Justastory

As everyone knows a psychic Octopus named Paul has correctly forecast all the world cup results so far. National feelings run deep however, and Paul has been threatened with death because of the accuracy of his predictions according to the Washington Post. William Hill admit to losing £100,000 as a result of his predictions. But remember folks, a closer look at Paul will tell you that betting is for suckers.

paul the psychic octopus

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) – Paul the oracle octopus was given a replica of the World Cup on Monday as a reward for his perfect eight-for-eight record in picking matches as bettors worldwide collected their winnings based on his selections.
The two-year-old octopus with possible psychic powers turned into a worldwide celebrity for accurately predicting the winner of Germany’s five World Cup wins as well as their two defeats. Paul also tipped Spain to beat Netherlands in Sunday’s final.
“We’ve had a lot of offers for Paul but he will definitely be staying with us and returning to his old job — making children smile,” Sea Life spokeswoman Tanja Munzig in Oberhausen told Reuters after presenting Paul with the World Cup replica.
“There’s no rational reason why he always got it right.”
Bettors around the world made small fortunes based on Paul’s uncanny picks, said Graham Sharpe, media relations director at William Hill in London, one of Britain’s largest bookmakers.
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime but this is the first time I’ve ever seen people making their picks based on what an octopus tells them,” Sharpe told Reuters.

“We had people coming in saying they didn’t know how to place a bet but heard about this German octopus and wanted to bet with him. It’s ludicrous. But he kept getting it right,” said Sharpe. “It’s one of the finest tipping feats ever.”
Sharpe said that anyone who had placed a 10-pound accumulator bet on Paul’s picks from the start of the World Cup would have won 3,000 pounds ($4,500) by the end of the tournament.
Paul’s home at Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen has been inundated with visitors and media from across Europe. Many networks broadcast his picks live. Hundreds were on hand to watch the World Cup replica lowered into his tank on Monday.
WINNING BETS
“Paul now wants to say good-bye to the whole world,” Daniel Fey, a supervisor at Sea Life, told Reuters. “He really enjoyed all the media attention but now he’s returning to his old job.”
Yet interest in the 50-cm long octopus remained intense, especially after his last two picks on Friday were once again accurate. Germany won Saturday’s match for third place and Spain won Sunday’s final — as Paul had called it on Friday.
Last week Germans were shocked and distraught when he picked Spain to beat Germany in the semi-final after tipping German wins over Argentina, England, Ghana and Australia.
And after Spain beat Germany, many wanted to publicly grill him. Sea Life installed extra security to protect their octopus.
“We have to remember he’s quite old now — 2-1/2 years is quite old for an octopus,” Fey said.
Probability experts were quoted in media reports saying the likelihood of getting eight consecutive picks right is 1/256. Sharpe said the odds of getting eight straight right was over 1/300. Humbled professors were quoted saying Paul got lucky.
The octopus, considered by some to be the most intelligent of all invertebrates, had a choice of picking food from two different transparent containers lowered into his tank — each with a national flag on it.
The container Paul opened first was regarded as his pick.
Sharpe at William Hill said he had at first been skeptical about the oracle octopus. But he became a believer.
“I suspect that Paul’s predictions could have made about a half a million pounds,” Sharpe said, adding he estimated William Hill paid out 100,000 pounds on his picks at its 2,300 outlets.
“We had people coming in asking who Paul had picked before they placed their bets,” Sharpe said. “I’m sure there were a lot more people too who were too embarrassed to tell you they made their bet based on what the octopus said.”
He said it was the first time in 30 years of work that he had seen “such widely orchestrated use of a non-human tipster.”
Sharpe said he, unfortunately, did not follow Paul’s advice. “It’d have been too embarrassing,” he said. But Sharpe said he was going on holiday soon. “I’m going to the seaside and intend to eat as much octopus as I can cram down as revenge,” he said.

This story from today’s Guardian should be fiction but isn’t.

