Players react as Fabrice Muamba is treated on the pitch at White Hart Lane. Photo credit: Crystian Cruz
Bolton Wanderers’ 23-year-old footballer Fabrice Muamba remains stable but in critical condition in intensive care after he suffered a cardiac arrest during the first half of his side’s FA Cup clash at Tottenham on Saturday afternoon. The match was abandoned after Muamba collapsed and Bolton’s upcoming fixture against Aston Villa has been postponed as players struggle to cope with the traumatic event.
As shocked fans watched on, medics spent six minutes trying to resuscitate the former England Under-21 international on the pitch after he fell to the ground with no other players around him. Press Association reported that it took medical staff two hours to get Muamba breathing again.
Muamba was born in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) but moved to England aged 11. He begun his career at Arsenal, before moving to Birmingham City. Since joining Bolton in 2008, he has made 148 appearances for the club and earned a reputation as a tireless and talented box-to-box midfielder.
Muamba’s fiancee Shauna Magunda, the mother of his son Joshua, has thanked well-wishers for their support. “Where there is life there is hope,” she tweeted on Monday. Muamba proposed to Magunda on Valentine’s Day of this year. The tragic event has shocked and saddened the world of football.
Pray for Muamba. Since Muamba’s collapse, Twitter has been awash with tributes to the man and player from fellow pros. “Pray for Fab. God willing he will pull through.” tweeted Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe. “All our hearts with Fabrice Muamba, one of my closest friends at Bolton. I’m shocked, wishing him a fast recovery.” tweeted Wigan’s former Bolton goalkeeper Ali Al Habsi. “Doesn’t matter who you support. Doesn’t matter if you aren’t a football fan. Doesn’t matter if you aren’t religious. Pray for Fabrice Muamba.” tweeted Tottenham defender Kyle Walker. “I’m so sad about what happened to Fabrice Muamba today. Played with him for a couple of years. What a great guy. Always a smile on his face. Please Fabrice bring that smile back. My thoughts are with you and your lovely family!” tweeted Arsenal captain Robin van Persie.
A 21-year-old man from Pontypridd, South Wales, has been arrested in connection with racially offensive comments made on Twitter. It is understood to follow complaints about comments made following the collapse of Muamba, reported the BBC. The comments, which appeared on Saturday evening, have been removed from the social network.
Harrowing and horribly paradoxical. Amy Lawrence of The Guardian, who was at the game, said “it was devastating to watch – irrespective of whether you were a team-mate, coach, supporter, official, ballboy, steward, journalist and no matter whether it was your 1,000th football match or, in some cases, your first. There was a basic human reaction to what was going on in front of our eyes. Nothing prepares you for the sight of a person fighting for his life. This was not an actor in the movies. This was a son, a brother, a fiancé, a father, a friend who seems to be adored by anyone lucky enough to have crossed his path.” Lawrence said the incident was “so horribly paradoxical. It is not in the natural order of things to see a young, fit, professional sportsman so stricken. It is not a normal situation to gather for an event that is supposed to be competitive entertainment and find yourself watching such a grave and distressing scene. The impulse to shudder, to weep, to pray, overtook just about everybody.” Like others who were there, Lawrence praised the crowds’ response: “In such traumatic circumstances as here the crowd responded in a way which was quite moving. Everybody felt helpless, yet impelled to do something that might help in some tiny way. Spontaneous applause broke out, as noisy and compelling from the Tottenham fans as the Bolton faithful, and some urgent shouts of encouragement, before Fabrice Muamba’s name was sung.”
“It was easily the worst thing I have seen inside a football ground in more than 30 years following the game. As I was not there at Hillsborough or Heysel or Bradford I cannot relay the horror of a multiple tragedy such as those. But other instances which been difficult to watch, such as when a player suffers a career-threatening injury or a crowd inflicts hooliganism on the game, bear no comparison,” said Amy Lawrence at The Guardian.
Football shown in a good light. Tony Evans, football editor of The Times (£), said the “concern for Fabrice Muamba has shown fans in better light … For all that the tribal hordes who fill stadiums are willing participants in the hysterical slapstick that is football, they are not mindless. They know tragedy when they see it.” Evans argued the response by players and fans alike to the tragedy proved that the “vast majority” of those in the game are “good.” Evans said that the “outpouring of concern” from footballers on social media “will have astonished those who wish to depict players as overpaid pantomime villains. Twitter is often a platform for the deranged and overwrought but it has given footballers a direct conduit to the world. The sheer number of players who tweeted in support of Muamba illustrated the kinship of those who kick a ball for a living.” “The stereotype of drunken, marauding hooligans was challenged at White Hart Lane on Saturday,” insisted Evans, “was proven to be a lie by the huge number of wellwishers who are still praying for Muamba.”
Fans much more than tribal savages. Mike Walters at The Mirror’s Football Blog argued that the reaction to the tragedy has challenged some politicians’ opinion that “football is the province of tribal savages” Walters said that “while the country’s crown jewel, the National Health Service, swung into action, 30,000 supporters abandoned partisan inclinations to afford a stricken footballer their goodwill even though they felt sick to the pits of their stomachs … the grand old game bared its soul and revealed a sport awash with compassion, sensitivity and an unassailable sense of priorities.”
Football won’t necessarily become more compassionate. James Lawton of The Independent said the tragedy is a grim reminder that “that football stars, for all their riches and their celebrity, are not immune from the fears and hazards of ordinary men and women.” Lawton was unconvinced that the tragic event would “usher in a new age of warmth and mutual understanding in the trenches of football” but insisted it will remind spectators of the “vagaries and frequent injustices of human life … No one is to blame and there is only one victim, if you don’t count his family and all those who filed out of White Hart Lane with a loss of some of those certainties they had always assumed came with the price of their tickets. They are unlikely to do that ever again.”
Impact on Bolton players. Ex-Liverpool defender Alan Hansen assessed how the traumatic incident will impact on his relegation-threatened Bolton colleagues as they prepare to attempt to beat the drop. “How long that feeling will last will be different for each individual player, but it is something that could take weeks, months and perhaps even years for some of them to come to terms with. The Bolton dressing room will be a lonely place and there will be no thoughts of ‘let’s do this for Fabrice’ at this stage. The sense of worry and the whole trauma of what happened when Muamba collapsed during the FA Cup tie at Tottenham will be the only things that occupy their minds right now … right now, there will be a sense throughout the club that football doesn’t really matter.” Hansen suggested that only Muamba’s “strong recovery” will give the dressing room the “uplift” the Bolton players need to “go back out there again.”
