A goalkeeper went down with a head injury on Saturday, got fitted with a neck brace, was given oxygen, and was carried off on a stretcher. A section of the Everton crowd booed him as he went. That's the whole thing. Everything else is people trying to make it smaller.
The argument that sprang up afterwards is that this has all been misreported: that the jeers targeted Chelsea's away fans and their chanting rather than Martinez, and that plenty of Evertonians were actually applauding him off. One eyewitness account tells it that way. It's a tidy version of events. It also doesn't survive contact with what actually got reported from the ground.
Multiple outlets, working off the live broadcast audio and witness reaction, described the same thing: boos from the home end as the stretcher took Martinez off the pitch. That's independent coverage converging on the same ugly moment, and there's no competing, well-sourced account that recasts the noise as something innocent. The "it was really about Chelsea" line appears nowhere in the primary reporting. It showed up afterwards, as an excuse, once the footage started to look bad.
So pick which one you believe: a stack of broadcast-sourced accounts, or a story that materialised precisely because the first one was embarrassing. I know which way that goes.
The context only makes the booing worse. In the second half, Martinez came racing off his line to claim a set piece when Everton's Jarrad Branthwaite went up for the header and caught the keeper instead. Branthwaite himself had to sit up and go through concussion protocols before he could carry on. Medical staff spent several minutes over Martinez before he was stretchered off, after a stoppage of around ten minutes, in a neck brace, on oxygen. Afterwards Xabi Alonso could only offer: "As far as I know, he left the stadium conscious; he's in the hospital doing precautionary tests. This is all I know so far." As of this writing, that's the last word on his condition.
Anyone who's watched the sport for more than a season knows why a goalkeeper and a collision like that gets treated with real fear. Twenty years ago Petr Cech took a knee to the head against Reading and suffered a fractured skull; Chelsea's backup that day was knocked unconscious too, and John Terry ended up in goal. A stretcher, a neck brace, and oxygen mean real danger, and you don't need a medical degree to see it in real time.
I get why Evertonians don't like Martinez. He's a wind-up merchant who's made a career out of getting under people's skin, and he's very good at it. None of it matters when a human being leaves the field on a stretcher with his airway supported: you shut up. You don't have to clap. You just don't boo. That's the lowest bar in the building, and part of that crowd stepped straight over it.
One Argentine outlet described him being carried off "under a shower of applause" rather than boos. That's the opposite of everything the English-language, broadcast-based coverage said, and it reads like a home-market softening of a bad scene. It doesn't rescue the crowd, and it doesn't make the eyewitness alibi true.
Pedro Neto scored twice, once inside the opening minute of the second half, and Chelsea walked out with a clean sheet, their first since January. That's why Everton lost. The injury to their goalkeeper had nothing to do with it. There's no sporting grievance to hide behind either.
Stop trying to launder it. The crowd that booed a man in a neck brace doesn't get to borrow Chelsea's supporters as a scapegoat. They booed, and it's on camera. That was gutless.
