train track, because with its junctions, red lights and rattling speed the railway has enough metaphors to fill an entire sporting life.

Mercifully, the sound of a train driver’s horn came in time for Aspinall to leap away from the demise he had planned for himself after he torched £1 million on alcohol and gambling, his addictions of choice.

Yes, choice. Nobody put Aspinall, the former Carlisle United midfielder, in handcuffs and led him to a bookmaker’s for the first time. Nobody strapped him into a dentist’s chair and kept forcing liquor down his throat.

There is a civilised and accurate need to assess addiction as illness. At its darkest depths that unquestionably applies. But what Aspinall was doing on our television screens this week was reclaiming responsibility for his own plight, which led to his aborted suicide bid in December 2007. The warning flags he raised ought to be visible across football.

Known as “Sumo” for his Sunday League physique during his Brunton Park days, it is a much bigger man who will submit himself to a Sky Sports interview and say things like: “I was consistently telling lies, being deceitful to people.

“I had lost money and promised my fiancee I would never do it again, but I did. I thought nobody loved me. That’s why I took that stroll down to the train track.”

Aspinall’s errors were to presume the party would never stop, and to bear a couple of personal vices that are rarely compatible with a smooth existence in a short football career.

Let’s accept that some of us conspired in that. We hoisted him into the pantheon and burnished his ego. His liking for a pint and a scrape, well-known in these parts and others, were extra layers to add onto his “cult status”, that strangely unspecific term which tends to obscure flaws of varying seriousness.

Sometimes it can cover up something trivial, like a skill deficiency. At its worst it can mask the most perilous of character traits.

Hindsight now tells us we were, with Aspinall’s consent, simply building the most fragile of walls between the man and reality. The bricks fell away upon his retirement through injury in 2000 and exposed the ex-Portsmouth and Aston Villa player to the very worst of himself.

Hear this, from his tearful interview: “I never thought it would end. People kept saying to me, ‘Are you putting money away for your retirement? You should put more money into your pension.’

“My dad would say, ‘Give money to me and I’ll put it aside for you’. I would say, ‘I’m OK dad, there’s no problem.’ I had two record signings in my career, and now, really, I’ve got nothing.”

Aspinall, now 42, jumped off that track three years ago towards the hardest reckoning. Redemption came with the help of the Professional Footballers’ Association and the Sporting Chance clinic, but the point of his televised confession this week was not to speak about his climb back to stability – he now works in a distribution centre and scouts for Brighton & Hove Albion – but to talk about the junctions he missed and the red lights he skipped.

“I thought I had a lot of friends. but they weren’t,” he said. “They were acquaintances. Because when I came to needing help, there weren’t many there to help me. So to other footballers I would like to say – beware of those people.”

Now, this column isn’t normally one for loose speculation, but Aspinall’s haunting words got me thinking. Imagine there was a player on Brunton Park’s books currently, one who was not averse to one or two of the vices that so nearly brought “Sumo” down.

Let us suppose that such a player had reached a junction in his own career, seemingly oblivious to the old truth that the good times are more precarious than they seem. That damaging mishaps do not follow you around by chance, but are drawn towards you by decisions you make yourself.

That certain “friends” quickly scatter when the party ends – something that can happen more abruptly than you might think. And that you can very swiftly be left with much less than you once thought.

It’s a bunch of lessons Warren Aspinall absorbed to his wretched cost, and has now shared, to his considerable credit. In so doing he has served his profession in a more meaningful way than through anything he achieved with a football at his feet.

You watched him prostrate himself before Sky’s cameras and wished hard that the footage would find its way into certain dressing rooms, and to the home of a flawed footballer in these particular parts, should one spring to mind.

First published at 09:04, Saturday, 06 March 2010
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk