Yeovil Town manager Mark Cooper said that common sense had prevailed following the early abandonment of the game on Bank Holiday Monday.
The Glovers were trailing 1-0 to W*ymouth when the game was stopped shortly before the 75th minute due to a medical incident in the crowd – after the game the Gaffer spoke to BBC Somerset’s Sheridan Robins and wished the supporter well.
“The most important thing is that the lady gets better, but we’re still no nearer to leaving, it could be two hours before the game restarts, I think after you’ve played 70 minutes you can’t expect athletes to get warmed up and go again, it’s just best that we wash our hands and move on to the next one”
“Our paramedic, Tony was with her and she was in a bad way and they couldn’t do what they needed to do properly so they had to do some real invasive treatment on her, I think, and there’s just no guarantee of when the game could have taken place.”
The Glovers had taken themselves back into the changing rooms during the stoppage and discussions continued with the severity of the incident making it difficult to pin point a potential restart, with implications for players having to get going again.
“You’ve got to bare in mind that we’ve got Rhys Murphy back on the pitch, with a big calf injury, we’ve got two or three that are struggling with tight hamstrings, you ask them to go and play after 70 minutes – you’re in danger of those injuries reoccurring.
At one point there was going to be a ten minute stoppage, then it went to 25, then it went to 40 and I think once you get to that time scale… listen the W*ymouth side will say we didn’t want to play and we’re losing, and I get that, I understand that, but listen, common sense has to prevail and I think the right thing was done.
The W*ymouth players are winning against the top team and having a right go at it, and they see it as we’ve backed out, but we’ve got bigger fish that we have to try and fry, in terms of, we’ve got a league to win, they’re safe, it doesn’t matter if one of them pulls a hamstring, it does to us.”
“Common sense has to prevail and I think the right thing was done”
As for the football itself, Yeovil were 1-0 down at the point of abandonment, but were trying to get back into the game.
“Listen, Jamari Clarke was ruled out this morning, Olly Thomas’ performance when he came on on Saturday, we thought that it was the right decision to start him, looking back, it looks as though it wasn’t, we tried to react, Jordan Stevens felt his hamstring tighten up, so he had to come off. We tried to put lots of forward players on the pitch, Alex Fisher was just about to come on, which would have meant half the team were forwards.
We were trying everything to get back momentum, I thought we had a head of steam up when the game was abandoned, I was confident we would score, there was still 24 minutes to go in total.”
It likely means that Yeovil will have to make the trip back to W*ymouth before the end of the season.
“It’s a bit surreal, the atmosphere was incredible, unbelievable support from both sets of fans, Yeovil fans today, we went on the sea front, in the coach just to see the fans, it was incredible.”