INJURY TIME
Sympathy for the atrocious injury sustained by Eduardo da Silva in Saturday's fixture between Arsenal and Birmingham at St Andrew's has extended well beyond the confines of north London. Those too squeamish to watch the moment of impact on Match of the Day would have gleaned the gist of it all too eloquently from the shock on the faces of the player's team-mates. Cesc Fabregas appeared to drift into a twilight zone somewhere between throwing up and passing out. The despair of Bacary Sagna and Emmanuel Adebayor were plain to see. A section of the player's lower fibula had erupted through the flesh and through his sock, while his foot lay semi-detached from the leg at an angle not seen in nature.
What compounded the general revulsion at Birmingham centre-back Martin Taylor's action, for which 'foul' seems too feeble a term, and 'tackle' wholly inadequate, was the unexpectedly derisive response to the events of the match from certain quarters. Arsène Wenger's comment that the perpetrator should never be permitted to play football again became the instant post-match talking-point. One could argue that a manager of Wenger's experience should have seen that one coming. The remark wasn't made only to the BBC and, it could equally be argued, wasn't exactly made in the heat of the moment, since the incident had occurred barely three minutes after kickoff. At least a little of the motivation for the public retraction Wenger made later on Saturday evening may have been the need to re-focus attention on what had happened to the player. Certainly, for the never less than sternly orotund Garth Crooks, in the Final Score studio at teatime, the manager's remarks were worse than the injury itself.
Nobody can seriously suggest that any player ever has the intention to cause injury of the kind that has ended not just Eduardo's Arsenal season, but his interest in the European Championships too. Indeed, Taylor looked suitably ashen as he was dismissed from the field. That said, certain of his team-mates have gone on record as saying that they don't feel the tackle merited a red card, as though the result of a late and clumsy crunch should be entirely subtracted from the consideration of intent. 'The reason the ref has sent him off,' reflected Stephen Kelly, 'is because he has seen Eduardo has broken his leg. I don't think you can send a player off for that.' Perhaps not if he has broken his own leg, but how about when he has had it broken for him? If Kelly was speaking for the team as a whole, and thereby undermining the public contrition its manager Alex McLeish properly showed in his own post-match comments, it can only be that self-delusion has reached astonishingly giddy heights at Birmingham City.
In the Match of the Day studio, the proprieties were tossed aside with cheerful impunity. The focus of the analysis was on the woeful defensive errors in Arsenal's first-half performance, without a murmur about the psychological state the players were in. Their recovery after half-time to gain the lead reflected surely one of the more heroic recoveries (not to mention one of the more inspirational dressing-room talks) of the present season. William Gallas's emotional unravelling at the final whistle, exacerbated by the dubious nature of the injury-time penalty awarded to Birmingham, led the normally urbane Alan Hansen to scoff that Manchester United would surely be left laughing over the events at St Andrew's.
Laughing? Really? If anybody had a laugh left in them on Saturday evening, they should have saved it for the efforts of the French penalty-kicker Damien Traille in the Six Nations rugby. Nothing that happened in Birmingham came anywhere near a laughing matter.
