Right, so you spend the best part of a decade playing top-flight football. You've faced flying tackles, screaming managers, and forty-thousand fans calling you every name under the sun. You retire in one piece. Lovely. Job done.
And then a pitch roller absolutely does you in.
That's basically what happened to a former Premier League winger, let's call him Danny, who somehow managed to get run over by one of those enormous grass-flattening machines that groundskeepers use to make pitches look pretty on telly. The kind of vehicle that trundles along at roughly the speed of a pensioner on a mobility scooter. That one. Got him.
Now to his absolute credit, Danny laughed it off. Fair play, mate. Because if you're going to get mowed down by what is essentially an agricultural appliance, the only dignified response is to see the funny side before anyone else does. Beat them to the joke. Classic move.
What gets us though is the sheer audacity of the situation. This man has been on pitches at some of the biggest grounds in the country. He's been on the wrong end of some properly nasty challenges over the years. Studs, elbows, the occasional forearm to the face, walked away from all of it.
One slow-moving groundskeeping vehicle, though? Absolutely flattened.
There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere about retirement and life after football, but we're not that deep. It's just properly funny.
The pitch roller, for what it's worth, is understood to be doing fine.
Have you ever had a more embarrassing run-in at work than this bloke? Drop it in the comments, we want to know.