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Ched Evans is set to feature in Preston’s FA Cup quarter-final tie with Aston Villa which takes place nine years after his successful appeal and retrial (left)
A decade ago he was the footballing rapist freed from jail over a case as heinous as any to hit the English game. On Sunday, nine years after that conviction was overturned, he could play a part in Preston North End’s most glamorous game in modern times.
The public outcry has died down but it will not be lost on Ched Evans quite how unlikely this shot at glory once seemed. He runs out in front of BBC One cameras that previously captured him as the lead item on news bulletins. But at 36, an against-the-odds career highlight beckons, with Aston Villa standing in the way of a potential FA Cup semi-final.
Evans, his body slowing as he fends off retirement, is likely to be restricted to a reduced role as an impact substitute, but this FA Cup tie is nevertheless a taste of what might have been.
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Ched Evans joined Preston in 2021 from Fleetwood and has won over many of the critics who opposed his signing - Stu Forster/Getty Images
He has come back from a debilitating neck condition and there have been extended stints on the sidelines in recent years but that is not why this striker never quite delivered on the heights that were anticipated as a youngster at Manchester City. It is instead the boos and jeers he still faces from opposition fans that remind him why opportunities such as Sunday have been so scant.
There are many outside football – including some figures now in government – who still believe it is an abject failure of the footballing authorities that Evans was ever able to resume his professional career.
So much has changed over the past nine years, but the sport still regularly encounters moral dilemmas when its high-profile role models are accused of sex crimes. In recent years, similar debates have raged around whether Mason Greenwood and Benjamin Mendy should have been allowed to carry on after rape cases against them fell away. In the Premier League today, a player still features for his club week in, week out while the Crown Prosecution Service considers multiple charges against him.
Evans’ rape trial, appeal and retrial
Evans had his public image battered almost beyond repair despite being cleared in 2016 of raping a 19-year-old woman in a hotel room five years earlier. The acquittal came after a lengthy appeals process which still alarms victim rights groups.
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Evans was convicted of rape in 2012 and jailed for five years but his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in April 2016 and he was found not guilty at the retrial later that year - PA/North Wales Police
His actions on the night in question have been found lawful but they were nevertheless obscene. The woman told the jury she woke up naked in a hotel room in Rhyl, North Wales, in May 2011 with no memory of what had happened but fearing that her drinks had been spiked.
After friends encouraged her to go to the police, officers discovered the room in which she woke up had been booked and paid for by Evans, who said that he and his friend and fellow footballer Clayton McDonald had consensual sex with the woman. In court, Evans repeatedly admitted that he lied to get the key for the hotel room and did not speak to the woman before, during or after sex. He left via a fire exit and it also emerged that Evans’s younger brother and another man were trying to film what was happening from outside the room.
Campaign against precedent set by case
What sticks most painfully in the craw of women’s campaign groups is the means by which his initial rape conviction was overturned. His legal team had found two witnesses who gave testimony about the complainant’s sexual preferences and the language she used during sex. A prior appeal-court decision to allow the jury to hear the evidence, and subsequently question the complainant in detail in open court about intimate details of her sex life, set a precedent with which case lawyers are still grappling today.
Among those leading calls for the Attorney General to take action at the time to tighten the law was the Labour MP Jess Phillips. It can be safely assumed that Phillips, now a Home Office minister, will be cheering on her home-town club Villa today. Her husband’s cousin, coincidentally, is the former Aston Villa striker Kevin Phillips.
Other campaigners standing alongside Phillips in 2016 readily express disgust at Evans’s redemption in the game while sex assault victims continue to pay the price for the precedent his case had set.
“The Evans appeal allowed irrelevant evidence of sexual history with men other than the accused,” says Lisa Longstaff, of Women Against Rape (WAR) which led protests at the time. “WAR has campaigned for years for such evidence to be banned in law so the victim’s character and past are not on trial. The current restrictions to sexual history evidence are not enough.”
Harriet Wistrich, the renowned human rights solicitor and founder of the Centre for Women’s Justice, also reflected on a lack of progress since the case. “It is difficult to say things are any better than they were then,” she said. “Some improvements but other steps back,” Wistrich added.
How Evans returned to football
During that same period, life has been relatively smooth for Evans after a bumpy start. The mood was febrile when it was announced after his release from jail that he would resume training with Sheffield United, who had released him after his initial conviction. Various club patrons resigned and the Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill stated she would want her name removed from a stand at Bramall Lane if he was offered a new deal. Hartlepool, Grimsby and Hibernian also mooted deals.
But after the conviction was quashed, Evans was able to get his career back on its feet quickly. He initially signed a one-year deal at Chesterfield, then in League One, and hit a rich vein of scoring form during early appearances. A short-lived and unsuccessful return to United followed in 2017 before he joined League One Fleetwood Town the following year.
Following a debut goal for Fleetwood, he left the pitch to a standing ovation but following a fall-out with then manager Joey Barton, he eventually pitched up at Preston, where once again fans would take convincing. In a fan forum poll of 500 supporters in January 2021, 87 per cent declared him unwelcome.
Regulars on the terraces at Deepdale and club executives have since been won over, however, by Evans’s determination to redeem himself over the past four years. A magnificent left-footed volley against Millwall in his ninth Championship game for the club helped his cause. There were also several man-of-the-match displays the following campaign in which he was the club’s top scorer with nine goals.
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Some strong performances on the pitch helped Evans become accepted at Preston - Bryn Lennon/Getty Images
That season ended with a career-threatening medical condition relating to his neck and spine. But once again he confounded expectations and forced his way back to fitness six months later. The manager at the time, Ryan Lowe, spoke of the regard with which he is held at the club and said he was “absolutely over the moon for him, his family and for us as a club” as Evans returned to action. “It was a bit emotional when we got the news; I actually rang him and started singing his name down the phone.”
Over the summer, there was more praise for the Welshman as he was handed a player-coach deal. This season a knee injury ruled him out until late January. He has since made substitute appearances but is yet to regain a starting place. However, life is good for Evans, a popular member of the squad who is now married to Natasha Massey, the woman who stood by him throughout.
She gave a rare interview to The Telegraph in 2016 in a bid to explain why she had stuck with Evans. “It wasn’t the rape allegation,” Natasha recalls. “It was personal. It was the fact Ched had cheated on me, he’d ruined the trust that we had. I trusted him with my life.” But not for a second, she says, did she ever think that Ched had actually raped someone. “He couldn’t. I mean the only people who think Ched is a rapist are people who haven’t met him. He’s a big softie.”
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Evans’ fiancée Natasha Massey stood by him throughout the trials process and the couple were married in 2022 - The Telegraph/Nick Edwards
Team-mates and staff alike at Preston also clearly believe the man now so respected in the changing room could never be capable of such a crime.
Others who studied the case carefully, however, maintain that regardless of the court’s verdict, the saga remains one of football’s bleakest episodes. “At some point the outrage becomes white noise to the public,” says Jamie Klingler, of Reclaim These Streets.
In the fickle world of football, that noise is drowned out like nowhere else.
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