Residents in Bristol, U.K., were left angered after a clearly malicious prank was discovered on a local playing field.
As BristolLive reported, a man out for a stroll with his dog very nearly ruined his day when he encountered a soccer ball that someone had filled with concrete, covered in cruel, taunting notes, and left there for some unsuspecting person to try to kick.
"We walked around the perimeter of the cricket pitch, which is in a raised part of the playing fields, and I noticed the ball pretty early on — it was my intention to go over at the end of the walk and kick it to the side somewhere," he told the paper.
"As I was heading towards it, I noticed it looked a bit misshapen and deflated, so I just very lightly tapped it with my foot. I noticed straight away it was very heavy. The concrete patch was visible too, and on closer inspection I saw someone had scrawled on it."
Whoever left the ball there had also written "cool bet that hurt" on the ball, among other things, with the obvious intent to taunt someone for trying to kick the ball.
He said he hadn't weighed it yet but figures it's in the neighborhood of 15-20 kg, or 33-45 pounds.
"It was clearly intended to injure someone, there are some not very nice notes written on the ball and it's definitely been done with a bit of malice."
"I wouldn't have thought it was done by kids, as I doubt they would have access to concrete and the sort of materials you'd need to make it look that realistic," he said.
The reactions were predictably furious. "That could change someone's life," one person wrote. "If someone were to kick that full pelt they could suffer injuries that would take months to recover from and may never walk the same again. A real nasty, nasty thing to do. Unbelievable."
And it's hard to blame them. If something like this popped up in my neighborhood, I'd wonder about the people living around me as well.
"That's disgusting the amount of little kids that could have just ran over and kicked it," one person wrote. "Some people are bloody vile."
The man who found the ball turned it over to his local councillor, who encouraged the police to get an investigation going and for anyone with any information to contact him or the local authorities.
h/t BristolLive
