It arrived in one of those daily “your highlights” list of links sent to me by Twitter with the aid of their spyware. Tweets on topics I have shown an interest in the past. Like English football or foreign affairs.

Do they send those messages to everyone? Or just to people who aren’t tweeting enough?

Anyway, it came from a Twitter account named “Football Fours” (at) “Football_Fours … and the text went like this:

“This is brilliant! Yakubu literally doing nothing for 2:20 minutes for Coventry today.” With this link.

And it appears to be a Coventry City player named Yakubu Aiyegbeni, recently added to a struggling club, doing a lot of nothing for more than two minutes late in a 3-1 home loss to Swindon Town.

The video became a hot topic on the web, and I had a look at it yesterday, and replayed it for the other person in the room, and we decided: “Yeah, that is amazing, and a little odd; does he think no one will notice?”

The only problem?

Yakubu suffered a hamstring injury after coming on in the 70th minute, and Coventry had no subs left.

The manager, Russell Slade, decided to leave him on the pitch, perhaps to show Coventry finished with 11 players. Yukuba, then, wandered around a small area near the touch line, as the game went up and down around him.

That left him open to being mocked on social media. And he has been.

Yakubu, 34, once was a prolific scorer for English Premier League sides Portsmouth, Middlesbrough, Leicester City and Blackburn, but he had done nothing much since being signed last month by Coventry, who are at the bottom of the table in League One and seemed destined for relegation.

A Coventry fan apparently took the video seen in the link (above), perhaps to demonstrate what a slacker Yakubu is … or how bad a signing he was by the foundering club.

Soon after, the video became very popular on the web, and critics of Yakubu piled on. “He is just an insult to the club.” … “In fairness he mops his brow at one point.” … “Never has someone doing nothing been so interesting to watch.” … “Robbing a wage.” … “You all forget the man is 72 years old. Give him a chance.”

However, many of those at the match realized Yakubu had hurt himself while helping to set up Coventry’s only goal, but the “slacker” video continued to pick up momentum.

The club yesterday said he might be done for the season. Today, the manager “confirmed” his injury (in the wake of the viral video) and updated his status to out for “a couple of weeks”.

Several of those who pilloried him on social media posted apologies to the player.

It was too little and too late.

How many of those who shared the video bothered to check on his status? Apparently, not much of anyone. It was just passed along as an obvious example of a footballer doing nothing to earn his money.

Reconsidering the video, it appears Yakubu is moving gingerly. Once or twice he seems to favor his left leg. I remember wondering, too, how he could be out there and think the club would not notice he was not even jogging. (The club noticed, and decided it would rather have him out there, even if walking.)

It turned out to be one of those “more to this than meets the eye” situations, where a bit of investigation early in the process would have turned up the hamstring situation.

We are sloppy on social media. Very sloppy. We rush to judgment, we take the word of people we do not know, people who often have agendas of which we are not aware.

It leads to situations like this one, where a veteran’s injury is held up and then widely broadcast as a (flawed) morality tale.