Forever more, Joël Veltman will be known as the dickhead who did this.
In the heat of battle, footballers are liable to do anything but surely there is no place on the pitch for such unsportsmanlike behaviour.
Veltman has solidified his own personal section in football’s hall of shame with this scumbag move during Ajax’s 2-0 victory over Sparta Rotterdam on Sunday that will make him public enemy number one at every away game for the foreseeable future.
https://twitter.com/DutchGoalsAMore/status/830795345055596544
With Ajax leading 2-0 at home, Veltman took possession of the ball out on the right flank before spotting that teammate Bertrand Traoré was down, injured and apparently in need of treatment.
Veltman pointed at his stricken comrade, prompting an opposition player to turn around with the expectation that the game was set to be halted.
Quite literally every spectator in the stadium anticipated a break in play but they underestimated the opportunistic scummy nature of the Dutch international, who saw his chance to steal a yard of space and took the ball away.
Thankfully the move didn’t result in so much as a chance for Veltman but perhaps he’d want to revise his opinion on the matter because his reaction was perhaps more dicky than the act itself.
“I was just being clever,” Veltman told Metro.
“Bertrand went down and I thought to myself ‘I am going to use this to my advantage’. I pretended to kick the ball out of play, but when my opponent looked behind him, I just went past him instead.
“I know that it was perhaps not the most beautiful thing to do, but it was just something clever, nothing more. I can have a good laugh about it.
“My team-mates told me in the dressing room that they would have kicked me hard had I pulled off something like this against one of them… What would I have done had my cross resulted in a goal? A goal is a goal!
“I think people are exaggerating all this a bit. It was not like I found myself one-on-one with the goalkeeper after it.”
Some people!
