While Chelsea have backtracked on their latest dossier of “evidence” that they wanted to hand in to the FA on the exact reasons why Stephen Hunt kneed Petr Cech on the head we are now getting the official story of what went on with the actual ambulance crew who came to ferry Cech to hospital after his condition deteriorated in the dressing room.

Mark Ainsworth, who was the ambulance duty officer on the scene, has hit back strongly at Mourinho’s claims and instead gives a very different version of events which tallies a lot more with Reading’s than Chelsea’s:

“We support Reading Football Club with their statement of events,” he said.

“They are the accurate ones and I’m not sure where the confusion has arisen with Jose Mourinho’s version of events.

“The player (Cech) was taken off the pitch and went down into the players’ dress area as they normally would do, and was under the inspection of the Chelsea doctor there around 20 minutes before he called the paramedics to come and have a further assessment of him.

“It was 20 minutes before the doctor decided to actually get the paramedics to come and inspect him. We wouldn’t routinely send the paramedics to inspect a player, they are under the care of the duty doctor provided by the club.

“The ambulance was called at 1745 and it arrived at 1752, so seven minutes from the time that the call came through to the ambulance control until they actually arrived at the scene.

“It left 12 minutes later, that was obviously taking him from the players’ area up to the ambulance and actually leaving the ground area. He was taken in a lift from the players’ dressing room up to where the ambulance was waiting to take him to Royal Berks (hospital).”

“We have two options for removing players from the ground, one of those is on a stretcher round the edge of the pitch in front of all the players and then out through the tunnel,” Ainsworth added.

“That was declined by the Chelsea doctor, he wanted to keep (Cech) out of the public eye, so the other option was to go in a wheelchair, in a lift, up to the waiting ambulance.”

So which is it? Did Reading and the ambulance crew force Cech into a life threatening move to a wheelchair to get him to the extremely late ambulance or is troublemaker and bullshitter extraordinaire Mourinho overstepping the mark once again?

I’ll leave the final decision up to you but I know who I believe. What must Chelsea fans make of the way these people in charge of their club are carrying on? Dragging a famous (if less than successful) old club’s name through the dirt at every opportunity just because they got a rich bloke on baord who can shovel load of money at all comers (or could until his wife found out about his carrying on behind her back). If they were running my club I’d be moritified to hear Mourinho go on like he does.

Time to give it a rest Jose and instead thank those paramedics and the doctors involved for helping stabilise your player instead of getting involved in petty, childish and unsubstantiated claims about people who save lives every day of their working careers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 11:18 am and is filed under Chelsea. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.