Wales national team boss Gary Speed has said that he and his staff certainly did not call Tottenham 'incompetent amateurs'. There has been some uproar following the reported hamstring injury sustained by Gareth Bale at Welsh training ahead of Saturday's Euro2012 qualifier against England.
In fact, the star winger came to Cardiff with the problem from Tottenham and had not trained with the Welsh team before being ruled out by Speed and his medical team.
Wales assistant Raymond Verheijen posted on his Twitter page: "This morning there will be an official statement by Gary Speed about the situation with Gareth Bale. The incompetent amateurs struck again!" which was followed by: "Funny to read about Gareth Bale injuring his hamstring in training yesterday.....as he did not train at all yesterday."
But Speed insists the comments were not directed at Spurs, indicating that the words may have been aimed at the press.
"In no way did it refer to Tottenham, that is a given," he said. "I can understand it might be portrayed that it was, but the fact it was reported Gareth did his hamstring in training yesterday, when he didn't train yesterday, was the incompetent bit.
"We do take a lot of time and effort to make sure our players are right so when something is reported like that that is incorrect, it is not right.
"That is where the confusion on that side has come from.
"Gareth reported from Spurs with stiffness. We left him out of training Sunday and Monday just to assess him and put him through the recovery process," he added.
"He did the warm-up Tuesday morning and he still felt a bit of tightness in his hamstring, so we took him off.
"He didn't train Wednesday so we took him for a scan. The results came back that he has an injury there. I think you can tell on scans now, with the fluid and the blood, that it was an injury from last week.
"We do our utmost here to look after players and Gareth is the most important person in this scenario, so it was decided he wouldn't play Saturday."