A stunt skydiver and cameraman who survived a 6,000ft (1,829 metre) fall on to a remote Russian mountain when a parachute jump went wrong has told of his miraculous escape.

James Boole, 31, suffered a broken back, a cracked rib, a bruised lung and several chipped teeth following the jump last month when he hurtled to the ground at approximately 90 miles per hour, landing in a snowdrift.

Boole, a veteran of 2,500 skydives, was filming for a television documentary with another skydiver in the remote Russian region of Kamchatka when the accident happened. He and the other skydiver were disorientated by the snow and were unable to judge the altitude as they came to land on the final jump of their 10-day trip.

Boole said that in the two seconds before he hit the ground, he was aware that there was not enough time to open his chute and thought he was about to die.

“I didn’t panic or freak out,” he said. “In those two seconds I just thought of my wife and young baby and the sadness of not seeing them again plus the loneliness of my death.”

His parachute partially opened, but far too late, and he landed on his back and was briefly unconscious from the impact.

Then he faced an agonising half-hour wait in sub-zero temperatures before a helicopter was able to reach him. It was three hours before he was able to reach the nearest hospital.

“I opened my eyes and was immediately elated to be alive,” he said. “I did not think I would survive the fall. Breathing was incredibly difficult, there was blood in my mouth and I was in excruciating pain from my spine. My first three instincts were to breathe, vomit and scream.”

He was concerned as there was quite a lot of gurgling from his airways and about the difficulty of accessing medical treatment in such a remote area of Russia.

“There was no Hollywood moment of my life flashing in front of me as I fell, there was no glory that jumpers sometimes fantasise about if they are facing death,” he said.

“During that half hour, I was going through great highs and lows of emotion. I was glad to be alive and just wanted to see my wife and daughter but was thinking I wouldn’t ever be able to work again and would never recover from my injuries.

“In the end I thought those thoughts weren’t very useful and just had to focus on my immediate problems as my broken rib was making it difficult to breathe.”

Boole was taken by helicopter and ambulance to the nearest hospital at Kamchatsky city.

The hospital was primitive “with paint peeling off walls, the filaments visible in lightbulbs, patients in corridors, smoking allowed on wards and blood on the x-ray machines”. As for the food, he says it was “absolutely disgusting”.

Within 48 hours, he discharged himself from hospital and transferred to Moscow for further treatment. “I got to hospital and immediately had a CT scan, which was able to get a diagnosis.”

He flew back to the UK for further medical treatment at a hospital in London and is now home with his family in Tamworth, Staffordshire, where he is enjoying spending time with his daughter.

“Thanks to the back brace I was able to stand up after six days,” he says. “Over the last three weeks I have been taking my first tentative steps again.”

He has given up skydiving with a camera but will continue with the sport for fun. “I have re-evaluated my life and it is not something I want to ever do again with a camera,” he added.

“However, I have my own motivation to jump for fun and I will continue to do that.”

It’s unusual to find someone writing intelligently about football. I watch Match of the Day most Saturday nights because I love football and  frankly I can’t afford to pay £75 (and the rest) every Saturday to watch a premiership game. This writer, Amol Rajan,  is The Independent’s Sports News Correspondent, and tries to put his finger on just what’s wrong with the programme. He’s nearly there I think. I like the highlights, but hate the pundits.

The very first Match of the Day highlights package was broadcast on 22 August 1964 and it featured only one match – Liverpool v Arsenal at Anfield.

Saturday’s Match of the Day programme covered seven matches but only one headline-stealer. Just like that summer night 45 years ago, it was the Liverpool fans greedily glued to their TV screens to watch their side win a five-goal thriller.

Were the BBC’s standards of editorial excellence higher then or has “MOTD” always disappointed (which may explain its substitution by basketball highlights in the mid-eighties)?

Like hundreds of millions across the globe, I watched the game live on TV and, like most of the Premier League’s global audience; I witnessed Liverpool start the match with the sort of vibrancy they normally reserve for Real Madrid at home.

