In the grand tradition of somebody throwing a grenade at soccer players comes this clip from Sunday’s match between Anorthosis and Omonia Nicosia, wherein a player gets injured and somebody in the crowd throws firecrackers at him. No, you read that right: he wasn’t injured when someone threw firecrackers at him, he was already injured and on the ground with a bunch of people huddling over him, then the firecrackers were thrown. I know, right?

One of the most interesting things about running a blog is observing how difficult it is to get people on the Internet to believe anything. If you post a picture of Scarlett Johansson naked on a bed and she says it’s her, people call it fake and start dissecting it by angles to prove it. If she says it isn’t her, they use those same angles to find matching lightswitches and wallpaper prints to verify that she was AT THAT SAME HOTEL ONCE so it HAD to be her. If you post a video of someone throwing a grenade onto a soccer field, people say it was enhanced with CGI (no, really) and explain how grenades have shrapnel, so while this may have been an explosive it wasn’t a grenade, because blah blah something something Dwight Schrute. This video already has its detractors, with people saying the smoke and explosion were scripted, and the players are just diving and playing it up. You know, because a Cypriot football match needs a SOMEONE TRIED TO EXPLODE US narrative.

That said, explanations as to why someone would toss explosives at an injured player are already popping up in the comments section, so I’ll let a couple of psychotic, asshole soccer fans explain it themselves:

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if you don’t understand why he’s doing this, then you don’t understand tennis.

That’s a comment from YouTube user thefinnman92, describing this video of Cyprian tennis player Marcos Baghdatis destroying four consecutive tennis racquets between sets to help him emotionally get through an impending round two Australian Open loss to Stanislas Wawrinka. The lesson here? I don’t understand tennis. Also, it sucks to lose anything to a guy named Stanislas.

Not that I don’t understand losing control of your good mind and Nard-dogging a hole in the wall, but those things are expensive. Maybe when you’re the 44th best player in the world they send them to you in the mail with samples of Tide. Regardless, as a longtime baseball fan my first thought when a pitcher wanders into the dugout and starts lobbing Gatorade coolers and whipping bats is to side-eye the hell out of him and cut him from my fantasy team before he breaks his hand.

Set analysis courtesy of Bill Hanstock at SB Nation:

Baghdatis went on to lose the match in four sets, 7-6, 6-4, 5-7, 6-1. I can only assume that the final set was 6-1 because Baghdatis was out of racquets and had to go bare-handed.

/cuts Baghdatis from tennis fantasy team