The Ghent goalkeeper took a goal kick and earned an open fracture: tough footage from Belgium

Paul Nardi’s team had to fin­ish the match in the Con­fer­ence League with­out him. The Bel­gians won this match.

The goal­keep­er of the Bel­gian club “Ghent” Paul Nar­di suf­fered an open frac­ture dur­ing the match against the Ukrain­ian “Zorya”. The press ser­vice of his team spoke about this on the social net­work X.

The clubs met in the fifth round of the Con­fer­ence League group stage at the home sta­di­um of Ghent on Novem­ber 30.

The match was going well for the Bel­gians until, in the mid­dle of the sec­ond half, 29-year-old Nar­di received a seri­ous injury: while kick­ing the ball away from the goal, he sud­den­ly fell and began scream­ing in pain — while he had no con­tact with oth­er play­ers. The doc­tors who entered the field pro­vid­ed first aid to Paul, after which the play­er was tak­en to the tri­bune premis­es on a stretch­er.

The team had to con­tin­ue the game with Zorya with­out him. Instead of Nar­di, Davi Ruf stood in goal. As a result, Gent won the match, defeat­ing their oppo­nents with a score of 4:1. The club took first place in Group B and secured ear­ly access to the play­offs of the tour­na­ment.

Footage has appeared online show­ing how the goal­keep­er lies on the field after an injury, as well as how doc­tors car­ry him away.

Ken­neth de Vlieger, a sports com­men­ta­tor from Bel­gium, wrote that Nar­di was injured when he hit the ball. He also recalled that Paul had recent­ly returned to duty after a long absence: he had been under­go­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion for sev­er­al months due to a seri­ous head injury.

The Ghent account in X pub­lished a post ded­i­cat­ed to Nar­di. “Our thoughts are with Paul. The diag­no­sis is dis­ap­point­ing — he suf­fered an open frac­ture. Take heart, Paul“wrote club rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

The head coach of the team, Hein Van­haze­brouck, also spoke out about the inci­dent. “It was, of course, shock­ing. He just returned from a head injury, and now this”- he said.

Gent is in third place in the Bel­gian Cham­pi­onship stand­ings. In the nation­al league, Nar­di played 10 match­es this sea­son, con­ced­ing 12 goals against Ghent. In the Con­fer­ence League, Nar­di has three match­es and con­ced­ed four goals.

In Octo­ber, we talked about anoth­er inci­dent on the foot­ball field. In the match of the next round of the French Ligue 1, Cler­mont goal­keep­er Mau­ry Diot was injured after Mont­pel­li­er fans threw a fire­crack­er at him. It explod­ed right at the foot­ball player’s feet, after which he lost con­scious­ness. Doc­tors took Dio off the field, and the ref­er­ee decid­ed to end the game ear­ly.