Nine hours later, I joined 3.5 million people to watch the BBC regurgitate this season’s finest football lesson; but rather than approach the task with the care and relish of an Emperor Penguin feeding her chick, the BBC approached it with all the regurgitating relish of a recent diner to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant – say Jim Rosenthal for context and relevance.

At lunchtime Liverpool dominate possession for the first 20 minutes, as Rafa Benitez set about his game plan of starving Manchester United of the ball, disabling the effectiveness of Ferguson’s introduction of Anderson and Carlos Tevez’s energy to the side. Then, when the opportunity arose, Liverpool – through Skrtel, Hypia, Lucas and Reina – four times caught United’s defenders dreaming of quintuples with what can only be described as a series of devastating Garryowens.

On Match of the Day, those first twenty minutes ceased to exist.

According to the programme editors they had no relevance to the narrative that Benitez had crafted with all the intricacies of a footballing Tom Stoppard. But the culling of the first quarter of the game made the watching experience akin to turning up twenty minutes late to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and hoping to understand what the hell is going on.

Match of the Day is failing in its public service remit. I was lucky enough to see the game live and be shocked by its misrepresentation, for many others that was their one chance to view the footage and the BBC failed to tell the whole story. This isn’t the first time and it is far from being MOTD’s only failing but it is glaring and relevant.

But do you agree and how would you change the programme to make it not only more representative of what happens on the pitch but also more representative of what happens throughout the league in general?

This article ran in the G2 section of the Guardian yesterday – nicely put put together by writer Alok Jha, who had to  wear a wrist band that records walking and exercising movements in order to link up with a computer based personal training system.

Like so many who have gone before me in the fight against flab, I am engaged in an unending war with my body. I don’t mind exercise – I jog, cross-train and swim – but I do love food. Children learn early that when your stomach is full it is a good idea to stop. It is a skill I have yet to develop.

These two sides – the exercise and the eating – are finely balanced. For months at a time, exercise will prevail, but it takes only one missed gym session for the discipline to fall apart.

Enter MiLife, a web-based system that claims to be the world’s first “personalised online coaching system”. As I am never going to get an actual personal trainer (why pay for someone in a tracksuit to shout at you?), I thought a virtual one could keep an eye on my progress and shame me into action.

The system comes with a wristband that records all the movements you make in a day and, when connected to a computer via bluetooth, uploads this data to a personal profile on the MiLife website. Every week, you track your performance with a plethora of bar charts and line graphs and the MiLife software advises you on how to get the best out of your exercise.

To start, you tell MiLife what your goals are. Perhaps you want to raise your activity levels or lose some weight? The website’s virtual trainer will come back with a personalised plan, broken down into daily targets. As you progress, the software automatically adapts the plan during a weekly coaching session to take into account the exercises you seem to be good at and those you’re not.

I chose to give myself both exercise and weight targets, but rapidly regretted the latter. Weight control involves recording a daily food diary, an activity as tedious and irritating as filing tax returns. Every day. I tried, I really did. MiLife even allows you to use your mobile phone to text in how many calories you eat but, seriously, how do you know exactly how many are in a salmon mousse? I gave up after just a few weeks of semi-completed diaries and, during my weekly online coaching sessions, the software duly reminded me of my laziness.

I was more successful with the wristband, which I wore obsessively. MiLife breaks down activity into low, medium and high. Shuffling around my flat was low activity, a brisk walk counted as medium-to-high and a jog or even the odd dash for a bus would rack up minutes in the high-activity section. Like anyone given a target, I did everything I could to get the daily totals up: I walked into work more often, went walkabout at lunchtimes, and avoided buses for all short journeys.

All the information about my activity was recorded with no need for my intervention, and it was useful: days when I took the bus home, for example, instead of walking, appeared as conspicuous gaps among the skyscrapers of activity in the days where I had been more diligent. I could monitor my minutes of high activity from jogging or cross-training to ensure that I kept up the levels suggested by the software. All of this was motivational, too – I was surprised how far I would go to get a perfect set of bar charts.

