Greetings from the Dutch division, where a player ostensibly dies and play goes on as if he wasn’t there. That might sound like a bit of an over reaction but once you see Cas Peters of De Graafschap get cracked in the head by his own teammate’s shot, and see how his teammates end up playing harder once he’s down, you’ll understand.
Everyone blatantly ignores Peters, even the referees — who I thought were supposed to immediately halt the game in the case of a head injury, which this clearly was.
You can see in the slow motion replay that immediately after De Graafschap’s Bryan Smeets drills a thunderbolt into the back of Peter’s head, he is not concerned about what he has just done; he is exasperated that his shot was blocked. His fellow teammates follows suit and continues to attack like their lives depend on it. The ball even rolls over a flat-on-his-stomach Peters and no one thinks twice about shooting.
Photo: YouTube
That’s what life at the bottom of the table will do to you.
After their eventually 6-3 defeat in this match — yes PSV Eindhoven would score twice more after this debacle — De Graafschap are in dead last in the Eredivisie. They haven’t won a game all season; they have 2 points and a goal differential of -19. They scored an absurd 33% of all of their goals in this one game, 3 months into the season, and still lost.
To put that last bit into perspective, 3rd place PSV has scored 29 goals through their victory over De Graafschap. If they score 13 goals in their next game and lose, by the percentages that loss still wouldn’t be as monumental of a loss as De Graafschap’s.
Apparently, it’s easy for teammates to ignore a dead man when the threat of relegation has made them all dead men walking.
PS: here’s the rest of the highlights. It gets pretty ugly for De Graafschap, but you probably could've guessed that.
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