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Football

25th Mar 2018

Player nearly decapitates opponent with horror tackle and then complains about red card

He almost took his head off

Reuben Pinder

Ouch!

Every now and then, footballers mistime tackles. It happens. You slide in a couple of seconds late, you catch your man, you hold your hand up and you carry on.

Occasionally you might catch an opponent with your elbow while jumping for a header, it happens. You might even take someone down on purpose. Football is a contact sport, and should be played as such. But very rarely does anything quite as violent as this tackle in the Los Andes vs Club Atlético Brown fixture on Saturday.

Martín Minadevino was shown a red card after half an hour for – and this is not an exaggeration – almost decapitating an opponent. He seemed to have no awareness of his surroundings, as he lifted his foot to head height and caught in the face.

Incredibly, he complained to the referee that the tackle did not merit a red card.

You’d hope the Argentine governing body hand out a long ban at the very least for this act of recklessness – some people are going as far as saying the tackle merits a prison sentence, although definitely tongue-in-cheekly.

And hopefully the victim of this horror challenge makes a quick recovery and escapes without any major injury.