If you choose, MiLife will email or text to get you exercising, and chide you if you miss too many sessions. The virtual trainer is powered by something called the “Idapt engine”, a computer model that MiLife says is the result of five years of research collating data from hundreds of people to tease out successful strategies to, for example, lose weight or keep motivated to exercise. During the first few weeks of use, this builds up a profile of the kinds of exercise that seem to work for you. By matching this to the profiles it stores, it can suggest exercises or ways to break consistent bad habits. I was advised, for example, to try an exercise bike and do more gentle jogging, but the longer you use the programme the better the suggestions should be.

In a randomised controlled trial of 77 people over nine weeks, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2007, those using the MiLife system ended up doing, on average, two hours more physical activity a week than the control group. This is a good result, but bear in mind that these were probably active volunteers, so likely to be motivated to exercise.

There are niggling problems with the system: the website is slow, badly designed and frustrating to use. As a Mac user, I found the software a small nightmare to set up and the system lost two weeks of my weight and activity data. That meant my programme was all but shot to pieces because the software assumed I had been lying down for a fortnight.

I didn’t manage to make MiLife record my activities for long enough to complete a 12-week programme but, on the evidence I do have, my feelings are mixed. Just knowing that all your movements are being recorded is surprisingly rewarding and motivational. Small bits of low-level exercise can add up, and visualising all the jogging and cycling with the bar charts every day was (when I was wearing my geek hat) addictive.

The weight-loss part of the MiLife programme was defeated by my lack of willpower. But the exercise plan definitely recorded an increase in my activity in the weeks that I used the system. Whether that was entirely due to MiLife, I’m not so sure – most of the increase came in the low-level exercise – the jogging or other aerobic exercise I would have done anyway.

So a partial success for me, but is it worth the £99 it costs for the basic equipment and a year’s subscription to the website? It might not be as expensive as a personal trainer, but if MiLife is hoping people will put their hands in their tracksuit pockets, the technology needs to be more impressive.

• For more information, see milife.com

• This article was amended on Wednesday 14 January 2009. Milife, a computer based personal training system, costs £99 for a year’s website subscription and all the basic equipment, not £200, as we said above. This has been corrected.

Spread betting is an interesting game. We were talking about it in our office at the end of last week –for many people it allows entry into a world of speculative gambling which would otherwise be denied them. There are no warm feelings for Mike Ashley in the Newcastle United supporters enclosure – I wonder how this news was greeted by them. This story ran in the daily mirror  on Saturday and was written by Adrian Butler. 

Football tycoon Mike Ashley has lost £300million this week in a BET on crisis-hit bank HBOS.

The Newcastle United owner watched helplessly as HBOS shares plunged in value on Tuesday and Wednesday under sustained attack from speculators.

Ashley made his mammoth  bet in March on HBOS’s share price when the price was just under £6.

He gambled that the shares would go up and put down £50million – a 10 per cent deposit of the total HALF A BILLION pounds he was gambling.

The terms of the bet meant that for every penny HBOS’s share price went up Ashley made £800,000, and for every penny it went down, he lost the same amount.

Betting on the performance of shares – financial spread betting – is a way of playing the markets while avoiding capital gains tax. High-rolling gamblers predict what will happen to a firm’s share price and can make millions if they get it right.

But if they get it wrong and the shares move in the opposite direction, they end up having to pay fortunes to the financial bookmakers who take the bets.

On Wednesday, as the world reeled from the collapse of US bank Lehman Brothers and insurer AIG, HBOS shares went into freefall amid fears about dodgy debts.

Ashley lost £100million in just one hour as the shares plummeted to an all-time low of 88p.

When trading closed for the day after the price rallied slightly, Ashley had lost £50million in a day, with the world economy in meltdown. He would have been required to wire cash to betting firm IG Index to cover the loss.

