Former Chelsea captain John Terry’s trial on charges of aiming racial abuse at QPR’s Anton Ferdinand last Autumn continued Wednesday, with Terry denying he’d been provoked by Ferdinand referencing the former’s affair with the girlfriend of former teammate Wayne Bridge. In addition, Terry continues to insist that he while appeared to call his opponent, “a black cunt”, he was merely repeating the slur back to Ferdinand. From The Guardian’s Caroline Davies :
Under cross-examination , Terry agreed words such as “cunt”, “prick” and fuck”, were part and parcel of the game, as was calling another player “fat” or “ugly”.
“There are no-go areas aren’t there?” asked prosecutor Duncan Penny. “Wives, girlfriends. ‘I shagged yours’, that sort of thing?”
“I wouldn’t call them no-go areas,” replied Terry.
“Your domestic circumstances, the position is any allegation, as far as you were concerned, was a no-go area?” asked Penny.
“Clearly not,” replied Terry, who said he was used to dealing with abuse over the alleged affair with Vanessa Perroncel, fielding comments on it “more or less every game” when he “just laughed it off”.
He told the court he often repeated insults back to other players. Penny asked him: “You said that your response was to repeat back ‘a black cunt’, or ‘calling me a black cunt’. How about ‘what’? Straightforward, ‘what?'”.
Terry replied: “At the time I was shocked and angry. I had never been accused of it on a football pitch and repeated it back.”
After the game, he asked Ferdinand to come to the Chelsea dressing room, because he wanted to sort it out. “I said: ‘I thought you were accusing me of calling you black cunt’. His reply to that was: ‘No, no, no,'” he said.
He claimed Ferdinand had then said: “We all said things we shouldn’t have said”, and the two agreed it was “just handbags” – or banter – and shook hands.
Asked if he had considered apologising to Ferdinand, he replied: “Why would I apologise to Anton when he is the one who accused me? What I said was in response to what Anton said to me.”