August 3, 2016
A Russian team
has been banned from the world’s largest teen football tournament after beating
up a rival Norwegian team so badly that police were called in.
In a press
release issued on Wednesday, the organisers of Norway Cup, an international
football tournament for boys aged 10-19, said that Russia’s SPK Cosmos team
would be fined 2,000 Norwegian kroner ($240) and would be banned from the
tournament.
Trond Lervik, the
coach for Norway's Herd team, told Dagbladet newspaper that the Cosmos team
had launched an attack after one of their players, who had been earlier sent
off with red card for a violent tackle, ran back onto the pitch and
karate-kicked one of the Norwegian boys.
The other Russian
boys then began beating up their Norwegian rivals, continuing even after the
panicking referee blew the whistle to call off the match.
“They stormed
towards our players and beat them up. It was a real fight. We way rushing in to
get them out of the way,” Lervik said.
The police were
called but by the time they arrived the Russian team had already left.
Rune Hekkelstrand
from the Oslo police confirmed that the Russian team appeared to have been
“very aggressive”.
“Several of the
boys had black eyes, and one had a possible broken rib, but this has not been
confirmed by paramedics,” he said.
Lervik said that
from the very start the Russian boys, who were unusually large and well-built,
had performed tackles which “resembled assaults”.
“We knew from
other teams that had met them that they played very tough, but we never thought
it would go this far. We are shocked by what has happened,” he told Norway’s Sunnmørsposten newspaper.
Norway Cup’s
independent judges ruled that Herd had won the game 3:0.
