THE PHYSIOTHERAPIST:A radio call turned a physio's life upside down, writes Johnny Watterson

THERE WAS a call over the radio from Dean Richards. “Does anyone have any blood?” Never less than prepared, Steph Brennan, the Harlequins club physiotherapist, did. Brennan had bought the capsules in a joke shop in Clapham Junction in London for £3.95 as it was not the first time that Harlequins staff had heard Richards make such an inquiry. Brennan could not remember if he had put down the amount as an expense to the club or not.

Richards instructed Brennan that Tom Williams was to come off with a fake blood injury. The moment he decided not to question the charismatic head coach and accepted to follow Richards’ command, his career as a physiotherapist with Harlequins, with the RFU, who had offered him a job on the Monday prior to the match and with the game of rugby, was in tatters.

That came about quite simply when Williams, in a supplementary statement to the ERC Independent Appeals Committee, sang like the proverbial canary about the entire artifice of his first statement. Having run out of wriggle room Brennan felt the gun being placed to his head.

He told the ERC Independent Appeals Committee that “he prayed that the club would not win the match as he knew what they had done (using the blood capsule) was wrong” and that he “could not believe that Mr Richards brought Nick Evans (place kicker) back on the pitch when he could not kick.”

Brennan’s spellbinding testimony into the minutiae of what appears to be casual and normal cheating procedures might leave many rugby sports physiotherapists quaking in their boots. His story is one of being a link in a chain of subterfuge and, more catastrophically for his career, one of grave error and personal misjudgment under instruction from the authoritarian Richards in the quarter-final of a European Cup match.

Brennan passed the blood capsule to Williams while all eyes were on Mike Brown who was taking a Harlequins penalty.

He told Williams “to do the right thing” and admitted that “he meant Williams should use the blood capsule”. The next thing Brennan noticed was Williams under the posts holding his head, which prompted a thought in the physiotherapist’s mind of “how ironic if this guy is actually injured now”. Brennan also told the appeals committee that “(name supplied) was asked to use a blood capsule in the season before getting promoted to the Premier Division, (name supplied) in the 2007/2008 season and also (name supplied) in the same season.”

In all he claims to remember five occasions in total, when Richards instructed that a blood injury be fabricated. Occasionally he used fake blood from a bottle on a piece of gauze and applied it to the player’s body. Furthermore Brennan claims that he “asked him (Richards) to stop using blood capsules but three months later he received another message on his radio asking for a blood injury to be fabricated and the same thing happened”.

To compound matters, when the former policeman, Richards, asked Brennan to fill out statements about the incident for himself as well as Williams and Evans he did so using the same black biro and the same hand-writing in all three drafts. Brennan claims it was done in order “to keep the statements consistent” as some medical knowledge was required.

The appeals committee did not believe this reason was credible. Richards then allegedly typed up those original statements, tweaking them. All three were signed in the same room at the same time by Brennan, Williams and Evans.

Brennan, who has been banned from the game for two years for misconduct, advised the appeals committee “that his motivations in assisting with the cover-up were to protect himself, Dr Chapman (the team doctor) and Williams.”

It is a ragged end to a promising career, but it is not yet over for the remorseful physiotherapist, who has agreed to make himself available for further questioning as the ERC continue their investigations into the other fabricated blood injuries. Brennan has apologised for the trouble he has caused and has conceded that he “brought the game and his profession into disrepute and that his actions amounted to no more than cheating”.