Aguero had every right to defend his dignity in invasion

People who think a match ticket is also a licence to be nasty on the pitch deserve all that comes to them – superstars ‘deserve’ it no more than anyone else

Wigan’s pitch after one of the great FA Cup upsets was curiously reminiscent of social media, with people having fun and people using it to goad and threaten. With a swipe of the hand intended to push rather than punch, Sergio Aguero decided he was going to be nobody’s dartboard.

At the risk of reading too much into Aguero’s brush with a bouncy, over-stimulated Wigan fan after City’s Cup defeat, Twitter pretty much spilt on to the field of play with menaces. Footage of Monday night’s pitch invasion shows Aguero being struck on the head – and a sage in an anorak running up to him and “getting in his face”, to use the technical term. A Spanishspeaking reporter claimed Aguero was also spat at. But, hey, he is meant to tolerate all that out of respect for the inalienable right of fans to do as they please.

This being Britain, a seething isle, a magnificent FA Cup win with an icy finish by Wigan’s Will Grigg mutated into a disciplinary hurricane (if you wanted it to). And before anyone blames the press for this, take a look at social media, where Manchester United fans, in large measure, reached for the schadenfreude, claiming that Pep Guardiola had “fought” with Wigan’s manager and that Aguero had “punched” a fan.

These tribal distortions are to be expected, sometimes quite funny, and apparently allowable if they come from spectators rather than reporters, who are lambasted for the merest hint of “top-spin”. More interesting is that footballers are now seen by many fans as dehumanised Xbox avatars who have no right to object to personal abuse or to defend themselves.

On this one-way street, Aguero is the hot-head who “lashed out” at a lad who may have been about to attack him, was certainly shouting in his face and had no right to be on the pitch in the first place.

In crowd psychology, joy can quickly turn dark. Look what Philadelphia Eagles fans did to their city after the team won the Super Bowl. Overturned cars expressed reckless pleasure. At the DW Stadium, a handful of Wigan supporters flipped from celebrating their own victory to goading the opposition for losing the game. Seriously: if you were a Wigan fan