One of Britain's top brain surgeons has urged England captain John Terry not to rush back to action after suffering an horrific head injury last weekend.
Colin Shieff, consultant neuro-surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in London, said he would normally advise similar injury victims to take it easy for at least two weeks.
Terry lost consciousness, swallowed his tongue and stopped breathing after a kick in the head from Arsenal's Abou Diaby during their 2-1 League Cup final win on Sunday.
PHOTO: AP
But he checked out of hospital after treatment and returned to the Millennium Stadium to celebrate with his victorious teammates. And the defender could now return to action against Portsmouth on Saturday.
"Someone who came in to us with a similar story and which was witnessed by so many, I would suggest to them that they take it easy for a couple of weeks," Shieff said.
"Boxers who were rendered unconscious would not be allowed to go back into the ring until they had satisfied the requirements of the regulatory authority. The boxing board of control would not let them fight for two or three months afterwards," he said.
"It is one thing feeling well enough to get back to the team and another to being considered fit to play. He is more than likely to have had a brain scan on Sunday and it would probably have showed up normal and that there was no bleeding," Shieff said.
"During the period a person is knocked out, the brain is not working. It is like having a computer which suddenly doesn't work and won't accept anything you type or which refuses to save anything. When you get it working again, you might find it has saved your document but it may not have," he said.
"During the period he was out, his brain wasn't getting a lot of oxygen but Chelsea are concerned about the guy as well as his performance and I am positive they will have obtained some neurological opinion and given him an MRI scan to determine whether there is any other damage," Shieff said.
"You can't always predict these things and it may take a while to get right," he said.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier