Puzzler: Petr Cech is carried off in the San Siro -
but will he play in Tuesday's second leg?
Jose Mourinho does not make throwaway remarks. He does
not do off-the-cuff. He prepared to meet the press as he prepared
to meet the opposition. He knew his objective. Little was left to
chance.
So when, after the first leg between Inter Milan and Chelsea, he
was asked about the fitness of Petr Cech for the rematch, his
response would have been as carefully considered as an attacking
set-piece.
‘Of course I think Cech could play,’ Mourinho said. ‘I don’t
listen to those reports that he’s out for a month or more. Dr
Needles can get him healthy enough to play — and play well.’
For extra emphasis, maybe he should have made a pantomime show
of covering his mouth, then slapping his wrist and saying: ‘Oops,
silly me, now I’ve let the cat out of the bag.’ He might even
regret not doing that because his cunning slur did not have the
desired effect. Nobody picked up on such a delicately placed hint
that Chelsea may have a medical professional injecting their
players back to health. That will teach Mourinho to be subtle.
Cech has not played since the first leg and there is only an
outside chance he will be fit for the match at Stamford Bridge
tomorrow. Chelsea are in the midst of an injury crisis, though, so
Carlo Ancelotti, the manager, did not rule him out entirely. Either
way, Mourinho was not entirely wrong in predicting an impressive
recovery, because Cech is at least expected back for the title
run-in, beginning with the match against Blackburn on Sunday.
So who is ‘Dr Needles’ and what, specifically, was Mourinho
implying by dropping the name?
Not all of his comments were the product of self-serving
paranoia, either. He was right, sometimes — Rijkaard did try to
approach the referee at the Nou Camp, according to the UEFA report
— and because he was sharp-minded and successful, his excesses were
often indulged as part of sport’s psychological war.
Driving a wedge: Is Mourinho making a serious
allegation against Chelsea or casting vague and baseless
aspersions?
This is different. If Mourinho knows Chelsea have a
method of injecting players back to fitness that is beyond the
capacity of their rivals he needs to clarify this, leading to a
formal investigation.
Otherwise, he is casting vague and baseless aspersions to
unsettle an opponent before a major game, which is a shameful
tactic considering the seriousness of the issue and the
professional implications.
The highly-respected professional caught in the middle of this
is Dr Bryan English, a consultant orthopaedic physician, who worked
with UK Athletics at the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004.
He joined Chelsea a year later and now heads a team comprising
another full-time doctor, a part-time doctor, three
physiotherapists and four masseurs. Mourinho would know this,
though — after all, he appointed him.
Mourinho’s critics claim he often sees the worst in others
because of what he knows of himself. He thinks Barcelona try to
influence referees because he tries to influence referees. He
thinks officials are intimidated by a big club like Manchester
United because he used bullying tactics in Portugal with Porto.
If he is drawing attention to Chelsea’s treatment of Cech it
would be because he was familiar with English’s regime at Stamford
Bridge, where he introduced the controversial technique of
blood-spinning to treat injuries. Blood-spinning is allowed by
FIFA, although it is not without its critics and controversies.
It begins with an injection, removing a quantity of an injured
player’s blood, which is then spun in a centrifuge to increase the
concentration of growth hormones. Calcium and the enzyme thrombin
are added before the resulting gel is injected back into the wound.
The healing process is up to five times faster, but some still
believe blood-spinning risks introducing artificial elements and
should be banned.
It is no secret these days, though. Dr English referred to
injections, as well as tablets, cold therapy, hydrotherapy and
manipulation, as a way to treat injuries in an interview on
Chelsea’s website, uploaded in April 2009.
Injections are nothing new in football anyway. Footballers from
past generations received cortisone injections routinely to enable
them to play through pain. John Gorman, assistant manager to Glenn
Hoddle with England, once reduced a male audience to a cold sweat
with the casual revelation that he had an injection directly into a
testicle to enable him to play for Carlisle United in the
Seventies.
What is different here is Mourinho’s implication that needles
are a stock in trade at Chelsea and that this club makes players
fit when they should be injured.
He knew exactly what he was doing when he said it and he was no
doubt hoping somebody would pick up on it. So now, over to you,
Jose. Is there something we should know, or was it all just another
fatuous game?
