Aston Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez was allowed to stay on the field despite appearing to have suffered a head injury. After a five-minute on-pitch assessment, he was allowed to continue for another 14 minutes before signalling to the bench that he needed to be removed.
Headway – the brain injury association has been calling for the introduction of a temporary concussion rule in football for many years. Doing so would allow medical teams more time, in the quiet confines of the changing or treatment room, to assess the player for the evolving signs of concussion.
Luke Griggs, Interim Chief Executive of Headway, said: “We have repeatedly warned football of the risk it is taking, not only with the elite-level players who are being allowed to return to the field of play potentially concussed, but also with grass roots and youth players who follow the examples they see on their screens.
“Team medics are placed in the impossible position of having to make immediate judgements about an evolving condition – with tens of thousands of fans watching them work. It is not an appropriate or effective way of making a clinical judgement.
“If in doubt, sit it out!’ is supposedly at the heart of concussion protocols in all sports. And yet too often we see teams fail to take that approach. “Instead, the approach seems to be ‘let’s see how they get on for the next 15 minutes’, during which time they risk exacerbating the effect of the initial injury.
“Football’s stubbornness to adapt is putting the short and long-term health of players at risk and change can no longer be resisted at the highest level of the sport.
“We need the introduction of temporary concussion subs, but more importantly we need to see a change in attitude from IFAB and FIFA when it comes to brain injury in football.”
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