It should have been a weekend of celebration for Ireland and Sheffield United striker David McGoldrick. On Saturday, McGoldrick finally scored his first Premier League goal against Chelsea. Before the match had ended, he scored his second.
A message from our No.17 👏
David McGoldrick, what a player 💪🏾 pic.twitter.com/iDCxcFw6T2— Sheffield United (@SheffieldUnited) July 11, 2020
Unfortunately, the gloss has been taken off McGoldrick's big day after the intervention of yet another idiot racist on social media.
Yesterday evening on Instagram stories, McGoldrick shared a disgusting racist message he had received on Sunday afternoon.
A message aimed at David McGoldrick. Absolutely disgusting! 🤬
Who in the right mind would think it’s a good idea to send something like that? It’s 2020 for goodness sake.
If any of the Blades fans are like this MMA moron, get out of our club, you’re not wanted! 👋🏻 pic.twitter.com/RawaBzrGdu— Gem 💎 (@GemTollerfield) July 12, 2020
The user who sent the message MMA_notorious_mma has since deleted his account.
This morning, Sheffield United tweeted its support of McGoldrick, saying:
As a club we will support David McGoldrick and will do all we can to find the perpetrator of this disgusting message.
We will work with the relevant authorities to ensure the person behind this post is brought to justice.
This cannot continue. Something needs to change.
McGoldrick shared the message the same day that a 12-year-old was arrested for sending racist messages to Wilf Zaha on Instagram messages. Earlier this year, Ian Wright shared racist messages he had received from an Instagram user in Ireland.
Roy Hodgson spoke eloquently about why these people need to be called out:
I think it's important. It's being highlighted very much at the moment anyway with the 'Black Lives Matter' movement and everyone seems to be making such an effort to eradicate this type of behaviour.
Then very sadly on the day of a game you get a player waking up to this cowardly and despicable abuse. I think it's right that Wilf [Zaha] made people aware of it, I don't think this is something you should keep quiet about.
I think it's good that our club, Aston Villa, and the Premier League are doing everything they can to find out who this despicable individual is.
One can only hope that he will get identified and he will get called into account, and that he will pay for his actions.
There is no excuse at all. The reason is that he wants to put off one of our best players from playing well today, but to do it in the way he has chosen to do it I think it totally inexcusable.
Hopefully the actions of police will prove fruitful in halting some of this disgraceful racism. Ultimately the onus has to be on these platforms to control and ban these racists. The instagram platform allows users to directly message literally anyone, and then delete their accounts and disappear.
We can only hope the person who sent this message will be arrested shortly.