The £50million hit took Ashley’s loss on his HBOS punt to the mind-boggling total of £380million.

Amid the Lloyds Bank rescue of HBOS, the share price recovered steadily on Thursday and Friday to £2.22, but that still left Ashley £300million down.

And as he was losing millions, Newcastle’s owner – whose wealth has been estimated at £1.4billion – was also struggling to sell the club for his asking price, potentially putting him out of pocket by another £100million.

Ashley decided to quit Newcastle after he was blamed by angry fans for manager Kevin Keegan’s exit earlier this month. He has been in Dubai trying to sell the club for £400million – but offers so far have valued it at only £200million.

Ashley said of his gambling loss at the time: “It is what it is. Unfortunately every morning I get up, I don’t always back the winner.”

A source close to the businessman said: “Mike has had the week from hell. He was complaining he would be left disastrously out of pocket from Newcastle. Then he is being stalked by this bet, which is killing him financially.”

Spread-betting expert Malcolm Pryor said: “I’ve never heard of a loss as big as this.  Anyone could have seen the way the financial market was going this week – what made Ashley think HBOS would be the exception? Ashley looks like he’s made the classic poker error – he knows he has a bad hand but he won’t get out of the pot.”

His losses began with £129million in March, then grew to £200million by July. But his real problems hit last week, when he told pals: “I’ve lost £300million this week.”

Ashley has admitted he loves gambling, spending many nights in the exclusive Fifty casino on St James Street, Central London.

“Many of the most successful people I know are gamblers,” he said. “When you get up on Monday morning you are in the risk business. But there is a fine line between an entrepreneurial investor and a gambler.

“People say: how do you play poker? My answer is ‘all in’ – I’ve always been the same.”

Brian Viner, who writes about football for the Independent, correctly predicted all the Premier League positions before the season had even started. However one of his wrong predictions nearly had him doing a naked conga across London’s Soho Square. Not easy to do on your own. This article originally ran under the heading “The naked truth about football”

Far be it for this column to blow its own trumpet, but here goes anyway. On 11 August last year, on the opening day of the Premier League season, it began thus: “You don’t have to be Nostradamus, or even Eileen Drewery,…

Actually I feel I have to put a note in here. Brian Viner must be one of the best informed people writing about English football and for him people like Eileen Drewery are part of modern English folklore. Eileen was the lady hired by England manager Glenn Hoddle ten years ago in the 1998 World Cup finals to help his team prepare for the competition – much to the amusement of the rabid British tabloid press she was a faith healer…

…..to predict what is going to happen in the Premier League season, which begins today with no certainties except that Manchester United will win it, Chelsea will finish second, Arsenal will finish third and Liverpool fourth. That I know this before the season kicks off is of course dispiriting beyond belief, and means that as a source of excitement I must already focus on the relegation battle: any three from Derby County, Wigan, Birmingham City, Fulham, Reading and Sunderland.”

Even though first and second places have yet to be decided, I wish I’d backed my own prescience with a visit to Mr Ladbroke, as one Liverpool fan, disgruntled by my prediction for his team, suggested I should. He emailed me to say that if I could prophesy the order of the top four with such assurance, then perhaps I should put my mortgage where my mouth was.

Regrettably, I didn’t. Instead, that same column has risen again this past week and bitten me on the backside, in an almost literal sense, because of something else I wrote. Continuing the theme of English football at the top level having become wearyingly predictable, I undertook to lead a triumphant conga across Soho Square, naked, in the almost unimaginable event of none of the so-called “Big Four” reaching the FA Cup final. As we now know, none of the Big Four did and, last Sunday, the good people on The Observer Sport Monthly magazine, obviously keen readers of this column, thoughtfully reprinted my promise, together with the telephone number of The Independent’s sports desk, so that people could ring in to encourage me to honour my pledge.

