Bradford City football fans are being urged to dig deep in aid of the Bradford Millennium Scanner Appeal.

Appeal organisers hope to raise thousands of pounds in a collection at Valley Parade on Saturday before the game against Wolverhampton Wanderers.

The Bantams are backing the appeal, which will give more than 2,500 patients each year access to a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner at Bradford Royal Infirmary, after seeing the benefits of the technology on City players.

Most of the squad have had scans to examine the extent of soft tissue damage mainly with knee, ankle and groin injuries which are extremely common.

Scores of amateur sports people in the Bradford district could get easy access to the scanner if the T&A-backed appeal hits its target.

Among players scanned recently using the technology are striker Gordon Watson and defenders Wayne Jacobs and Ashley Westwood.

Central defender Darren Moore had a scan on an injured knee last week.

"The scanner is like a tube which is only two or three feet high and wide," he said.

"You slide your body in and then you have to remain still while the scanner does its work.

"My scan took a good hour and a half. They make you as comfortable as possible, give you some headphones and you just have to relax.

"In my case, I have a bruised knee and some tendonitis and the scan was to find out what damage had been done and what the problem was.

"It is a very useful piece of equipment and all sorts of sports people use it."

Club surgeon Steve Bollen, who is also a consultant orthopaedic surgeon specialising in sport injuries at BRI, said he had a good idea of the type of injuries suffered by players but MRI technology gave him certainty.

"It's an invaluable aid to diagnosis," he said.

"Usually I tend to have a pretty good idea what the diagnosis is, which it confirms, or to exclude some other problem which could possibly cause a particular symptom.

"There is nothing else for these types of injuries which gets such images."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.