Gary Neville and Ashley Cole slam football's racism stance after Antonio Rudiger incident

Gary Neville and Ashley Cole have called into question football’s attitude to dealing with racism by claiming a lot more needs to be done if the sport is to tackle to the problem.

The Premier League legends’ comments come after Chelsea centre-back Antonio Rudiger reported alleged racist abuse during Sunday’s 2-0 away win over Tottenham.

Rudiger mimicked a monkey, in response to what he allegedly heard from the home crowd.

The incident came shortly after Rudiger was involved in the sending off of Son Heung-min, who was shown red for kicking out at the German.

After the game, Neville was asked whether footballing authorities and bodies are doing enough in regards to dealing with racism.

“It’s a poster campaign, where once every year the players walk out onto a pitch, we did it for 20 years,” Neville said on Sky Sports Super Sunday.

“You walk out onto the pitch and honestly no word of a lie, do you know what the Kick It Out and racism campaigns are [Sky Sports presenter] Dave [Jones]?

“It’s a group of players being told by the media manager of the football club to walk out onto the training pitch and hold the banner for five minutes then basically go off and train. That’s it, that’s what we did.”

Cole then backed up his former England team-mate, by giving the damning assessment that “people really don’t care”.

“You have a t-shirt in your place,” he said. “They then say to put it on for the warm up and then you can take it off.

“So people don’t really care. They don’t care, they don’t care. That just put it on because they have to.”

Neville then added: “But Dave I said before, I think ultimately I accepted it. Because I was in the changing room where players were racially abused for maybe ten years.

“There were occasions where it happened with England and I wasn’t offended by it at the time. It was almost as if I would just concentrate on football.

“When you get older and you get wiser and you see the issues it is ultimately having in society, that football to be fair can be a driver for change but it’s not been.”

Tottenham have condemned the alleged racist abuse of Rudiger and vowed to take action after it is investigated.

“We are now conducting a thorough investigation which will include liaising with Chelsea and their players for their observations,” a club statement read.

“Any form of racism is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated in our stadium. We take any such allegations extremely seriously and shall take the strongest possible action against any individual found to be behaving in such a way, including stadium bans.”

source: express.co.uk