As for real horses, I would not stand in front of a charging horse, ever, and try to do something as retarded as say, stab it in the forehead with a short weapon or anything like that. Nobody normal who has seen a normal-sized horse would.
But since horses become ethereal on death (instead of a horse corpse falling directly on you being even more dangerous then a living horse hitting you), warband anti-horse tactics have nothing to do with reality.
In reality, with medieval technology, you'd stop a horse charge by either:
- pikes / stakes / other long, sharp stuff, a wall of which a horse would not charge, and horses hitting stopped horses in the front makes a huge big mess rather then just stopping like some sort of retard bumper cars
- (protected) archers shooting in the flanks of a horse charge
Failure to employ either of these (or trying to stop a head-on horse charge with un-protected archers) resulted in being destroyed if the enemy had a sufficient-sized cavalry force.