when he said…
Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
Thirty six thousand plus individuals who were stunned into a shocked silence on Saturday night as a young man was helped in his fight for life on the White Hart Lane pitch, showed life is above all everything.
At the very moment 41 minutes into the F.A. Cup quarter final between Spurs and Bolton, when Bolton’s Fabrice Muamba was tracking back during a Spurs attack, football became irrelevant. There was things that happened in that 41 minutes that could fill up a blog post but quite frankly it doesn’t interest me to do so, with what happened.
At this moment with Muamba still critically ill after suffering a cardiac arrest, a strange thought in that maybe he was lucky. It’s likely with the info we’ve been given this was a condition he had that would likely be triggered at some point but he was at a place with two sets of trained medical staff, one from each team, all the equipment to deal with such an incident including an ambulance on site and being in London not far from a hospital equipped to deal with such an emergency.
It brought to mind Welsh rugby great Merv “The Swerve” Davies, who died last Friday, whose rugby career was cut short when he suffered a brain haemorrhage while on the field of play, luckily for him, according to the player himself, it was the Cardiff Arms Park which had the medical personnel – high number of doctors playing the game back then – and equipment on hand to save his life. Along with a nearby hospital that could handle his condition.
Though as we’ve seen recently with what seems an above average amount of footballers suffering on field incidents from heart problems the player isn’t always this lucky. Just seems to me that if it had happened walking down the street or at his home, things could have been a lot worse.
So best wishes goes out to Fabrice and his family, seemed like a fighter on the field, sure he’s one off it as well.