Sunday 17th October 2021
“Moment of madness”
Goalkeeper hits teammates and flies
In the Northern Irish league, Glentoran keeper Aaron McCarey ensures the moment of the week. Annoyed by a goal, he grabs a teammate, throws him on the ground and receives the red card. The dressing room is there for such an argument, wonders a club legend
Goalkeeper Aaron McCarey attacked his own team-mate Bobby Burns in a Northern Irish Premier League match between Glentoran FC and Coleraine FC. After a late goal, the keeper sprinted out of his goal, grabbed his teammate, grabbed him by the collar and pushed him to the ground. When two other Glentoran players rushed towards him and one threw the ball at McCarey, the goalkeeper let go of him, got the red card and had to fear for his team’s 2-2.
The official website of the Northern Irish team commented rather soberly. “Ten minutes from time, a bad pass from Gael Bigirimana didn’t find its way to Bobby Burns and Lyndon Kane intercepted the ball,” they wrote about the scene before the match: “Kane found substitute Cathair Friel, who got the ball under McCarey Immediately after the goal there was an incident between McCarey and Bobby Burns, as a result of which the goalkeeper of Glentoran saw the red card. The “Glens” had to survive ten complicated minutes to score a point fetch. Which they succeeded. ” Is everything okay then?
Certainly not: The incident was so remarkable that Glentoran legend Paul Leeman later reverently spoke of a “moment of madness” that will go around the world. The tough ex-defender would have solved it differently as a player, at least apart from the global public: “I’ve already received a few blows in the locker room,” Leeman chatted at the BBC. “I saw players being pressed against the wall in the locker room. That’s where it should have happened. It shouldn’t happen here on the pitch and then with your own team-mate.”
Like Jens Lehmann once did
But Leeman’s words came too late. So he concluded, “I’ve never seen anything like it.” What the former Glentoran defender does not suspect of having dealt more intensively with events in the Bundesliga at the beginning of the 2000s. There in February 2003 Jens Lehmann, the Dortmund Borussia goalkeeper at the time, saw the yellow-red card for his attack on team-mate Marcio Amoroso. “There really isn’t such a strange rule,” the later 2006 World Cup goalkeeper wondered.
The fact that this rule already existed in 2003 and is still there 18 years later led to the red card for McCarey in the game Glentoran against Coleraine. Not a big problem for his trainer Mick McDermott. “Aaron raised his hands in the locker room and said that shouldn’t have happened. He is dejected, Bobby is dejected. Everyone is dejected. But that was the incident after the goal,” said the coach after the game, who conceded the goal called a “really bad goal”. “There is no argument between the players here. We have a tightly knit squad here.”
With the hard-fought and ultimately spectacular 2-2 draw against Coleraine, Glentoran remains in the middle of the table in the Danske Bank Premiership. But unlike subscription champions Linfield, they have made Northern Irish football in the international headlines. McCarey had already caused a stir in 2015. At that time he received a long suspension from the English Football Association (FA) after a positive test for a non-performance-enhancing substance.