Livorno player dies of heart attack

Livorno's Piermario Morosini is helped by doctors as he is carried on a stretcher during their Serie B soccer match against Pescara at the Adriatico stadium in Pescara April 14, 2012. [Photo/Agencies]

ROME - All Italian matches scheduled in the weekend were suspended after Livorno midfielder Piermario Morosini died on Saturday from a heart attack during a Serie B match, local media said.

A crowd of players and supporters shouted and cried outside a hospital in Pescara, a city in central Italy, when cardiologist Edoardo De Blasio confirmed the death of the 25-year-old.

Morosini began to stagger in the 31st minute of the Pescara-Livorno match and then fell to the ground.

Medical staff tried to revive the player and then rushed him to the hospital, but Morosini's conditions were already too desperate to save him, doctors said.

It was only the latest of a long series of sudden deaths in the sport world. A few days ago, another Italian, former Olympic volleyball silver medalist Vigor Bovolenta, died of a heart attack during a second-tier league game.

The Pescara accident aroused a debate on local media, as some experts denounced the ambulance was blocked for some minutes by a parked car thus arrived too late to help the unfortunate player on the spot.

An investigation was held over the case, local media said in the late afternoon.

"Nowadays it is anachronistic to have a defibrillator on an ambulance which has difficulties in arriving fast enough," cardiologist Daniela Aschieri told Rai state television.

Aschieri has developed the first European project for an "early defibrillation" to prevent sudden deaths due to cardiac arrest.

"Defibrillator is a fundamental saving-life instrument, not expensive and that every person can easily handle," the doctor said adding every minute lost in first aid means 10 percent less of probabilities to save a life.

"This instrument should be available not only on ambulances, but on the benches of all matches, including children ones," she stressed.