‘A lonely existence’: Ivan Toney walks well-worn path as he returns from ban

Over the years players in England have received lengthy, months-long bans for a surprising array of offences. For failing and missing drug tests, for betting and biting and fighting, for asking to move clubs, not asking before moving clubs and refusing to play for existing clubs, for abusing the referee, assaulting the referee and ignoring the referee, for committing violence and glorifying it (though it summed up Vinnie Jones’s career that even his four-month ban, for delivering a how-to guide to getting away with harming opponents, was suspended), for stamping and elbowing and flying kung-fu kicking. The path Ivan Toney has followed these past eight months is well-travelled.

Four goals, including a hat-trick against Southampton’s Under-23s, in two warmup games suggest that he will return with a finisher’s touch undimmed, but it is clear this has been a difficult journey. “There was a stage where I fell out of love with football a bit,” he said last week. “Football’s all that I know really, it’s what I’m used to. Missing the game for a while and not being around my teammates was tough.”

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For Danny Cadamarteri, who got a six-month ban in 2006 after testing positive for the ephedrine contained in the flu medicine Night Nurse, this sounded very familiar. “When you’ve been in football from a young age, you’re institutionalised,” he says. “Your habits, the banter, the camaraderie – your routine is the same day in and day out and then you’re not around the same group of people and it’s a bit of a shell-shock. It’s a lonely place, if I’m honest. You become isolated. A marathon runner might be used to training on their own and occupying themselves mentally, but a footballer is used to being in a dressing room with their mates. When you take that away it’s a lonely existence.”

Paddy Kenny, then at Sheffield United, was banned for nine months in September 2009, also after testing positive for ephedrine. “Training on your own is very, very hard mentally,” he says. “I had it for more than seven months, training on my own. It was difficult just filling my time. It’s something you’ve done for however many years, it’s your job, your routine, and all of a sudden it’s snatched away. Saturday afternoons were the worst for me, looking at the results. You do try not to think about the games – you’re not out there with your team and you do distance yourself from it.”

Maintaining your fitness when you are not allowed to so much as set foot on your club’s training ground is another challenge. Charlie Mitten, the Manchester United winger banned for six months in 1951 after returning to England from an unsanctioned spell in Colombia, ended up turning out for a Salford pub, the Spinners Arms, in a Sunday League game away at the Papermakers Hotel in Lower Broughton. “The really hard part was not being able to play in a competitive game,” he said. “I’d been keeping myself fit in the local park, but match practice is absolutely vital and this seemed the only way.”

Cadamarteri had to find new ways to motivate himself for solo sessions. “I’m a competitive person, and every day you’re striving to do better than your teammates,” he says. “Then suddenly, who’s pushing you on, who’s your motivator, who are you competing with? How do you push yourself? But I was just that eager to hit the ground running and get back to what I loved doing and had missed out on doing.”

Toney returned to training with Brentford in mid-September, embarking on a 16-week training programme that ended with his two B-team outings. Kenny, by contrast, had just six weeks to get match-ready after being allowed back into Bramall Lane. “Those six weeks when I did come back to training, it was a tough six weeks for me. I had to graft to get fit,” he says.

“My first game back, you’re asking yourself: ‘How are you going to be? Are you going to be ready for it?’ You don’t know how your time out of the game might have affected you mentally. But in the first couple of minutes I had a through-ball and if I hadn’t been on the front foot and ready to come for it the lad would have been in. I knew from then I was bang ready for it.”

Kenny’s ban expired in April 2010, allowing him to come back for the last two games of Sheffield United’s season. He kept two clean sheets and was named man of the match in the first.

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Kenny, like Toney, returned to the familiar environment of a club he joined several years ago. Cadamarteri was released by Bradford City during his ban and, after it expired, played two games for Grays Athletic in what would now be the National League before being signed by Leicester. “It was easier for me in a way because I wasn’t going into an existing dressing room, I was going in for a new start,” he says.

“Those two games for Grays were really beneficial for me, to get my touch and my gamecraft back and get that burn in my lungs after a time out. You can run as much as you like but it’s not the same as the stop-start physicality of the game itself. Those two games allowed me to hit the ground running when I got to Leicester.”

Toney is unlikely to lack motivation. “I hated the FA, I hated all the people who smiled at me but then banned me,” Rio Ferdinand, banned for eight months in 2003 for missing a drug test, said in 2022. “I used all of that, hate and bitterness, reading all them articles and people saying: ‘He’s the drug cheat, he’s not going to come back the same.’ And when I trained, I visualised all them people. I don’t think I ever trained as hard and as frequent as I did in that period when I was banned.”