By Chris Wright
There are very few players who return to play against their former clubs without being heckled and jeckled from their first touch onwards, but Anderlecht’s Steve Defour suffered more than most this afternoon – eventually getting himself red-carded on his return to Standard Liege after reaching his breaking point.
Defour, who played at Standard for five years before leaving in 2011, was goaded and jeered relentlessly by the majority of the fans inside the Stade Maurice Dufrasne, but boiled over after a gigantic, gruesome banner depicting the midfielder being beheaded was unfurled in the crowd along with the message, “Red or dead”…
Unsurprisingly, Defour reacted angrily to the tifo and hammered the ball aimlessly into the Standard fans, with the referee following it up by showing him a straight red card for violent conduct.
Just to plonk a glacé cherry atop the dog turd, Anderlecht also went on to lose the game 2-0.
The banner is quite rightly already being lambasted as “shameful” by most observers, with the Belgian FA now expected to launch an investigation into the incident.