{"id":294609,"date":"2023-10-29T00:24:12","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T00:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportslifetale.com\/?p=294609"},"modified":"2023-10-29T00:24:12","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T00:24:12","slug":"riath-al-samarrai-garnacho-tweet-not-malicious-but-should-be-charged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportslifetale.com\/soccer\/riath-al-samarrai-garnacho-tweet-not-malicious-but-should-be-charged\/","title":{"rendered":"RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Garnacho tweet not malicious but should be charged"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Alejandro Garnacho&#8217;s tweet about Andre Onana which featured two gorilla emojis wasn&#8217;t malicious&#8230; but the Man United youngster must be charged by the FA<\/h1>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Alejandro Garnacho&#8217;s tweet about Andre Onana featured two gorilla emojis\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>The Football Association have approached Man United over Garnacho&#8217;s post<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Follow Mail Sport&#8217;s new Man United WhatsApp channel for all the breaking news\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Before we get to Alejandro Garnacho\u2019s use of social media, let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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: \u2018You do that again and I\u2019ll poke you in the eye right up to my knuckle.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>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: \u2018Where\u2019s your magic carpet, A-Rab?\u2019<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t scan very well on the page, but he was a mate and sometimes mates test the fences \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019ve experienced racism, actual racism, you can almost always smell the distinction.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/10\/27\/15\/77040305-12680343-Alejandro_Garnacho_posted_about_team_mate_Andre_Onana_and_includ-a-21_1698415994220.jpg\" height=\"795\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Alejandro Garnacho posted about team-mate Andre Onana and included two gorilla emojis<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/10\/28\/23\/77127367-12684179-image-a-32_1698532913641.jpg\" height=\"425\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>The FA could take action against Garnacho if he is deemed to have breached their rules<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t a conversation between team-mates in a local league, it was shared after a Champions League fixture on the platform formerly known as Twitter \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>So this wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2018negrito\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The relevant FA rules, 3.1 and 3.2, boil down to \u2018aggravated breaches\u2019 and \u2018references whether expressed or implied, to race and\/or colour and\/or ethnic origin\u2019. 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u2018People cannot choose what I should be offended by,\u2019 Onana wrote once the attention started to escalate. \u2018I know exactly what [Garnacho] meant: power and strength. This matter should go no further.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Demonstrably, Onana hasn\u2019t 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\u2019t made its way to the surface.<\/p>\n<p>So what are we dealing with? Stupidity? Yes \u2014 piles of it. Racism? It really doesn\u2019t smell that way. And it doesn\u2019t have any of the angry, nasty edges of what went on between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra \u2014 this wasn\u2019t an argument, it was posted in celebration after Onana\u2019s best night in a United shirt.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/10\/28\/23\/77127311-12684179-image-a-31_1698532834397.jpg\" height=\"423\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Edinson Cavani was suspended and fined for calling a friend &#8216;negrito&#8217; on Instagram in 2020<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/10\/28\/23\/77127295-12684179-image-a-30_1698532752568.jpg\" height=\"357\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Bernardo Silva was punished after\u00a0for posting a picture of Benjamin Mendy alongside the image of a mascot for a confectionary brand in 2019<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s reply has stirred an awkward feeling. Sure, he wasn\u2019t offended, but this was public, so the context encompasses more than him.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2018nearly every game I\u2019m called a monkey or a n***** or a whatever\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 it is less than three years since the FA noted how the club had not provided cultural and media \u2018training\u2019 to Cavani.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2017\/08\/02\/636x90_facebook_ad_sport.png\" width=\"636\" height=\"90\"><br \/>\nSource: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sport\/football\/article-12684179\/RIATH-AL-SAMARRAI-Alejandro-Garnachos-tweet-Andre-Onana-featured-gorilla-emojis-wasnt-malicious-Man-United-youngster-charged-FA.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Alejandro Garnacho&#8217;s tweet about Andre Onana which featured two gorilla emojis wasn&#8217;t malicious&#8230; but the Man United youngster must be charged by the FA Alejandro Garnacho&#8217;s tweet about Andre Onana featured two gorilla emojis\u00a0 The Football Association have approached Man United over Garnacho&#8217;s post Follow Mail Sport&#8217;s new Man United WhatsApp channel for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294608,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Garnacho tweet not malicious but should be charged - Sports Life Tale<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sportslifetale.com\/soccer\/riath-al-samarrai-garnacho-tweet-not-malicious-but-should-be-charged\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Garnacho tweet not malicious but should be charged - Sports Life Tale\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Alejandro Garnacho&#8217;s tweet about Andre Onana which featured two gorilla emojis wasn&#8217;t malicious&#8230; 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