Orava confident of full recovery for David Beckham, but World Cup is off the table

Star's wife Victoria to arrive in Turku today

Sakari Orava

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Orthopaedic specialist Sakari Orava, who operated on the ruptured achilles tendon of footballing icon David Beckham on Monday evening in Turku, declared that the one-hour procedure went smoothly and that he was confident Beckham would make a full recovery.
     
However, the nature of the injury - Beckham's left achilles tendon was cut right through and required stitching back together - effectively rules out the player's taking anything but a token or ambassadorial role in the World Cup finals in South Africa in June.
      The time-frame is quite firmly against this: the tournament begins in mid-June and the recovery period is at least four to five months before full fitness can be restored.
      It will be a full three months, possibly longer, before the ankle is in the sort of condition that will allow for running and light training.
      The doctor has enough experience of similar sports injuries in a long and distinguished career to be able to make such calls, but he acknowledged that in few previous cases had he been surrounded by quite so much press attention while he worked on a patient.
     
Orava said on Tuesday that the 34-year-old midfielder would remain in the Mehiläinen private clinic in Turku for another night.
      He met with the player again on Tuesday morning and found him in good spirits and not in any pain.
      Beckham is expected to fly home to Los Angeles via London on Wednesday. Before then Orava will inspect his leg another time and change the dressings.
      Beckham will have to learn to walk on crutches, and will also need to learn to limp properly so as not to damage his left leg.
     
According to the player's press aide, Beckham's wife Victoria will be arriving in Turku today to provide support for her husband, who will naturally be bitterly disappointed at missing out on the opportunity to add to his 115 caps for England and become the first English player to appear in four consecutive World Cup tournaments.
      The couple's three children will not accompany Victoria Beckham to Finland, and at present the Finnish aviation authorities have given no time for her arrival, as a means of warding off the anticipated scrum of people wishing to get a sighting of the former Spice Girls singer.
     
Beckham's own arrival in Turku was also a media event on a large scale, at least in Finnish terms, with a crowd of people on the perimeter of the airport to watch the private jet come in to land, and a still-larger crowd outside the clinic in Turku when Beckham's limousine arrived at the entrance to the underground car park.
      Anyone who had gone in hopes of securing the star's autograph were probably out of luck: Beckham had other things on his mind than gratifying his fans.
     
Sunday's injury to David Beckham is a personal tragedy, and has also been seen as a blow to England's World Cup hopes, albeit that he would probably not have been a key player in England coach Fabio Capello's starting XI.
      It will also be a disappointment to the organisers of the tournament, in the sense that Beckham has star quality and brand-recognition above and beyond nearly all other footballers worldwide.
      By the same token, always assuming his career is not over and he is able to continue playing either for Los Angeles Galaxy or AC Milan, Finland comes out of all this as one of the few winners: it would be very hard to acquire the sort of positive publicity in the international media that was generated by this incident in any other way.
     
This did not prevent the usual suspects from grumbling on Internet message boards that the media interest in Beckham's travails was a waste of time, or - somewhat quixotically - that the player's operation in a private clinic was somehow adding to the queue of national health service patients.
      Whilst most realised the positives to be taken from the fact that a professional sportsman with practically unlimited funds would choose to fly straight to Finland for treatment, since it is a reflection of the quality of the care to be expected, there were inevitably those who found something to grumble about.
      Those who carped that little Finland was grovelling on its knees once again before an overpaid star seemed to forget that the story was a major international news item all over the world: David Beckham's arrival, even at very short notice, was followed by journalists and cameramen from many countries, and his injury and treatment was covered extensively on TV news channels worldwide.
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  David Beckham to face ankle surgery today in Turku (15.3.2010)

See also:
  Sakari Orava - court surgeon to the sporting glitterati (16.3.2010)

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