the stretcher

Second half of Italy vs. Paraguay. After the tying goal, Italy takes control of the field and pushes Paraguay back to its own half. Six minutes before the end of the match, the Paraguayan midfielder Jonathan Santana is lying down, near the side-line. No idea why. He’s waving his hands, and the referee stops the play and approaches him. We all approach him. Santana says something. He also gestures in a very peculiar way. It looks like he’s asking for the stretcher. He points to his leg and conveys, sure enough, that he would like to have the stretcher.
When a game is about to end and your team desperately needs to keep the score as is, and the opposing team is attacking at full swing, there’s nothing better than watching the referee lift his arm and order the stretcher to come in. "Let’s hope the injury is nothing serious," one thinks immediately, "but thank God!" Because between the emergency team getting there, seeing what’s wrong with the player and getting out, two or three minutes can go by and, more importantly, the game cools down.
Santana’s request is interesting because nowadays players know that referees won’t call in the stretcher unless they’ve witnessed a really tough tackle or a nasty-looking cramp.
In the late seventies, however, when I used to go to the stadium with my father, the stretcher coming in to the field was a very common occurence; what’s more, our stadium would have the four shortest, heaviest guys they could hire carrying it. They’d come out of some corner of the stadium, and even though they were running, it looked like they didn’t gain any terrain. It was a moment from the circus. The followers of the visiting team would see that and head straight to the exits.
The referee of Italy-Paraguay, Benito Archundia Téllez of Mexico, of course rejected Santana’s request, and the Paraguayans had to keep on protecting their goal with the ball in play.