By Andrew Warshaw
May 14 – It isn’t every day that a club in the eighth tier of its country’s football pyramid makes national headlines. But such is the gross injustice meted out to tiny Enfield Town in England’s Ryman Premier League that the club received nationwide support in their fight to avoid being sanctioned by the English FA for no other reason than showing integrity and good governance.
England’s first supporter-owned club, Enfield have just discovered, after two delays, that they have lost their appeal against an FA ruling which prevented them from taking part in the end-of-season playoffs, wrecking an entire season.
Enfield had reached the play-offs by finishing fifth in their league, only to find themselves docked three points for fielding an ineligible player, Aryan Tajbakhsh, earlier in the season when he was due to serve a suspension immediately after joining them.
The suspension was missed by Enfield because documents submitted by his previous clubs were erroneous in terms of the number of bookings he had accrued, and because of the FA’s own misleading records.
Enfield’s case, supported by a leading QC, centred on the fact that the player’s previous clubs were responsible for the discrepancy; that Enfield themselves contacted the FA as soon as they realised the mistake; that the player was suspended for the requisite two games once the error became known; and that an FA employee had promised Enfield in writing that “no further action” would be taken against the club several months ago.
All this, however, was thrown out by a three-man FA commission as the club were punished according to the letter of the law despite flagging up the FA’s own record-keeping flaws .
“We feel we have been very unfairly dealt with, we’ve identified the failings within the FA, we were informed there would be no action taken but we now end up having missed out on the play-offs and feel very, very disappointed,” said Enfield vice-chairman Paul Millington.
“The initial advice to us was to leave the player out for two games which we did so we feel he served his suspension. The FA some months later decided to charge us and as a consequence of the charge the Ryman League have to deduct points in any of the games that he played whilst he should have been suspended. Again a very unfair system we believe.”
“The FA’s system is not fit for purpose. We have been punished for being honest and it’s not a situation we expected to be in. We’ve had hundreds of messages of support and can now only publicise the unfairness of it all and emphasise the inadequacies of the FA’s system.”
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