Greek stretcher bearers toss time waster around, inspire team to comeback win

Down a goal to visiting Ergotelis in their second half of their Greek second division match, all of AE Larissa began to get a little impatient. Even their stretcher bearers. So when Ergotelis’ Leonardo Koutris went down with an injury in the 66th minute, there were suspicions that he might be faking it to waste time.

The fans whistled and the stadium’s stretcher bearers tried to hurry him off the pitch as quickly as possible, so the match could continue. In doing so, they dumped Koutris onto the stretcher without warning and tried to carry him while running. This proved difficult, however, causing one of the stretcher bearers to fall and drop Koutris in the process. Then, while trying to pick the player back up, he fell again, causing him to drive his head into Koutris’ midsection.

Finally, they got him off to the side with everyone a little worse for wear. Though Koutris seemed more concerned with complaining to the ref and trying to be as much of a dead weight as possible as he was being unceremoniously hauled off, perhaps indicating that he wasn’t actually hurt, he was substituted after this, so who knows.

But the uncoordinated effort from the stretcher bearers did inspire AE Larissa, as they scored twice in the final minutes of the game to win 2-1.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.