Wayne Shaw and pie-gate, eat your heart out. Michiel Kramer and croquette-gate are the new flavor of the month for food-related football bans.
Kramer, a decent 29-year-old striker for Feyenoord, was on the substitute’s bench for a cup match against SC Heracles Almelo on Thursday when cameras caught him snacking on a delicious-looking croquette. Manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst did not take kindly to this impudent action and suspended Kramer for Sunday’s league match against Roda JC Kerkrade.
It’s hard to blame Kramer for croquette-gate. Dutch kroketten are delectable, far superior to British pies. (To be fair, just about everything is better than any food or drink in England.) If offered one right now but told I’d be suspended from work if I ate it, I’d probably still eat it.
Croquette-gate. Photo: @ipeadia | Twitter
But one does not fuck with van Bronckhorst. The Feyenoord coach was once a brilliant player with Arsenal, Barcelona and Feyenoord and scored one of the best World Cup goals of all time in a 3-2 semifinal win over Uruguay in 2010.
Wayne Shaw received a much stiffer punishment for pie-gate, earning a two-month ban (he didn’t have a team anyway) and a $489 fine for eating a pie in a cup match against Arsenal last season. Part of this was because he purposefully ate the pie after a British bookmaker offered odds on the corpulent keeper doing so during the match.
Kramer, a lanky, 6-5 forward rated 72 in FIFA, also received an undisclosed fine, but his ban of just one match makes me think it was probably worth it to scarf down that breaded beauty.
While it’s funny to make fun of an overweight goalie eating something the British call a pie, I empathize with a skinny striker eating a croquette. Van Bronckhorst probably just handed down the ban because he was jealous he wasn’t offered a bite.
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