TACKLE ON MAN UTD’S COLOMBIAN ACE
tackled him in our penalty area five minutes before half-time. I didn’t even feel I had touched him. I had to make a tackle in order to prevent a shot, but I didn’t even feel the contact.
“He went down injured and was carried off, but no one knew what was wrong. During half-time a team-mate said, ‘Did you hear about Falcao? They are saying it is serious’.
“After the game, which we lost 3-0, TV interviewers wanted to speak to me and I understood it wasn’t because of my defensive skills. When I got home to my wife Selvinaz, the phone had already been ringing. It rang and shook all the time.
“Phonecalls, e-mails and, above all, Facebook notifications kept coming thick and fast. Some unknown guys made requests to follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Guys with Spanish names. It was my story everywhere that whole week.”
Then, the attention began to turn sinister with disturbing calls to their home telephone in the early hours of the morning.
Selvinaz said: “We didn’t answer. We saw the calls came from Colombia. They were late calls, after midnight. In the end, we just switched off all the telephones.
“He was being terrorised on the internet. I saw a picture showing Ertek next to an image of Andres Escobar with the words, ‘ The most wanted man in Colombia’. I was shocked and afraid. I didn’t show it to him, but I was very worried. I was thinking to myself, ‘Could that happen to him?’”
The day after the game, Ertek went to the school where he works. He added: “A parent came over to me and said, ‘Mister Ertek, you are the most quoted name in Colombia on Twitter’.
“I didn’t really know what Twitter was. But I understood it would be a nightmare and for two solid days it was.
“The only relief was when my first lesson began with eight-year-old children, that first morning after the game.
“We would spend 10 minutes telling everyone what we did the night before. And the children came with poems and drawings to support me. No one was talking about Falcao in the classroom. It was a moment of innocence. It was good for me.” After medics confirmed Falcao had cruciate damage and he would likely miss the World Cup, the messages from Colombia took on a greater intensity.
Ertek said: “People were saying, ‘If I was him, I would commit suicide’. Another said, ‘If the Colombian army want to be trusted again, let them take care of Soner Ertek’. It was very heavy stuff.
“One Colombian newspaper wrote, ‘He will be 29 soon with nothing to celebrate. He is Evil, represented with a capital E’.
“Things at that time reached saturation point and made me sick. None of the publicity from Colombia was good.”
Mayhem
A tweet from Falcao absolving Ertek of blame briefly calmed the situation and France World Cup winner Frank Leboeuf and fellow international Willy Sagnol waded in with their support, too.
But when Falcao was officially ruled out of the Colombia squad at the start of June the mayhem started again.
Ertek added: “A journalist called and said everything was going crazy in Colombia, that I should ask for police protection.
“He was worried more than me. But I said ‘no’, I am determined this hell won’t come back again.”
He now plays for a new club Villefranche, where his nickname is ...Mister Falcao’.
He said: “It’s not the nickname I’d choose – but I will have to live with it.”