Which was a little unkind to my colleagues, who had better things to do than field all the calls, but I am flattered that the boys at OSM are so keen to see me in the altogether. Whatever, this column does not renege on its pledges. On the other hand, there’s no such thing as a one-man conga. So, if I can find a few others, as delighted as I am at the prospect of an FA Cup final not featuring United, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool, and as willing as I am to take their kit off in celebration, then I will do my stuff across Soho Square, subject to permission from the local constabulary.

I’ve already been practising in the bathroom mirror, trying to perfect the technique of covering my tackle with one hand while waving the other, in the manner of naked men doing novelty balloon dances in front of appreciative audiences on the northern variety circuit. Moreover, my friend Chris, a fellow Evertonian, has very supportively promised to take his clothes off and do the conga right behind me (he has long arms, I’m pleased to say), should my pledge reach fruition. He says we can call ourselves the alternative Big Four.

In the meantime, I confess to being ever so slightly miffed that everything I got right in that column, assuming United do the business at the JJB tomorrow, has been overshadowed by what I got wrong. I tried to emphasise its percipience when I was interviewed by BBC radio, alerted by the OSM item, on Thursday.

But the presenter wasn’t interested in that; he just wanted to know when I was going to bare my bum in central London. Fair enough, I suppose. As for the broader picture, I was gratified to find my theme of last August being taken up by Kevin Keegan this week. He was dead right; it might seem like a perverse thing to say on the eve of the tightest finish for years, but the Premier League is boringly predictable, and the Champions League is squarely to blame.

Like Keegan, I see no likelihood of any other team breaking up the Big Four cartel any time soon, not with all the riches they get to splash in the transfer market. The best hope for the chasing pack this summer is that Liverpool implode in an internecine struggle between their co-owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, or Arsenal continue to suffer from the departure of David Dein, who, it seems fair to say, would never have let Arsène Wenger lose players of the calibre of Mathieu Flamini and the seemingly unsettled Alexander Hleb.

That said, “chasing pack” is pitching it a little strongly. Even though Everton pressed Liverpool most of the way for fourth place, the Merseyside rivals will finish the season at least eight points apart.

So, what will be the one-two-three-four a year from now? Nobody can make any kind of informed prediction until the summer transfer dealings are over, and even then I might think twice. I’ve learnt the art of circumspection, the hard way.

b.viner@independent.co.uk

The naked man dancing – silly but fun – is by David Chien.

Heard this story from Reuters Paris just now and it summed up events for me in a way. After a day of hearing radio and tv news bulletins about incidents involving protests about the Olympic torch and China’s human rights record particularly in Tibet, and an hour or so spent personally musing about how big a percentage of all British manufactured goods is sourced directly from China, this morning I heard a leading policeman, Commander Bob Broadhurst of the Met Police, on Radio 4 differentiating between pro and anti torch demonstrators – in a “goodies and baddies” kind of fashion. The pro demonstrators were “lawful” and the anti were not, apparently. I suppose the law exists to protect property at the end of the day. But……..Chinese property? British property manufactured in China…….? All I can say is, despite the presence of Chinese security guards protecting the torch, I couldn’t help but think (as Jane Austen would say) that you couldn’t protest in anything like this way if you were actually in China. And the lights were going out all over Europe……..

Security officials extinguished the Olympic torch on Monday on the Paris leg of its journey, disrupted by protesters against China’s crackdown on Tibet.

A police source said organizers were forced to put the torch on a bus to protect it from the hundreds of protesters who swarmed the procession after it set off from the Eiffel Tower.

The torch had to be extinguished because of a technical problem, a police spokesman told Reuters. After a brief interruption the relay resumed with the torch alight.

A member of the French Greens party had earlier been restrained by police when trying to grab the torch from the first of 80 torch bearers, former world 400 meters hurdles champion Stephane Diagana.

Escorted by security, Diagana was wearing a badge reading “For a better world”.

