UK Edition
A tale of two Man City keepers - Tony Coton's sickening blow shows progress is being made in treating injuries
The pictures posted on social media of Ederson’s face after that ugly encounter with Sadio Mane’s right boot left little to the imagination but it is not until you get up close and personal with the Manchester City goalkeeper that the gruesome nature of the injury becomes fully apparent.
Surveying the damage when Ederson stopped briefly to talk after last week’s Champions League demolition of Feyenoord in Rotterdam, the slashes to the Brazilian’s face could just as easily have been the work of some delinquent with a flick knife as the Liverpool player’s studs.
It still seems remarkable to think that less than an hour after Ederson left the pitch on a stretcher, complete with oxygen mask to assist his breathing, he had returned to the Etihad Stadium in time to watch the closing stages of his side’s 5-0 win.
The speed and quality of the medical provision available to our top-level footballers nowadays is one of the advancements often overlooked in the game but, reading last week about the near-death experience of one of Ederson’s predecessors in the City goal, it is shuddering to think how different it used to be not so long ago.
It was April, 1995, when Tony Coton dived to save a free-kick against Newcastle United, spilled the ball and then felt the muscle rupture in his right thigh as he darted for the rebound. Coton could feel his thigh beginning to balloon as he took a shower after coming off but the reaction of City’s physiotherapist at the time, Eamonn Salmon, was merely to strap him up and send him home.
Coton had only got as far as Princess Parkway, a couple of miles from City’s old Maine Road ground, when the pain got so bad he was forced to pull over to the side of the carriageway to be physically sick. The story that follows takes some digesting and the bleak reality is Coton might not have been around to recount it in his riveting new autobiography, There To Be Shot At, but for a short telephone call that ultimately saved his right leg and possibly his life.
Coton had tried to ring the club but got no answer. He rang Salmon’s home number – again, no answer. Back then, when mobile phones were still not widespread, the club physio would leave an emergency number if they were out for the evening but Coton’s calls went unanswered. By now the pain was largely unbearable and, out of desperation, Coton telephoned City’s old physio, Roy Bailey, who had been at the game that day.
Within five minutes of explaining the situation to Bailey, Coton was in a car being driven by his wife Helen to the Beaumont Hospital, a private clinic in Bolton, where they were greeted by the sight of a surgeon, Tony Banks, dismounting a motorbike and whipping off his leather biker jacket to reveal a tuxedo and bow-tie after he had been dragged away from a social function to tend to the unfolding emergency.
After a brief examination of Coton’s thigh, Banks had called for an anaesthetist and the City goalkeeper was being prepped for surgery. “That’s compartment syndrome – a blood clot,” Banks told Coton. “And I really need to operate inside the next 30 minutes or we might have problems”.
By the time Coton came round, Banks and his wife were standing over him clutching large gin and tonics, the surgeon’s dress shirt still visible underneath a blood splattered green gown. Coton was told he had been 90 minutes away from losing his leg.
“I was numb... but I wanted to see the full extent of the damage,” Coton said in his book, beautifully brought to life by his ghostwriter, and Sunday Mirror journalist, Simon Mullock. “Mr Banks warned me it wasn’t a pretty sight but that didn’t prepare me for the gory mess that greeted me when I pulled the bedsheet back. It looked like I had been bitten by a shark.”
Coton could not have his leg closed back up because of the possibility of the blood clot returning and he was back on the operating table every other day to have the gash stapled shut. Ederson’s facial wound required eight stitches. By the time the doctors were done with Coton, he had 58 staples in his leg.
In some ways, though, Coton was just as hurt by the fact it took three days before anyone at City came to visit him in hospital. Imagine that happening now? And to add insult to injury, what the book did not mention is that a bed-stricken Coton had asked for a can of Coke and was appalled to discover City ended up deducting the cost of it from his next wage packet. How times have changed.
‘There to be Shot At’ by Tony Coton is published by deCoubertin Books on Thursday [Sept 21]. The book is now available for pre-order at http://www.decoubertin.co. uk/Coton
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