Ian Ashbee has been voted the British Football Personality of the Year by Mail on Sunday readers, trousering 44% of the vote and seeing off the likes of Ryan Giggs and Steven Gerrard.
Now, it's hard to not be a little cynical about this. Firstly, newspaper polls are patently unrepresentative of national thinking; they are only representative of the readership's thinking. And, as we know, most newspapers are only interested in targetting one section of society when positioning itself.
Secondly, the poll was the brainchild of Piers Morgan, as vacuous, clueless and self-opinionated a journalist as this country has ever produced.
Thirdly, it is almost certain that Hull City fans have picked up on this and, enjoying the limelight for their club after decades of being a footballing turd, have block voted. Evidence of such appeals for votes can be found on a couple of fan websites. My suspicion is that only a small percentage of Ashbee's backers have voted for him for the good of football rather than the image of Hull City.
Fourthly, Ashbee is cast by Morgan as somehow more relevant, more representative, of Hull City's rise from the earth's core to the sunshine, than anyone else. Well, his bit of history-making as far as captaincy is concerned is, of course, something nobody within the KC or beyond can take from him. If he ever gets a Premier League goal he'll add to that a record of scoring for the same club in four divisions, something that Andy Dawson (scored in th Championship and League Two, but never in League One) and Boaz Myhill (uh, he's a goalkeeper) can't equal, even though they too have partaken in games in all four divisions for the Tigers. Ryan France can do it, but he needs to be picked for a game first, and that is looking ever more unlikely. For all Ashbee's specific statistical achievement, the rise to the top flight was very much a staff, team and squad effort, from Phil Brown's ruthless brand of man-management, Brian Horton's wizened prompting and the likes of Myhill, Dawson, Sam Ricketts and Michael Turner all extolling what Hull City can be and have a right to become. Ashbee, even at his snarling best last season, has never been greater than the sum of parts of which successful Tigers teams under Brown and Peter Taylor have comprised.
But apart from all that, well done Ash...
By the way, Morgan has used the result to contrast Ashbee's life and career with that of David Beckham, giving the latter an unoriginal and needless bashing in the process. So despite Ashbee's success, he still can't quite get the limelight which this poll result says he deserves. I doubt he's bothered. I doubt he'll even buy the paper.
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