The FA is "giving serious consideration to launching a new investigation" into the England women's national team Manager Mark Sampson affair after Drew Spence, the first player to allege Sampson made a racist remark, "came forward for the first time" to tell the governing body what Eni Aluko said about Sampson "was true," according to Daniel Taylor of the London GUARDIAN. In a "key development to a controversy that is threatening to go to the top of the FA," Spence has reportedly given a written statement to the organization alleging that on her first England call-up, at the China Cup in Oct. '15, "she was left upset and offended by Sampson asking her, a mixed-race player, how many times she had been arrested." Spence also had a private meeting with senior FA officials to give her version of events and is understood to have "expressed surprise" that the two inquiries which cleared Sampson of any wrongdoing "did not think it necessary to speak to her." Spence's decision to back Aluko leaves the FA "under mounting pressure to abandon its previous stance that the issue was finished" at a time when the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee is preparing to summon senior FA execs "to explain the holes in the process" (GUARDIAN, 9/14).
