RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Alejandro Garnacho’s tweet about Andre Onana which featured two gorilla emojis wasn’t malicious… but the Man United youngster must be charged by the FA

• Alejandro Garnacho’s tweet about Andre Onana featured two gorilla emojis 
• The Football Association have approached Man United over Garnacho’s post
• Follow Mail Sport’s new Man United WhatsApp channel for all the breaking news 

Before we get to Alejandro Garnacho’s use of social media, let’s begin with a tangent from home. That would be Pembrokeshire, west Wales. It dates to around 25 years ago, when I was in my mid-teens and playing for a football team mostly made up of grown men. It was local league stuff and a highlight of each week.

The point is that a few of those guys, many of whom I liked greatly, would put less care than others into the delicacy of their words. One memory was of a team-mate in his late 30s having his shirt pulled by a lad from Solva and turning around to say: ‘You do that again and I’ll poke you in the eye right up to my knuckle.’

They are the sort of moments you never quite shake off, but that fella had a good heart beneath the occasional impulse to blind and maim. In any case, a reason for this digression is because he once handed down a nickname: A-Rab. Or Aladdin. And every so often those themes mixed: ‘Where’s your magic carpet, A-Rab?’

Half-Iraqi, you see. And it stuck for a while, which I never minded, even when the traumas of Operation Desert Fox commenced in 1998, because it was clear to me there was no malice. It probably doesn’t scan very well on the page, but he was a mate and sometimes mates test the fences — it is that highly personalised dance of figuring out how far is too far and finding something that might raise a laugh between defeats by Merlins Bridge.

The crux of the matter there was context. It was about intent and, crucially, what the recipient finds offensive within a certain dynamic in a certain space; it is about how words and actions that are offensive from one mouth can be taken very differently from another because, when you’ve experienced racism, actual racism, you can almost always smell the distinction.

Alejandro Garnacho posted about team-mate Andre Onana and included two gorilla emojis

The FA could take action against Garnacho if he is deemed to have breached their rules

Which brings us, via the houses, to a slightly grander level of football and a tweet sent by a teenager to his team-mate this week.

Garnacho, 19 and from Argentina, was naive and stupid to post two gorilla emojis above a picture of his Manchester United colleague Andre Onana. That wasn’t a conversation between team-mates in a local league, it was shared after a Champions League fixture on the platform formerly known as Twitter — Garnacho has 673,000 followers there and more than seven million on Instagram. Onana has 325,000 (two million on Instagram) and United have 100m or so in their various social media guises.

So this wasn’t so much a private exchange as a broadcast and only a fool would confuse the two, just as only a fool would fail to recognise how simian tropes in reference to a black footballer are harmful.

Garnacho might soon be sanctioned by the Football Association for it, which would be in line with the recent precedents they have set for similar incidents. Edinson Cavani was suspended and fined in 2020 for calling a friend ‘negrito’ on Instagram; likewise Bernardo Silva a year earlier for posting a picture of Benjamin Mendy alongside the image of a mascot for a confectionary brand. 

The relevant FA rules, 3.1 and 3.2, boil down to ‘aggravated breaches’ and ‘references whether expressed or implied, to race and/or colour and/or ethnic origin’. It therefore seems a fair assumption that Garnacho will run into bother, because if the FA let it fly it would risk muddling their stance on a broader subject of vast importance. But this is the stage when it is necessary to briefly return to the idea of context through the eyes of the recipient. 

‘People cannot choose what I should be offended by,’ Onana wrote once the attention started to escalate. ‘I know exactly what [Garnacho] meant: power and strength. This matter should go no further.’

Demonstrably, Onana hasn’t interpreted anything nefarious from the original message, which we can sensibly deduce is an instinct supported by the time they have spent together on planes, in dressing rooms, on buses, in hotels, on pitches. If there is evidence of other troubling behaviour from Garnacho in that direction, then it hasn’t made its way to the surface.

So what are we dealing with? Stupidity? Yes — piles of it. Racism? It really doesn’t smell that way. And it doesn’t have any of the angry, nasty edges of what went on between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra — this wasn’t an argument, it was posted in celebration after Onana’s best night in a United shirt. 

Edinson Cavani was suspended and fined for calling a friend ‘negrito’ on Instagram in 2020

Bernardo Silva was punished after for posting a picture of Benjamin Mendy alongside the image of a mascot for a confectionary brand in 2019

But should we care about two gorilla emojis? Yes, because language matters, even in this most modern of forms. Even when it is a message between pals. And that is why Onana’s reply has stirred an awkward feeling. Sure, he wasn’t offended, but this was public, so the context encompasses more than him.

When we look at the bigger picture, you quickly see what it feeds into. It was four years ago that Wilfried Zaha spelled out that ‘nearly every game I’m called a monkey or a n***** or a whatever’. 

A few months earlier, Kick It Out posted screengrabs that illustrated what Zaha would go on to describe. It was a rotten gallery, perpetrated by morons through screens and at grounds and a United player normalising those same tropes serves no good to anyone.

As such, the FA are right to look into Garnacho and quite possibly that will culminate in a fine and suspension of somewhere between one and three games, as it did with Silva and Cavani. If it goes that way for Garnacho it would be reasonable to feel some sympathy, as well as asking some questions of the educational advances at United — it is less than three years since the FA noted how the club had not provided cultural and media ‘training’ to Cavani.

Neither of these instances, from Cavani to Silva, was deemed an act of malice or racism so much as poor judgment and grey areas in the cultural crossover. None leapt out in such a troubling manner as the Suarez episode and none warranted a finger in the eye up to the knuckle. Nor does Garnacho, from what we can see. But they are still part of a message that needs to be posted.

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