With Leather would like to celebrate four straight months of stories about butthole soccer fans trying to hurt players with explosives! The streak started back in September, when a guy lobbed a grenade onto the field and almost took off a player’s hand. That was one-upped in October by fans throwing firecrackers at an injured player, and quickly followed by a goalkeeper having his eardrums exploded by a bomb (and stadium arson!) in November.

December almost passed us by without anybody being ASSAULTED BY BOMBS FOR PLAYING SOCCER, but with only four months left in the month, Turkish fans have kept the horrible dream alive.

Galatasaray striker Burak Yilmaz, who used to play for Trabzonspor, was struck in the head by a foreign object (possibly a water bottle) and dropped to the ground. As Trabzonspor defender Giray Kacar went to check on him, a smoke bomb went off near Yilmaz’s rear end. (via Holdout Sports)

Video is below.

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I’m not going to call them “grenades” anymore because people on the Internet know way too much about the semantics of what is and isn’t a grenade (“grenades have shrapnel!”), but this is the third story in two months we’ve written about soccer fans indiscriminately tossing explosives at soccer players, and I’ve got to ask … why is this a thing? Seriously, why are you trying to bomb the soccer guys?

The first story happened in Iran, where a player almost lost a hand disposing of what he thought was tossed garbage. A month later, a player gets injured during a Cypriot soccer match and fans throw firecrackers at him to “teach him a lesson” about not taunting them. Now, a first-division soccer match in Argentina gets suspended because somebody threw a bomb at a goalkeeper and nearly exploded his eardrums.

Again, why is this a thing? I guess “insanity” is a viable excuse, or maybe a surplus of bombs and nobody around but soccer players to murder, but can’t we find a way to riot about soccer without bombs and walls of flame? Jesus Christ, soccer, come on.

[h/t to Larry Brown Sports]

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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So, uh, this happened.

During a local club match in Isfahan, Iran some spectators threw a hand grenade on field, a player found it and thought it was some other object and threw it on sidelines just in time, if he had done this a few seconds later his hand would have been blasted.The game was called off and police have started investigating this case.

In case you somehow did not fixate on that blockquote for 20 minutes, SOMEBODY THREW A GRENADE ON THE FIELD DURING A SOCCER GAME. And sure, maybe I’m just a sheltered American guy who doesn’t know the hardships of the world or whatever and stuff like this happens every day, but stuff like this doesn’t happen every day because holy shit a dude threw a grenade onto the field during a soccer game.

Video of a guy seriously throwing a goddamn grenade onto the field during a soccer game is after the jump.

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Normally I leave the television you can write about without expressed, written consent to Warming Glow, but the first episode of ‘StuntBusters’ debuts Tuesday night on Speed and I felt it contained the right amounts of things exploding and women in heels surfing the hoods of cars to justify itself as a sports recommendation.

If the headline synopsis didn’t do it for you, perhaps the hilariously-direct “viewers can expect to see us blowin’ up cars” in the clip will win you over. Worst case scenario, you’ll watch it and go “oh wow who is this blonde lady” and google “Vanessa Vander Pluym” for the next forty minutes*.

A quick synopsis from the official website:

Stuntbusters is going to explore and explode motoring myths as we reveal the facts and figures behind the latest, fastest and hottest automotive technology on earth! Join our two fearless human crash test dummy stunt drivers, Garrett Hammond and Vanessa Vander Pluym, as they take it to the redline and beyond using our high-tech test lab equipped with cutting edge automotive technology and eye-popping graphic interfaces. Each high-octane experiment will be captured at one thousand frames per second; allowing us to slow the action down and dive into the physics behind the vehicular carnage!

I have it on good review-copy authority that future episodes of the show feature men on fire, people shooting guns at cars to make them explode (for science!) and a standard 99% chance of someone blowing something up and walking away from it without looking back. For science. I know that sometimes I walk a progressive line with this blog, but I hope we never get to the point where beautiful people firing rifles into gas tanks becomes a thing we don’t want to see.

For archiving reasons I am re-purposing this website as a chart for all the times this show makes me go “oh sh*t” at my television.

*She played Stacy in the ‘Parks and Recreation’ episode ‘The Banquet’!

These things are called “V8 Supercars,” and they’re sort of like the Australian version of NASCAR, only they aren’t piloted by Larry the Driving Guy and can turn both left and right. What you see here, specifically, is an exploding V8 Supercar and an Australian guy trying to escape a bunch of fire without dying. I guess “resistance to fire” isn’t one of your Supercar’s super powers. The last time I saw a car explode like that it had my beautiful teenage Italian bride inside.

The driver in question is Karl Reindler, Australian superdriver, and he managed to escape the explosion with only minor burns. If that’d been an American guy driving he would’ve hurt himself before the car blew up.

[Viva SBN by way of Jay Busbee]