Second thoughts

Creature gets taste of soccer

Streakers aren’t that unusual in sports, but fans and players at a soccer match in Thun, Switzerland, on Sunday got an unusual surprise as a furry field invader ran rampant through the stands and over the pitch - twice - before biting a player’s finger.

The furry creature, a marten, dashed onto the field a few minutes into the top division match between Thun and FC Zurich and evaded efforts by players and match officials to catch it. Play briefly resumed when the animal ran into the stands, but the marten, a sharp toothed animal related to minks, badgers, weasels and - perhaps tellingly - wolverines, reappeared shortly afterward.

Zurich defender Loris Benito dived and grabbed the cat-sized marten, receiving a bitten finger for his troubles as he tried to carry it off the field. Zurich’s goalkeeper, Davide Da Costa, managed to put an end to the creature’s caper and bundled it off the field.

“In hindsight, it was obviously foolish of me [to try and catch it],” Benito told Swiss website 20 Minuten Online after the match. “Who knows what diseases the animal had. But I wanted to play the match and now I simply trust my immune system.”

See? This is why goalkeepers wear gloves.

As for the match, Zurich won 4-0, prompting Benito, who doesn’t harbor any hard feelings against the marten, to suggest that they make it their new mascot.

“We have the lion. But the marten has brought us luck.”

Maybe they should reconsider. “Rally Marten” just doesn’t have the same ring.

Gum-related

Add Oakland A’s outfielder Michael Taylor to the list of baseball players who’ve suffered freak injuries.

Taylor, 27, has missed a week of spring training after he cut his finger in two places - while throwing away a wad of gum.

Here’s what happened, according to Susan Slosser of the San Francisco Chronicle: “He’s 6-foot-5, and his hand hit the light on the ceiling of the dugout as he made the toss. So he’s missed a week, he told me, and he cannot play until the cut has totally closed, which it has not.”

Since the A’s already have a full complement of outfielders and Taylor is missing a lot of work in his efforts to learn first base, is it fair to say his career is on the bubble?

Rocked

NASCAR Sprint Cup driver Danica Patrick, who did so well at Daytona on Feb. 24 before taking a vicious hit the next week in Phoenix, had another close call a few days before Sunday’s race in Las Vegas.

She got hit in the head with a rock.

Admit it. You’re thinking it.

“Your first thought is, “Who threw it?” wrote Jay Busbee from Yahoo! Sports. “(Our money would be on one of the Busch brothers. Maybe Tony Stewart.)”

That’s not exactly what happened. On Thursday, Patrick was watching a dirt-track race when a rock flew up and nailed her in the noggin.

“I feel like I have a concussion,” Patrick said during Friday’s pre-race news conference. “I got hit by a rock at the dirt track and I took it to the ground. I feel like this is really sore. It hit me straight in the head. Good thing I had a hat on or I’m feeling like there would have been blood.”

Patrick finished 33rd Sunday.

Quote of the day

“Thank you to Steve [Stricker] for the putting lesson.” Tiger Woods after winning the World Golf Cadillac Championship