Emi Martínez spent about ten minutes on the floor at the Hill Dickinson Stadium on Saturday. He was fitted with a neck brace. He was given oxygen. He was carried off on a stretcher and sent straight to hospital after a head-to-head collision with Jarrad Branthwaite. As he went down the tunnel, sections of the Everton crowd booed him.
That's the whole thing. Dress it up however you like afterward, and it still comes out as grown adults jeering a man being treated for a head injury serious enough to need a stretcher and a hospital trip.
Look at what the people who actually understood the moment did. Branthwaite got up and carried on, because he was fine. Medical staff from both sides sprinted on. Jordan Pickford, stationed at the other end of the pitch, wandered up to check on his opposite number. The two keepers are rivals on the day, and Pickford wears a shirt the Everton crowd has every reason to resent, but he still walked over to make sure a fellow goalkeeper was breathing. His own supporters managed less than that.
There's a defense floating around, and it deserves a hearing since it's the only one on offer. People say the boos weren't really about the injury. They were booing Martínez the character: the gamesmanship, the time-wasting, the pantomime that follows him into every away ground. The crowd's patience with him was already gone before he hit the turf, so what came out when he was carried past them was years of built-up contempt.
Grant every word of it. Martínez winds up opposition fans on purpose, and he's very good at it. None of that survives contact with a stretcher. The second a player is down on oxygen, the clock on all of it stops. At that point you're booing an injured man, and the only information you have about how injured is that the professionals around him clearly thought it was bad. When a collision produces the kind of reaction that sends trainers sprinting, the honest response from the stands is silence.
The timing made it worse. This same week, Petr Čech put out a statement about the head injury that nearly killed him at Reading, in a Chelsea shirt, seconds into a match, twenty years ago. It reminded everyone in English football exactly how wrong these moments can go. Days later, a Premier League crowd watched a keeper carried off with his head immobilized and found it in themselves to jeer.
What we actually know: Martínez was taken to hospital, and Chelsea hadn't confirmed a diagnosis. He gave a thumbs-up to teammates and fans on his way off, which is a good sign and nothing more. Nobody in that ground could have known that at the time. The booers were reacting to a man they had every reason to fear was badly hurt.
Chelsea won 2-0 behind a Pedro Neto brace, their first clean sheet in months. Mike Penders, 21, got his Premier League debut off the bench. Neto dedicated the win to his teammate: "This win is for Emi after his injury." He also said, "We saw the state of him on the floor but I don't want to speak about it too much." Neto showed more grace about the whole thing than a chunk of the crowd could muster.
Only sections of the stadium did it, and plenty of Everton supporters were probably as sickened by it as anyone watching at home. But "only some of us did it" isn't the save people think it is. Some was enough to be heard over a hushed ground, and that's enough to own this. Hate Martínez for ninety minutes every time he visits. When he's on a stretcher, put your hands together or keep your mouth shut.
