The Mirror reports that Birmingham City’s Martin Taylor has received death threats from Croatian fans over the Eduardo incident.
Taylor’s truly horrible challenge on Eduardo da Silva during Birmingham’s Premiership fixture against Arsenal on Saturday broke the Brazilian born Croatian international striker’s legs. The player will now be out for about 9 months implying that he shall miss the Euro 2008 finals for Crotia in the summer.
Birmingham manager Alex McLeish meanwhile has supported his player over the whole affair and says that Taylor needs to be sympathised with and not vilified. He says:
We are disappointed for Eduardo and we also have to rally round Martin Taylor because he is mentally shattered by the whole experience.
Psychologically he could be damaged from this as well and it is ridiculous he has had death threats.
I think there are some crazy people in the world but he has also had a lot of support from people up and down the country which has certainly helped.
We will give him a couple of days off and he will get on with his life again.
Martin was horrified.
There wasn’t a protest from the big man in terms of the red card as he certainly saw the damage he had done to Eduardo and I could tell immediately by his face.
I don’t think the tackle itself merited a red because it was mis-timed, almost like a trip, but I don’t know if he could have played on anyway.
It wasn’t a dirty challenge, it wasn’t malicious and Martin has to make these challenges again. He has to move on.
Indeed these death threats and vilification of Taylor is a shame and must not be tolerated. But somehow these things are almost inevitable in football.