ROSE: FOOTBALL HAS NO DETERRENT FOR RACISTS

ROSE ON HIS ANGER AND FRUSTRATION AS RACISM CRISIS DEEPENS

DANNY ROSE has piled pressure on the FA by insisting football still has no deterrent for racist abuse. The Tottenham and England defender (left) said: “Fines and fans not attending games is not working. Something else needs to be done. Something else needs to be looked at.” Rose’s

IT’S coming to something when a footballer – or anybody – has to psych themselves up before work due to the racism they know they’ll receive at some point.

For Danny Rose, and footballers across Europe, that has been the reality for so long it remains a

scandal. Rose, you’ll remember, revealed earlier this month that he is ready to wash his hands of a game with its head still stuck in the sand.

When he retires, Rose told Mirror Sport, he intends to walk away and leave football to its denial, its delusion and its refusal to adopt the zero-tolerance measures that will protect black players. In the meantime, he will continue to steel himself and take a deep breath when the fixture list for England and Tottenham throws up foreign trips to those notorious countries.

Opening his heart in State Of Play, a wide-ranging new documentary for BT Sport, he said: “I’m at a point now where I’m having to prepare myself three days before I’m going to another country, because there is a chance that I’ll be racially abused and that’s not on. It’s definitely not on.”

Three days. Seventy-two hours of coming up with coping strategies to deal with a problem that few other industries would tolerate. It is seven years since Rose, then an England Under-21 player, was accused of lying after revealing he’d received monkey chants in Serbia throughout a Euro 2013 qualifier.

Two years later, he was spared an uncomfortable return after being left out of his club’s Europa League squad to take on Partizan Belgrade. Like so many black players – Kalidou Koulibaly, Sulley Muntari and Mario Balotelli, for example – Rose was the one that suffered.

No wonder he can’t wait to see the back of football. Going back even further for the documentary, Rose revealed he’d had his eyes opened to the stark reality of racism in football as a youngster, playing alongside Fabian Delph, when the pair were at Leeds.

“Me and Fabian, who is at Manchester City now, were in the same youth team playing away against Barnsley,” he said. “We were playing and one of the players racially abused Fabian.

“It was a huge shock because we’re kids – back then you just want to enjoy football. I remember the guy abusing him and Fabian getting really upset.

“I just wanted to protect him, or try and protect him.” Back then, and for more than a decade later, football did not want to listen. Instead, it would pay lip service with the usual handwringing and platitudes, before moving on. Now, in an age of empowerment for black players, the game is being forced to confront its crisis, with stars no longer prepared to stay silent. At grass-roots level, more and more teams and players are leaving t h e field of play. In the professional game, players are standing up to be counted.

At the top, 28-year-old Rose continues to speak out on the dehumanising impact of the monkey chants, the taunts and the abuse he has had to get used to.

“I find it embarrassing, humiliating and I get really, really angry,” he added. “If it was under different circumstances, if I was walking down the street, or in a shop, and that happened, I would retaliate.

“But I’m representing my country. Points are on the line, maybe my reputation is on the line if I retaliated. You just never know.”

■ State Of Play, the next film in the award-winning BT Sport Films series, will premiere at 10.30pm on Wednesday, May 29 on BT Sport 2.