Newspaper suspends writer over ‘ill-informed’ Liverpool piece
The Daily Express have issued an apology and ‘immediately suspended’ one of their journalists after a piece on the recent fan unrest between Liverpool and Roma was published on their website.
Liverpool beat Roma 5-2 in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final on Tuesday, but the game was overshadowed with the news that Reds fan Sean Cox, 53, was left in a ‘critical condition’ after being attacked by two visiting supporters.
Two Italian men have been charged over the attack, and Liverpool have requested a meeting with Roma over concerns of fan safety ahead of next week’s second leg.
The Express waded in on the issue on Thursday, publishing an opinion article, written by Colin Mafham, and headlined: ‘Liverpool must take serious action after Roma violence or risk further trouble’
The piece questioned the role of Liverpool fans in the scenes on Tuesday, asking: ‘When you have a team capable of playing the joyous football Liverpool have for most of this season how on earth are their fans always seemingly involved in such horrific altercations on big European nights. Why does trouble seem to follow them like bees round a honey pot?’
Mafham would add that it is only ‘some of the people who ‘follow’ [Liverpool] that frighten the living daylights out of me’, before citing the cases of Heysel and Hillsborough – both completely unrelated, both completely incomparable.
‘You would have thought the deaths of 39 Italians at the European Cup final Liverpool lost to Juventus in 1985 – plus the five year ban on English clubs that consequently came after that – would have had a sobering effect,’ he wrote, in the article which has since been taken down.
‘You would have thought the horrors at Hillsborough and 96 more deaths that followed only four years later would have made everyone more aware of their responsibilities to each other.
‘Those two tragedies, in which the central figures were sadly mostly from Liverpool, are arguably football’s most painful Achilles and hopefully will never happen again.’
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Mafham did attempt to qualify his ‘concerns’, writing: ‘No one is suggesting that the violence that erupted on Tuesday night was solely the fault of Liverpool fans. Their visitors from Rome were clearly just as thuggish, and just as frightening.
‘But there are suggestions that the reputation of Liverpool supporters had gone before them and Roman yobs had simply decided to get in first, and with such awful consequences. It’s not right, but it does again highlight a common denominator.’
The article has since been removed from the website however, and the Express have apologised for the ‘ill-informed and wrong’ content that was published.
In a statement, they added that the article ‘should never have been written,’ that they are ‘conducting an inquiry’ into how it was permitted in the first place, and that ‘the journalist who wrote the piece was immediately suspended’.