“Watch this, Lisa. You can actually pinpoint the second when his leg snaps in half. Aaaaaand….now!”
Few football fans in Europe had heard of Luis Garrido before this week. Well, they’ve certainly heard of him now. In fact, some of us feel as if we’ve heard a little too much. Some of us, in fact, only have to see his name on our screens now and we can hear the crack of broken bone and the snap of unyielding tendon. Some of us have upsettingly vivid imaginations.
Garrido, as a professional footballer of international standard, would have grown up hoping that one day everyone would know his name. He probably didn’t envisage that it would be for something like this. The Honduran midfielder tangled with a Mexican opponent on Tuesday night and then…well…and then bad stuff happened. From what can be ascertained from the photographs, Javier Aquino fell onto Garrdio’s leg and Garrido’s leg bent in a way that really should not be possible. Football being football, Aquino did his best to make it appear that he was the injured party before horrifically obvious evidence to the contrary blew his argument straight out of our dimension.
It’s possible that you might be able to describe the incident with more detail and accuracy than that. You may have summoned up the courage to watch the Vine. And it’s almost certain that you were given the option. After all, just about everybody on the internet sent it whizzing around the world on Tuesday night, cackling with glee as they slapped their RT buttons, merrily applying their ‘like’ to the link. A nice little heart to signify their love for it. Yeah, click the heart. Click it. The man’s leg just popped like a cheap Christmas cracker. Click it. The least you can do is like it. What’s not to like?
It’s not the act of viewing Garrdio’s injury that is the sin. We’re all a little bit curious as to the limitations of the human body and, more pertinently, what it looks like when those limitations are breached. Some school kids always gravitate towards the darker, more graphic books in the library, lingering on the execution pages of history books or staring agape at the creativity of the artist tasked with illustrating the Legend of St George. Most of us are at least a little bit bloodthirsty. But we don’t have to be so fucking jubilant about it.
Twitter now blasts your attached images onto your followers’ timeline, so you don’t even get the choice of whether you want to look at the poor man’s leg being bent like a pipecleaner. Worse still, the Twitter mobile app just plays Vines automatically when you scroll down. And it’s not as if those forwarding it are just the dark-hearted, mean sort of people who laugh when old ladies slip on ice. It’s all the professional content guys too. The football sites, the sports sites, the news sites, the culture sites. They’re all snatching at Garrido’s misery, grabbing it repackaging it, branding it and then quickly pushing it out through all of their available channels. This is what we have become. This is what does numbers now.
For Christ’s sake, lads. The man’s finished. His career is over. They’re going to have to strip out his knee and rebuild it from balsa wood and rubber bands. Everything he worked for, everything he learned, every extra training session, every hard yard run, it’s all for nothing. He’s done. And you lot are passing the video round and giggling as if it’s a Katy Perry nip slip. Keep it to yourself, eh?
Is Iain wrong? Is laughing at horrific injuries all part of growing up? Are people too sensitive and easily upset? Are we actually, now that you think about it, forwarding grisly images on the internet, not because there is malevolence in our hearts, but because we want to toughen you up? Write to us: [email protected]
