#2Sides: My Autobiography by Rio Ferdinand Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t hear a thing. To quote from the later FA report, the conversation went like this:
    Patrice Evra:
Fucking hell, why did you kick me?
    Luis Suarez:
Because you’re black.
    Patrice Evra:
Say it to me again, I’m going to kick you.
    Luis Suarez:
I don’t speak to blacks.
    Patrice Evra:
OK, now I think I’m going to punch you.
    Luis Suarez:
OK, blackie, blackie, blackie.
    It was a Frenchman and a Uruguayan talking in Spanish but the conversation and its aftermath was big news in England for months. After much strife, Suarez was found guilty by the FA of racial abuse, and was fined and banned for eight games. At the two clubs, football tribalism kicked in immediately. At Manchester Unitedwe backed Pat, of course. We knew him as a serious, genuine guy who’d made a serious allegation. He’d never lied about anything before, why would he lie now? By contrast Liverpool players and their manager instinctively backed their man, saying Suarez was a great guy. The way Liverpool circled the wagons and later all wore Suarez T-shirts … it left a bad taste. They wanted to show solidarity to their teammate, but they were missing the bigger picture. They got right and wrong mixed up.
    What worried me more in those first few days was the reaction further afield. I was shocked by how much sympathy there was for Suarez. Huge numbers of people in the media and social media were saying: ‘Poor Suarez, maybe there’s nothing racist about it. Maybe in Uruguay this is inoffensive. Poor lad, he’s culturally confused, and he’s getting punished for nothing.’ Nobody even talked about the pressure on Pat. How could it get turned around so that racism was being defended and drawing attention to racism was being attacked? How could that happen in our game in this day and age? I didn’t understand it. People paid lip service to the idea that racism was
a bad thing
. But they obviously didn’t have a clue what racism actually was, or how its victims felt. It was a real shock to discover racism had never actually gone away – it was just much better hidden than before. We’d been lulled into a false sense of security. It had been swept under the carpet all these years. Just one little paper-cut of an incident made it clear it was all still there, just below the surface.
    I’d only been a few feet from that conversation between Patrice and Suarez. It never occurred to me that racism was just about to come a whole lot closer.
2. ANTON
    Six days after the Evra–Suarez incident I was sitting at home watching on TV as QPR played Chelsea in a league match. QPR were winning 1–0, and my brother Anton was having a great game in the QPR defence. About five minutes from the end, Anton and John Terry had an argument in the QPR penalty area. We then saw John jogging back into his own half before the television director cut to a close-up. You didn’t need to be a professional lip-reader to see that John Terry, captain of England, my defensive partner in the national team for the last six years, had just said: ‘you fucking black cunt.’ And he seemed to have said it in Anton’s direction. In less than a minute my phone began to go crazy. My mates, my family, practically everybody I knew were texting and calling to say: ‘Did you
see
that?’ Within minutes Twitter was going nuts and the clip was on YouTube.
    The consequences of that moment were confused, disastrously drawn-out and are still felt. The matter could and should have been sorted out cleanly and quickly in a way that would have allowed everyone – including John Terry – to emerge with dignity. Instead, it festered horribly for nearly a year and caused great harm.
     
    For those who didn’t follow the formal proceedings case, these were the main points. The police, acting on an anonymous complaint from a member of the public, eventually charged John Terry with racially abusing Anton. John Terry denied the charges and at various times offered different explanations. After a