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A teenage rugby player who was tripped by a ‘touchline dad’ just as he was about to score a try has told how the guilty man acted like “a naughty schoolboy”.
Talented winger Harry Bayford was streaking towards the line when the aggrieved father stuck out a leg to stop him scoring his hat trick.
The man is believed to have been a father of an opposing player who was fed up with watching his son’s team lose heavily.
Speaking for the first time about the incident, which was caught on camera, Harry told The Telegraph that the trip had sent him “flying”.
“I was running down the left hand side towards the line and this guy was standing on the sideline, although I didn’t really notice him.
“I turned around to push one of the opposition players and he suddenly just stepped out of nowhere in front of me.
“I flipped completely over and my head went where my legs should have been. I just lay on the ground and looked up at him.
“I didn’t know what to say. It was such a weird thing to do.”
The referee of the Hertfordshire Shield cup final intervened and sent the spectator off from the side of the pitch as the young player was helped to his feet.
Harry, from Royston, Herts, told how angry parents on the sidelines berated the man as he was being escorted away from the pitch.
He said: “He looked really guilty, like a little schoolboy who’d done something naughty.
“He tried to walk away as if nobody had seen what he’d done, which was obviously ridiculous.
“One of the women nearby went absolutely nuts at him. She was saying ‘Why did you do that? You’re supposed to be a grown-up. What kind of example are you setting to the kids?’
“People around didn’t know what to do because no one had ever seen anything like that.
“My captain wanted to deck him, so it’s probably a good thing he got taken away.”
But the angry father’s intervention had little effect as Harry picked himself up and scored his third try only a minute after the game was restarted, sending his fellow players into raptures.
At the final whistle Harry’s Royston Rugby Club U16 team had romped to a 64-5 victory against neighbouring rivals, Fullerians.
After the game the teenager realised he had a painful bruise on his leg where the reckless father’s knee had clattered into him.
Harry, a Year 11 student at the Meridian School in Royston, said he was even considering legal action against the man although he still does not know his identity.
He said: “I’m thinking about suing the guy because I think it’s an assault on a minor. Hopefully I’m going to talk to a solicitor, although I’m not sure he was right in the head, to be honest.
“We often get pushy parents at our games, but I’ve ever seen anything like that.
“We were thrashing them 59-5 at the time. I could have understood it more if it was a close game, but we were absolutely mullering them.”
After the game, Fullerians’ president Mike Musk described the trip as “deplorable” and said the man had been banned from matches until next December.
Article Courtesy of The Telegraph