The England striker whose career was stolen by a training ground tackle
FootballDean Ashton's story is one of the saddest in modern English football. A young England centre forward with the touch, power and composure to be a fixture in the national team for a decade, gone by the age of 26 because of an injury suffered in an England training session.
Born in Crewe in 1983, Ashton came through the Crewe Alexandra academy under Dario Gradi, a finishing school that produced a generation of technically gifted English players. He scored 66 goals in 151 games for Crewe, earned a move to Norwich City in 2005, and within a year was the most talked about English striker in the country.
West Ham paid a club record fee to take him to Upton Park in January 2006, and he repaid them immediately. His header past Shay Given in the 2006 FA Cup Final took the game to penalties, a performance that put him straight into Sven-Goran Eriksson's thinking. A broken ankle on his first day of England training in August 2006 began the long slide that ended his career. He made a single England appearance in 2008 before ultimately retiring in 2009.
Since then he has rebuilt, working as a pundit on BBC and BT Sport, studying food and wine, and founding his own cookery school. He talks about the injury with the kind of honesty that only time gives you, and he is one of the most thoughtful voices in the game on the human side of a football career that ended too early.
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