Thursday, March 08, 2007

Foul? I'll show you a foul!

Let's pretend for a moment that you're watching a indoor soccer match. You've got the team that you're cheering for, and you watch as a member of the opposing team commits a foul against one of your players. The fouled player could very well be related to you somehow. What do you do?

Ok, got your answer? Now let's pretend that you're watching a bunch of 8-year-olds playing in this soccer game. How do you react now?

Well, a 42-year-old man in Germany decided that the officials weren't doing enough by simply waving their little yellow and/or red cards around when fouls were commited. He decided to charge the field and deliver a karate kick to the antagonist, before being pounced on by other spectators who quickly rushed the field to stop further violence. The child suffered some bruises and grazes, while the man suffered a severe blow to his ego, by realizing that his karate kick did nothing more than graze an 8-year-old. Of course, to show that the 42-year-old isn't the only one with a less-than-substantial grasp on reality, the police aren't sure yet if he should be charged over the incident.

Ultimately, something like this can really only happen in a country where soccer has a rabid following. In the United States, we just can't get ourselves that worked up over some children kicking a ball around a field. Heck, we can barely get excited over grown adults with years of experience doing it. Although it is somewhat comforting to see that insane (potential) relatives are not simply an American thing. We may have a larger portion of that particular pie, but at least we can rest easy knowing that Germany has at least one.

And, being that this is the CSM, we've even found a bright side to this whole story, aside from the fact that the child wasn't seriously injured. If the German man had actually been Chuck Norris in some clever disguise, the poor child would've suffered far worse than bruises and scrapes. In fact, with one well-placed roundhouse kick, Chuck Norris could've sent reverberations through the family's bloodlines, causing even his great-great-grandparents to wink out of existence, or at least induce splitting headaches all the way down the maternal line.

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