“I would like to apologise to all connected with St Albans City FC,” said striker John Frendo last October, after a Herts Advertiser article had alleged (correctly – as it turned out) that, rather than face Concord Rangers in the FA Cup fourth qualifying round, he had flown to Spain to attend El Clásico at the Bernabéu. As he watched Pepe, Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema steer Real Madrid to victory, his Hertfordshire team-mates lost 1-0, missing out on £12,000 in prize money and a first round tie against Mansfield. Adopting the air of a naughty schoolboy caught bunking off a lesson, the prolific striker insisted: “I won’t do it again.”

Frendo is not the first footballer to be caught playing hooky from a match and reneging on responsibilities to their clubs. The reasons why players have gone AWOL often reflect the nature of the times. Wayward Brazil striker Adriano’s failure to return to Milan on time in 2009 was a show of dissent aimed at his club Internazionale, who had refused him time off at home after a friendly against Peru.



Eventually he resurfaced, having missed his team’s clash with Udinese, but only after incriminating pictures emerged of him flashing gang signs and posing with a gun with associates in Brazil. “He uses it for paintball,” insisted his spokesman. In grandiose style, Adriano suggested that his desire to spend more time in Brazil “is symptomatic of the plight of the modern player who works abroad and misses those closest to him”. His homesickness didn’t last long, as he returned to his beloved Flamengo a few months later.

Closer to home, Stephen Ireland finally came clean and admitted to having missed the Republic of Ireland’s 2007 defeat in the Czech Republic because he was visiting his girlfriend in Cork. This was only after both his grandmothers had been shocked to read of their deaths. Ireland had blamed his absence on the passing of one, then the other, before the press established that both were in fact still alive. “A few years ago, the story would be old news quite quickly, but in the modern age, I imagine that it will be recycled quite regularly,” he predicted, accurately.

Then there is the case of Malaysian forward Hasmawi Hassan. After jilting his bride in 2004 via a last-minute text message, and leaving her to face 1,000 guests at their wedding reception alone, he refused to attend training at his club, Kedah, and eventually missed three matches. Condemned by his state football association for “tarnishing the image of the game in this country”, Hassan returned to his club and was eventually forgiven by team-mates, but not the media. A decade later, Hassan is still rueful: “I have never been allowed to forget what happened. It’s like my dirty laundry is always being aired.”

The first British player to cite media intrusion and personal problems as reasons for missing matches was George Best, who resented the increased spotlight on his private life by the late 1960s. In 1969, Best refused to travel with his team-mates for a match against Chelsea, preferring instead to go to Islington and spend the weekend in the flat of actress Sinead Cusack. With photographers camped outside, he watched TV images of the actress’s flat, inside the flat on TV. “Even by my standards, it was a weird evening,” admitted Best, who claimed to be “living goldfish bowl by then”.

Members of the press gather outside a flat on Noel Road, Islington, in an attempt to photograph George Best and Sinead Cusack. Photograph: Ron Stilling/Associated News/REX

Back in football’s distant past, there were occasionally more uplifting reasons for players absenting themselves from games. In October 1936, a number of non-League clubs in the north-east reported that players had gone AWOL because they were marching in solidarity with the Jarrow crusaders. Seven years earlier, Leeds United’s Wilf Copping incurred the wrath of his manager when he decided to miss a first-team game in order to complete a shift in the Middlecliffe coal mine where a flu bug had laid low several of his former work-mates.

In the late 1960s, Cagliari’s central defender Comunardo Niccolai – who had been named after the Paris Communards by his leftist parents – disappeared to Rome on the eve of a home match because, as he later explained: “I wanted to demonstrate and march on the streets of the capital with other Italians to show my solidarity with the world’s poor.”

Such nobility is extremely rare in the cases of disappearing footballers. Luton Town’s Graham French vanished into thin air in 1970 just as the Hatters were about to set off for an away game after he had discovered that police wanted to speak with him in connection with firearms offences. He was eventually apprehended in nearby Bedford and jailed for three years. Luton’s manager, the famously loquacious Alec Stock, reacted wearily: “Until footballers are born with brains in their heads rather than their boots, they’ll always do bloody silly things and try and run away from responsibility.” Forty-five years later, it seems that little has changed.

• This article appeared first in When Saturday Comes

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