Football News: Two football matches experience life threatening incidents
Football has to be the world’s most interesting sport; with its intense popularity around the globe and the millions who play it and watch it all over, it looks like not even on pitch violence or life-threatening instances can
stop its reign at the top. Recently two very intense and separate incidents took place in different parts of the world; the one uniting factor between the two though was the fact that they both took place on a football pitch. In Turkey during a match a manager
was stabbed six times by his own brother as he was trying to oversee a match in progress. The other incident took place in the Netherlands when a player from the club Ajax had a heart attack and had to be revived on the pitch.
The first incident of the two mentioned above took place during a league match in Turkey. Mersin Idmanyurdu and Samsunspor were locked deep in battle against each other when a man jumped out of the stands and stabbed the coach
of Mersin Idmanyurdu, Yuksel Yesilova, six times in the stomach and hip. This unbelievable incident left the coach with injuries that meant the coach had to be taken straight to the hospital, even though fortunately the injuries sustained weren’t fatal. It
turns out that the attacker was the coach’s own brother and because of some ongoing family dispute he became so incensed with his brother that he tried to kill him. Yuksel Yesilova was released some time later, while the game was called off because of the
vicious attack. The incident sent the entire Turkish football world into a state of shock.
The second incident that took place this week happened in the Netherlands during an Ajax reserve game. Ajax midfielder Evander Sno suffered a suspected heart attack during the game and had to be resuscitated on the pitch. After
resuscitation the player was rushed to the hospital. It was a very frightening incident for the other players because Sno was very close to dying right in front of them. Players getting heart attacks is not a rare phenomenon in the game of football, as many
players before Sno have suffered massive heart attacks and some have even died while playing. Recent examples from this year are Guran Tunjic, who died of a heart attack during a game and Endurance Idahor, who suffered a heart attack and died in the ambulance
on the way to the hospital. It seems that even at a very young age footballers can put so much pressure on their hearts that they cannot take the strain and sometimes give out and stop functioning. Sometimes the players get lucky like in Sno’s case, but sometimes
they do not survive.
Football is a fascinating game. It has violence, pain, emotion, stress and sometimes death. It seems the sport has the ability to bring out the best and worst in people. Players sometimes perform heroic acts for their countries
and at other times fail miserably. Fans sometimes support their teams till the end and sometimes engage in such stupid acts of hooliganism that one wonders if they are even proper functioning humans. Football is the world’s greatest sport and because of this
reason, it has a polarising effect.
Hopefully we will be able to get past the on pitch violence in the years to come. Even though this was a very strange and isolated incident, it just showed that violence can and does occur on a football pitch from time to time.
With better training and crowd control policies we might be able to rid the sport of violence. With regards to players suddenly getting heart attacks, better medical testing prior to games should be introduced to rule out any existing heart conditions in players.
Even though the on pitch actions of the medical staff saved the life of Sno, others are not so lucky. Extra medical training and better funding for the sports’ medical staff might also help in this regard. Hopefully with these measures in place we will not
have to see any more coaches getting stabbed or players collapsing to their deaths on the football pitch.
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