Super Mario

So, anyway, Mario Balotelli tweets ‘Man Utd LOL’ after Liverpool’s great rivals squandered a 3-1 lead to lose 5-3 at Leicester.

You can imagine the stick he was going to get at Old Trafford when Liverpool, and Balotelli, turn up for their match later this season before this, but I don’t think anyone expected the reaction he would actually get.

If you thought racism was a thing of the past in England, then look at the replies he got, many of which referred to him as a monkey and some suggested he might return (return?) to Africa and hoped he would die of the Ebola virus. Nice.

Well, perhaps in the volatile world of football, you might expect a bit of a reaction to his comment but this? Maybe he was ill-advised to post what he did but surely people realise that it wasn’t nasty. A bit of a piss take, yes, hardly a violent attack.

His racial abusers must be very sensitive souls, working themselves into a right lather. How would they behave if something really serious and important happened in their lives?

Would they refer to all black people as monkeys, especially to their faces, or would they decide it was not worth the hassle?

It is the sheer ignorance of these people that riles me. You don’t need me to tell you that Balotelli happens to have slightly different coloured skin to some of us, but you would need to tell me how that makes any bleeding difference to the way you feel about him? ‘Well, he’s black, isn’t he? He’s different!’ What???

Of course, racism is not confined to football. It’s still alive and kicking, even if you have to look harder for it than you used to. And the internet, with its cloak of anonymity, is a good public hiding place for those with an irrational prejudice.

Balotelli is a character, as they say. He’s a little different from the norm. He has an amazing gift to play football, he’s a little eccentric. Well, Gazza was like that, so was Cantona, and their careers were often engulfed in controversy but not usually of the racial type (although Gazza was familiar with the ‘religious divide’ in Glasgow).

The police are investigating the comments to Balotelli and so they should. It can’t be swept under the carpet and ignored because if you tolerate racism you are on the slippery slope to making it respectable.

For all I know, it will probably turn out to be a couple of spotty 14 year old kids, being stupid, immature and racist but whoever it is needs to be reminded that it’s not acceptable, ever.