Several hundred demonstrators waving banners gathered on the Trocadero esplanade, just the other side of the river Seine from the Eiffel Tower, where the relay got under way at 6:35 a.m EDT.

France has deployed more than 3,000 police officers, some on roller blades, along the 28-km (17 miles) Paris leg of relay, to the Charlety stadium, on the southern edge of town, where the torch was due to arrive at 11:00 a.m EDT.

“Boycott Chinese goods” and “Save Tibet” read some of the banners held by the demonstrators, watched by police in riot gear and prevented by barriers from getting near the courseWe are doing our best but it will take the world to put pressure on China to help bring democracy and human rights to Tibet,” said Phurbu Dolker, a 21-year-old Tibetan refugee.

Thousands of protesters waving Tibetan flags and shouting “Shame on China” tried to disrupt the torch’s run through London on Sunday, the British leg of the international relay billed by Beijing as the “harmonious journey”.

French human rights minister, Rama Yade, denied on Saturday that President Nicolas Sarkozy would boycott the Games’ opening ceremony unless China started talks with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and released political prisoners.

The Olympic flame is expected to remain a magnet for anti-Chinese protests ahead of the August Games in Beijing.

The flame is due to return to Beijing on August 6, two days before it will be used to light the cauldron at the Olympic opening ceremony.

I found this story yesterday in the printed edition of Metro. Basically some adventurous types have slung a steel cable across a mountain valley in Northern Italy near Pietrapertosa around 1020 metres above sea level – and you get onto this contraption and “fly” across. Hmmmm. The only articles I could find from people who had done it were in Italian, so I have just included a picture this time. The journey is 1500 metres long – about a mile. Any contributions from people who’ve done it? my@justastory.co.uk.

I saw Eduardo play against Everton just after Christmas, when Arsenal put any number of goals past the Toffees in the second half. Eduardo was brilliant – and I speak as an Everton supporter. I saw this on the Match of the Day at the weekend – however, I thought the coverage of the issue on the sporting blog “the Sight is in End” was first class.

Right, I’m going to warn you now. There’s a very good reason why the broadcasters won’t show the full detail of Eduardo’s leg-break.

I’ve managed to find a clip of the break (mainly to see how bad the tackle was and to satisfy my own sick sense of curiosity), and it’s clear to see why.

But, the effects need to be seen. Personally, I’m not sure whether Martin Taylor’s tackle warranted the gruesome, unfortunate outcome. To me, it looked like Eduardo over-ran the ball, tried to regain it, and Taylor caught him unintentionally.

Still, it was a poor tackle and while extreme, Eduardo will now act as a permanent example of what bad, careless tackling can do. Let this act as the one moment where the art of tackling came back. In fact, it shouldn’t even be an art – good tackling is a necessity.

If Eduardo comes back and plays football again, then anything is possible in the game. However, after Wenger’s bleak assessment, it looks likely that his career is in real, severe danger.

The video the images are taken from has since been taken down due to a copyright dispute. However, I hope the BBC show the tackle and provide prior warning this evening on Match of the Day.

Let something good come out of this ugly mess. Show it to kids, schoolboys and aspiring players. Let them know that this could be them if tackling isn’t improved, and let them know that their possible career, for all its conceivable riches and celebrity, could meet a sudden and awful end. This should act as the ultimate reality check.

Having witnessed David Busst’s leg break when he played for Coventry against Manchester United in 1996, I thought nothing could surpass the nauseating effect that possessed. Eduardo’s break is the worse kind of compound fracture imaginable.

If you’ve got a soft stomach then I would advise against looking at the images below, particularly the second image.

A dangerous, clinical, young striker’s career could well be over, and the outcome needs to be seen:

Thanks for all your comments. Needless to say, I’m absolutely staggered at the interest these pictures taken off a YouTube clip hastily taken down have caused. It seems that the power of blogging was fully realised and experienced with this, and we managed to be right on the ball. Unlike Martin Taylor…