Glenrothes FC boss Paul Beveridge hits out at 'two to three-hour ambulance wait' after player suffers agonising knee injury

Jackson twisted his knee after going in for a full blooded 50/50 challenge with a Bathgate opponent, with his manager miffed at a delayed response from the emergency services which even resulted in the player being driven to hospital by club secretary Robbie Penman.

“After Liam was stretchered off we called an ambulance and the control room said not to move him,” Beveridge said. “So we were waiting two or three hours for an ambulance.

"Then it turned up and the guy said: ‘Can you not just drive him home?’ I wasn’t impressed. It was as if they just couldn’t be bothered.

"They had a quick look at him and said: ‘You may as well just take him in the car’. They didn’t give him any pain relief or anything. It wasn’t great.

“We could have driven Liam to hospital straight away but they told us not to move him so we kept him in the physio room, kept him warm.

"Liam was in major pain, he’d only had a couple of paracetemol. He couldn’t really walk, couldn’t put any weight on it and he was struggling to move it. He now wishes he could have got in a car earlier rather than hanging about for a couple of hours, still soaking, still cold. For the ambulance to come and then the guy to say that, it seemed like a waste of time.

"I knew it was a sore one when I saw Liam go down. At the hospital he was told it was a grade two, or possibly three, MCL injury.

"He is waiting to see a specialist to find out exactly what it is and what he’ll need.

"Hopefully it will not need surgery but he’s had that injury before and he was out for about a year the last time. Hopefully it’s not as bad this time.”

A Scottish Ambulance Service spokesman responded by saying: “While we are limited in what we can say because of patient confidentiality, we can confirm we received a non-immediately life-threatening call at 3pm on Saturday during a period of significant demand caused by Storm Boelo, which impacted large parts of Scotland.

"Our Ambulance Control Centre did everything possible to dispatch an ambulance as quickly as possible, but none were immediately available as crews were responding to higher priority calls. We would like to apologise for any distress caused.”

Away from Jackson’s injury nightmare, Glenrothes lost the match 3-2 in a topsy-turvy contest which leaves them third bottom on 10 points from 12 games.

Trailing 2-0 at half-time, Glens pulled it back to 2-2 with goals by Michael Beagley and Jack Brown, but conceded a late sickener.

Beveridge said: “When we came back to 2-2 I thought: ‘There’s only one team going to win this now’. I fully expected us to go on and score another one or two because all momentum was with us.

“Michael Beagley took his goal well and the build-up to the second one was a decent move. We were the better team at the time but then we kind of stopped doing what had got us back into the game.

"We were then hit by another poor goal. Every goal we lost was poor.

"If we’d defended properly we would have won comfortably but that’s been our Achilles heel for the majority of the season, not defending the box properly. If you keep conceding goals – especially cheap goals – you are not going to win games.

"It seems like we’ve got to fight for our goals but we seem to give opposition teams goals which we really need to start learning from, which we’ve not done yet. That needs to come soon.”

Glens visit Heriot-Watt University in the league this Saturday in a 3pm kick-off.