A fan who was on board the Paris train which saw a crowd of Chelsea fans chanting racist remarks to a black man has insisted they were not being racist, and were instead chanting about John Terry.
The metro train was carrying 40 – 50 Chelsea fans to the Parc des Princes stadium for Chelsea’s Champions League match against PSG, with video footage emerging showing a crowd of Chelsea fans pushing a black man out of the carriage before seemingly chanting “we’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it.”
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However, 17-year-old Mitchell McCoy was one of the passengers on the train and, after being named on social media as one of those involved in the incident, he has insisted that the chant was actually made about Chelsea captain John Terry, who has been accused of on-pitch racism in the past in an infamous altercation with former QPR defender Anton Ferdinand.
McCoy said: “He tried to get on and a few people were pushing him off because there wasn’t much space on the carriage – You couldn’t move. People were saying it was because he was black. It’s not true at all. I personally think it’s because he was a PSG fan. Obviously they didn’t want him anywhere with us.
“That guy in the video tried to force himself on, so they pushed him off.”
Fair enough, Mitchell, but what about the chant?
“That song was about John Terry. The only words I know is ‘he’s a racist, he’s a racist’ and I don’t know the rest.”
Well considering we can hear the chant clearly in the video (which you can watch right here), and the final sentence is “and that’s the way we like it”, it doesn’t exactly make it any better if by some stroke of imagination these fans were chanting about Terry.
Mitchell insisted that he wasn’t a part of the crowd that was singing, saying: “I didn’t sing it. It wasn’t just that one time that it happened. It wasn’t just with the black people that we weren’t letting on.
“There was white people, women that people weren’t allowing on. There was no space.
“They were saying, ‘You can’t get on this carriage, you have to go somewhere else’.”
The Metropolitan police are conducting an investigation into the incident and are looking to work with Chelsea to enforce footballing bans on those implicated.
Photo: Getty Images
