Heard about this story from a friend and found the CBC article about it fairly quickly. The long and the short of it is that during an outdoor game a player became angry because he thought he was fouled, so he stomped his opponent’s head and neck while he lay on the ground. Scott Keast, the victim of the assault, has been unable to work since the incident on July 13th, and also still has trouble swallowing and speaking. The attack, which has now seen the player officially charged with assault and awaiting an October court date, only earned him a YELLOW card at the time. For anyone not up on the rules, that means for a brazenly open attack that could have left Scott Keast in even worse shape than he ended up in, the player wasn’t even ejected from the game.

This brings up two problems. People might expect, based on my history of going after “the man” that the biggest bone I have to pick would be with the MSA and what must have been some terrible reffing. Actually though what gets me about stories like these is the fact that someone asked this guy to play for their team. What the hell? This is why people have a low opinion of soccer and guess what my fellow players, we are doing it to ourselves. I’ve put together a lot of teams, I’ve never been so short of guys I think to myself “Well, I’ll ask Phil, sure he’s got a little anger problem that tends to escalate to neck stomping, but a player is a player…”. Don’t ask assholes to play with you. That is all.

Image Craddock Fouling Originally uploaded by TGIGreeny