Footage of a Hong Kong football coach berating one of his players for a “rash tackle” has suddenly found widespread attention online after it was shared by popular sports website Bleacher Report on Facebook.
The clip shows a West Island boy tackling a Diocesan Boys’ School player in the semi-finals of an inter-school football competition. The footage was originally posted on a Facebook page run by WIS students on May 11, but didn’t blow up until Sunday, when it was shared with Bleacher Report UK’s 2.4 million Facebook fans.
Almost immediately, someone can be heard shouting, “What a tackle!” before West Island’s football coach and head of PE, Richard Lant, reprimands both the player and the heckler.
“Who said that? Who said that?” Lant said. “That’s shocking, that.”
Talking to the WIS player in question, Lant later warned, “You do that again, you’ll never play for West Island again.”
Commenters were quick to praise the coach (whose voice many seemed to instantly recognise) for being fair and decent, with one netizen saying the clip was an example of Lant as his “finest, proper Geordie like”.
Lant’s daughter Evie said, “It’s a funny video, but it […] just shows what he is like as a PE teacher and coach, I think that’s probably why loads of WIS people have shared it. He’s really fair even though it’s his own player.”
Speaking to Coconuts Hong Kong today, the beloved coach expressed surprise at the video’s popularity, saying that he’d even been sent the link by his two young nephews in the UK.
“I didn’t even know that somebody had videoed it,” he said, and added that the match had taken place at least 10 weeks ago.
While Lant admitted he may have “overreacted”, he partially attributed his response to the heckler, as he wouldn’t want one of his students to think the “rash” and “mistimed” move was a good tackle.
“It could have injured the other player,” he said.
Despite his strong words on camera, Lant says the incident is in the past.
“[The WIS player] is a really good boy, a nice person. We talked about it afterwards, and that was the end of it.”
“One of the things I always say to the kids is, we’re all going to make mistakes. We’ve just got to make sure that we learn from them, and try not to repeat them.”
Even though his coaching has received an overwhelmingly positive response, the coach said he was “embarrassed” by the attention, and joked that he would have said the voice belonged to one of his brothers “if [the footage] was bad”.
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