Football fans have been known to throw everything from coins and lighters to cups of beer on the pitch during matches, but you rarely see them chucking crutches. Upset by their club's recent form, Racing fans threw a bunch of them onto the pitch during a Copa Argentina match against fourth-division club Sarmiento as a form of protest.
Though Racing went on to beat Sarmiento 2-0, they're near the bottom of the Clausura table and most recently lost a derby match against Independiente that resulted in their manager resigning and striker Teo Gutierrez kicked off the squad for threatening teammates with a paintball gun after they got angry with him for getting sent off during the game. So, fans decided to bring a load of crutches and throw them early in the match, forcing play to be halted while players and officials collected them.
From Reuters:
"The fans' reaction is logical in a country that experiences football [in the exaggerated] way we do here, but I hope they'll support us as they always have," Racing's new coach Luis Zubeldia told reporters.
Media said it was not clear how fans had got away with taking a large number of crutches into the ground in Resistencia.
Logical? Even in a football mad country like Argentina, it's hard to figure how throwing crutches of all things is a logical reaction to an underperforming team. Of course, the most obvious explanation for how they got the crutches into the stadium would be by pretending to use them. Hopefully that's what they did because smuggling them in would've been very painful.
