The Great Football Ban-tastrophe…
Once upon a football pitch, there was Enoch West, a Red Devil goal machine with the fierceness of a greased lightning bolt. But alas, his career took a nosedive deeper than a winger in the penalty box during the grand match-fixing scandal of 1915! The man with a boot for scoring had his candle snuffed out for a whopping 30 years — that’s enough time to grow a forest of football boots.
But Enoch isn’t the only athlete who made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Enter Lou Vincent, the cricketer with a bat and a heavy secret—a sport-shaming concoction so spicy even a pepper couldn’t compete. Banned for life in 2014, Vincent swapped the pitch for a hard hat and hammer in Raglan. Yet, in 2023, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of an appeal, he returned to the cricket scene, though international matches went running scared.
Meanwhile, over in the land of two wheels, Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France wins vanished faster than an invisible ball during a magician’s penalty trick. USADA didn’t just ban him — they made his titles disappear Houdini-style! And there was also Ben Johnson, whose steroid-fueled sprints left him with a ban than ran longer than his races. Match-fixing cricket captains and snooker sharks followed suit, leaving a trail of bans longer than a striker’s goal gloves. It’s a merry-go-round of sporting suspensions!
